Getting started

Prospektor is a workspace where a sales team researches target companies and drafts partner pitches. You type a company; the studio works out who that company actually is from its own website, researches it, scores partnership fit against what your workspace says it is hunting for, and drafts your enabled deliverables: pitch deck, one-pager, cold-email sequence, written proposal, plus a decision-maker list and lookalike companies to pitch next.

Before you have an account: the free run

You do not need a workspace, a card or even an email address to see what Prospektor finds. A free run lives at /r on the studio: type any company website (or just their name) and the studio does the first half of its job in front of you.

1. It reads the site: what that company sells and to whom, and two or three things visibly true from their own pages. Where we can confirm them, the first facts on the strip are checked against a company database rather than read off the page: headcount, location, industry. It says so underneath, and it counts: "Read just now: 1 page and 2 web searches of acme.com." If it ever says "nothing here was opened just now" instead, that is the studio telling you the truth rather than dressing a guess up as a reading. Check what it says about you and correct the next step if it is off.
2. It says what it thinks you should be hunting for: one sentence naming the kind of company worth approaching. This is a guess, and it is meant to be corrected: "That's not it. Let me say" opens a box, and one line in your own words ("agencies that resell hosting", "family offices in the Nordics") sends it looking for those instead.
3. It finds real companies: three of them, each with its own website, two or three checkable facts, a fit score on the same 0–100 scale a paid run uses, and one sentence on why this company.

Then, if you want it, one more thing: who you are up against. Name a competitor takes one rival's website and reads them the way it read you: what they sell, how they position themselves, our read of what they actually do, who they sell to, and a list of their clients with the page that names each one. Their clients are your prospect list, which is why that list is the point of the block rather than a footnote. One rival per free run.

One line of that report is deliberately blank. How you win is the only line a competitor's own website could never answer, because it comes from your brief, so the free version says it needs one instead of guessing at a slogan. A workspace writes it.

Then it stops. What a free run gives you is who to approach. What a workspace gives you is what to send them: the pitch in your own voice, the deliverables, the decision-makers, the prep sheet, and a source behind every claim. That is the line, and the free run says so on the page rather than springing it on you.

Every free run has its own address, /r/<token>, and it keeps working. Send it to a colleague and they see the whole thing. They are not asked to sign in, because there is nothing to sign in to. Nothing about a free run is listed, indexed or searchable: the link is the only way to it, so it is as private as whoever you send it to.

If you would rather not lose it, we will send it to you. While you wait appears under the steps as the run works, and again at the bottom of a finished run: an email address and a mobile number, both needed to have the run sent. The run does not wait for either: the companies appear whether you fill this in or not, and the link in your address bar works either way.

Under those fields there is one box, Product news and tips, by email and text, and it starts ticked. Untick it and nothing at all is kept: no list, no record, and the number you typed is not stored. You get the link and that is the end of it. Leave it ticked and you get the same news a customer gets, a few times a month at most, by email and sometimes by text, and every one of those emails carries a one-click unsubscribe that works without signing in to anything. It is the same permission the studio asks for on your first day with an account, so if you later buy a workspace you will not be asked twice, and you can change it any time in Your account → How we may reach you.

Your number is held the way an account's is: in full international form, one per person, and a number you have already set on an account is never replaced by one typed here. Deleting your data deletes it with everything else; see Privacy.

"Why did I get an email about a run I did weeks ago?"

If you ran a free run, left that box ticked and never opened a workspace, you may get one email pointing you back at your own run. One, ever, not a sequence, and there is no second one waiting behind it. It links to your /r/<token> and to nothing else, so it opens without signing in, the same way it did the day you ran it.

The unsubscribe link on it stops that email and the product news it was sent on: they are the same permission, so one click ends both. If you have already opened a workspace you are not on the list at all, and if you unticked the box there is no record of you to be on it.

A free run is genuinely free and it is capped for the day as a whole, so occasionally it will ask you to come back tomorrow. A company somebody has already run comes back instantly and costs nothing, and the same is true of competitor reports, which have a smaller daily cap of their own because they are a much bigger piece of work.

The free workspace: one full pitch

Signing up gets you a workspace of your own, and everything a paid one does right up to the second run.

If you came from a free run and corrected what it said you were hunting for, that sentence comes with you: the studio opens your brief on your words instead of asking you the question again. Correct it there any time; Your brief shows whose sentence it is.

You answer the onboarding, the studio reads your site and writes your brief, and For you fills with real companies it thinks you should approach. Press Prospekt on one and you get the whole thing: the research, the fit case, who decides, and every deliverable your workspace has switched on, written in your voice, with a source behind each claim.

That is the one run. After it, /upgrade is what you meet when you press the next one.

Nothing is taken away. Your brief, your pitch, your library and the rest of the leads on For you stay exactly where they are, readable and shareable. What stops is starting the next run: a second pitch, a glance, a competitor report, a call prep sheet, an inbound judgment, warm paths, a rescan. A subscription starts them again immediately, on the same workspace, with the work already in it.

