Quickstart

Setup takes about three minutes, and the first seven days are free on any plan. The part worth reading is the last section, on what the first day actually looks like.

1 · Create the workspace#

Start here. You will be asked for two things: a name for the workspace, and your own company's website.

The website is not decoration. It is what probr compares against, so a signal about a competitor is weighed against the business reading it rather than judged in the abstract. Give it your real domain, not a landing page.

2 · Add competitors#

Enter a domain — globex.com, or a full URL, either works. probr resolves the company from the domain, so you do not need to find the right page.

Pick your real short list. Three is the free limit and it is also, for most teams, roughly the right number. The value of this product falls off quickly once the list is longer than you would actually read.

Two things that trip people up:

• Use the company's own domain, not their app subdomain or their docs site.
• If the domain is behind a login wall or hard bot protection, it will come back as failed. There is no fix for that from your side.

You can skip this step and add competitors later from the Competitors screen. It is easier to do it now.

3 · Choose where signals reach you#

Email is on by default and goes to the address you signed up with — one brief, Monday morning.

Push, on mobile, arrives at the same moment with the brief's headline. It is one notification a week, not a stream.

Slack is on every plan, including the trial. You can turn it on later without redoing any of this.

All three carry the brief. Individual signals are only in the feed, so if you want to see things as they are found, that is the screen to open.

4 · Wait a few minutes#

Each new competitor is profiled once before it is watched: what the company sells, which market it is in, who it competes with. That takes a few minutes and shows as analyzing in the app.

You do not have to sit there for it. It runs on the server, and it carries on if you close the app.

What the first day looks like#

This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth setting expectations.

The feed will be nearly empty at first, and that is correct. probr starts watching from the day you add a competitor. It does not backfill months of history, because a feed full of things that happened before you were looking is not intelligence, it is homework.

Signals arrive as competitors do things. The daily sweep runs at 06:00 UTC. If a competitor announced something last week, you will not see it; if they announce something tomorrow, you will see it the morning after.

Your first brief comes the following Monday — and only if there were signals that week. A quiet first week means no brief. That is the system working. See How it works if that seems wrong.

Realistically: give it two weeks before judging whether the feed is useful. One week is not enough signal to tell.

Then what#

Once it is running there is very little to do. Most people open the feed when the Monday brief mentions something they want to read properly, and otherwise leave it alone. That is the intended amount of effort.

Two things worth doing at some point:

• Read what it gets wrong. It takes two minutes and it is the difference between using this well and being annoyed by it later.
• If you use an AI assistant for research, connect it over MCP — then you can ask it about your competitors directly instead of opening anything.