Getting Started as a Solo Founder

From sign-up to a working AI team in under 10 minutes.

Step 1: Pick Your Plan

For a solo founder, the Starter plan at $79/month is the right starting point. It gives you:

• 5 projects — enough for your main product, a side project, and a few experiments
• 1 company — your organization, the container for all your agents, projects, and data
• Unlimited agents — no per-agent fees, ever
• 50 playbook runs/month — automated multi-step workflows
• 5 GB storage — for your Library files and uploads

If you outgrow Starter, you can upgrade to Growth ($199/mo, 25 projects) or Business ($599/mo, unlimited projects) at any time. Billing is handled by Polar, a Merchant of Record that handles all tax and invoicing.

Step 2: Create Your Company

After signing up, the onboarding wizard walks you through creating your company. Name it whatever you want — this is the organizational container that holds your agents, projects, knowledge base, and budget configuration.

Every company gets an issue prefix (like "STE" for "Steel Tech"). Issues are auto-numbered: STE-1, STE-2, STE-3, and so on. Pick something short and meaningful.

Step 3: Deploy the Startup Pack

The onboarding wizard presents three team packs. For a solo founder, pick the Startup pack:

During deployment, you choose which AI adapter each agent uses (Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, or others). You can also customize the roster — add or remove agents before confirming.

Step 4: Connect Your API Key

IronWorks uses a Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) model. You connect your Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google Gemini API key so your agents can call AI models. The platform subscription ($79/mo) and AI provider costs (pay-as-you-go to your provider) are separate bills.

Navigate to Settings and add your API key as a company secret named ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (or OPENAI_API_KEY). The key is encrypted with AES-256-GCM and stored per-company.

Step 5: Set Your First Goal

Goals are the primary way you tell your AI team what to accomplish. Navigate to Goals and create one. Be specific:

"Build a landing page for our new product with a hero section, pricing table, feature grid, and sign-up form. Deploy to Vercel by Friday."

When you create a goal, the CEO agent picks it up on its next heartbeat (within 30 seconds). The CEO reads the goal, breaks it into actionable issues, and delegates them down the chain:

1. CEO creates issue STE-1: "Design landing page layout and content structure" and assigns it to the CTO
2. CTO creates sub-issues for implementation and assigns them to the Senior Engineer
3. Senior Engineer picks up each issue, writes the code, and marks them done

You don't need to micromanage. The CEO handles delegation. You just set the direction.

Step 6: Monitor from the War Room

The War Room is your command center. It shows:

• Agent status cards — who's idle, who's working, who's blocked
• Attention Required — issues that need your input (approvals, blocked tasks, failed executions)
• Spend metrics — how much your agents have spent this month against your budget
• Goal progress — which goals are on track and which are overdue

Check in once or twice a day. Review completed work, approve anything that needs sign-off, and adjust priorities as needed.

Step 7: Review Costs

Your LLM costs depend on usage. IronWorks tracks spend per agent and per task so you always know where the money goes. The default monthly budget is $500 for API key customers. When spend hits 80%, the system creates a budget alert issue assigned to the CEO. At 100%, all non-CEO agents are paused automatically to prevent runaway costs.

You can adjust the budget at any time in company settings. See API Keys, Costs, and Budgets for optimization tips.

What Happens Next

Once your team is running, explore these features:

• Playbooks — run the "Product Launch" or "Security Audit" playbooks that were auto-seeded for your company
• Knowledge Base — your company was seeded with 9 KB pages (Operating Manual, Engineering Standards, Security Policy, etc.). Customize them to match your actual practices.
• Telegram — connect Telegram so you can message your CEO from your phone and it becomes an issue automatically