Getting started

Nerve becomes useful the moment it can see real numbers. Getting there takes three steps: tell it what your business is, get data in, and read your first briefing. Most people are done in under fifteen minutes.

1 · Set up your workspace

When you sign up, Nerve asks for three things: your company name, your industry, and — optionally — one goal for the next 90 days. The industry matters more than it looks: Nerve uses it to research your market and to pick sensible defaults for what “normal” looks like in your numbers.

While you finish setup, your workspace is seeded with a complete sample business, so every screen renders with realistic data from the first minute. Nothing you see in the sample is pretended to be yours — it exists so you can learn the product before you commit your data, and it gets replaced as your real rows arrive.

2 · Get your data in

There are three ways in, and you can mix them. They map to how much you want to wire up on day one:

1. Connect (recommended)

   Link your real sources under Settings → Connections. Stripe, QuickBooks, or Xero for money in and out; HubSpot or Salesforce for your pipeline. OAuth in, and Nerve pulls and categorizes on a schedule — no exports, no copy-paste.

2. Import

   No connector for your tool, or your data lives in spreadsheets? Import CSVs directly — leads into Sales, transactions into Finance. Nerve maps your columns and keeps the provenance, so imported rows are cited like any other evidence.

3. Explore first

   Not ready to commit data? Keep working in the sample workspace. Everything works — the briefing, the debate, the workflows — so you can evaluate honestly before connecting anything.

name, company, value, stage, expected_close
Acme Corp, Acme, 12000, proposal, 2026-08-15

3 · Read your first briefing

The dashboard front door is the operating picture: what changed since you last looked, the one thing that needs you most, and the numbers behind both. Each morning it rebuilds from your latest rows. The more sources you connect, the more it can see — and the more specific “what needs you most” becomes.

4 · Ask your first question

Open chat and ask something concrete: “what’s my runway?”, “which deals are stalling?”, “how did marketing do this week?”. Answers are computed from your rows and cite their evidence. If Nerve can’t verify an answer from what you’ve connected, it will say so and tell you what it needs — usually the fastest possible list of what to connect next.