The competitor report that stops is the one written from your brief: your read, your suppress list, a Prospekt button on each of their clients, and How you win filled in. The neutral version at a free run is still free to anyone, and still leaves that line blank.

Two things worth knowing. The one run belongs to the workspace, not to you, so a free account holds one workspace, and being invited into a colleague's changes nothing. And asking what a run would cost is always free, whether or not you have spent yours.

Your first minutes

• Sign-in is Google, a passkey, or an emailed link; there are no passwords. Access is your workspace's email allowlist; if your address is on it, you are in. Adding a passkey takes one press in Your account, and after that signing in is Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello or a security key, with nothing to type and no link to wait for. See Signing in below.
• Value first, account chores last. The first time you sign in, the studio leads with the work: if it has already found your first three companies, they are the first thing you see, and the guided tour follows (or skip straight to the dashboard). What the account still needs: a recovery phone number (so we can get you back in if you lose access to your email), how we may reach you (all optional, all off unless you tick them), and, if nobody here has confirmed it yet, what your company is called. It waits as one quiet Complete your account info line on the dashboard, and can always be answered later in Your account.
• One question comes before your company name: whose studio this is, either My own company, or A client of mine. An agency picking the second gets the five questions below asked about their client rather than about them, deliverables written as the client and never mentioning the agency, and a workspace name somebody is still asked to confirm. Leave both alone and it reads as your own, which is what it always did. Change it any time in Workspace settings → Whose studio this is.
• A brand-new workspace opens with a first draft, not with a question. The studio reads your own website and leads with the two things that are work rather than facts about you: who it would go and find, and the paragraph it would open with in your voice. What else we read opens the rest: what it read off your site, where it would look, who you are up against, and what it would score those companies against. Every block says where its text came from (our guess from your site, or your own words) and a block only you can fill stays empty rather than being filled in with something plausible. Where somebody has already scanned your domain, the draft starts from confirmed company data (industry, headcount, founding year) instead of guessing at it. Where you sell is never guessed from where you are registered: it stays empty until you say.
• A workspace an agency made for you skips the draft and the questions. You land in the studio itself, on the suggested leads. The agency answers those questions on your behalf when it creates the workspace, and either of you can finish them any time from Your brief.
• Then one question: what first? The draft is followed by a fork: three doors, with Companies to pitch already chosen, and Continue the only button, so the usual act is a single press. The other two doors are a competitor's clients (name one rival, get the list of who they sell to) and lookalikes of your customers (name two, get companies like them). Take either of those and you are in front of that question straight away instead of behind five others. Nothing is lost, because the door you skipped is still there afterwards: your three suggested companies still arrive, Counterprospekt still takes a competitor's name, and Lookalikes stands on the home screen for good. The five questions move behind the door, onto Your brief.
• Underneath it is a short interview, five questions: what to hunt for, where and how big, a few competitors by name, a few customers and why they are good ones, how you want to sound. Each screen is one calm question and the field that answers it, nothing else, and each answer sharpens that draft and every future pitch: your sentence replaces our guess in the brief. They are asked while the studio researches your company in the background, every one of them is answerable from the first second, and you can skip all five and come back via Your brief. Take me in works from every screen, and your workspace already exists behind it.

The example pitch in your library

Your Library is not empty on day one. There is one pitch in it already, labelled Example, and it is there so you can read a finished run while your own are still going; your three take a few minutes each, and the example takes none.

• It is invented, and identical in every workspace. Harborline Freight and Ledgerpost are both made up. Nothing in it was researched, and its 94 is the example's own score, not a judgment the studio made about anything of yours.
• It shows the real screen. The fit thesis, the deck, the cold email sequence, the one-pager, the proposal, the decision-makers and the lookalikes are laid out exactly where your own runs put them.
• It is read-only. No pencil, no share link, no call prep, and its lookalikes cannot be run. It is an illustration, so it never touches your brief, your voice or your outcomes.
• Remove takes it away in one press and it stays away on this device, and it goes on its own as soon as your first real pitch lands.

Name a few customers, and why they are good ones

The fourth question is the highest-value thirty seconds in the interview, and the why is the reason.

• Two or three is plenty; five is better. One per line: the company, then what makes that one good. "Northwind — their CFO had the same problem" is a complete answer.
• Real ones, or the ones you wish you had. A workspace on day one has no wins to name and the question still works: a dream customer with a reason is as useful as a closed one.
• The names alone are not the point. Anyone can find companies that look like a list of names. What the studio cannot guess is why those are the good ones, and that reason becomes the thesis every prospect is scored against.
• What you want more of sits beside it, with two one-tap suggestions. More companies like these keeps the studio close to what already works; Adjacent markets, related to these treats your customers as a starting point and looks for the neighbouring category your strengths carry into. It is a box rather than a switch, so "mostly more like these, but I want to test facilities management" is a real answer.

Both are on Who we hunt afterwards, and editable there.

Where should we hunt, and how big?

The second question is two plain boxes with one-tap suggestions under each, and it is worth thirty seconds because everything the studio does afterwards reads it: which companies are suggested to you, which ones a run goes looking for, and how each is scored.

• Geography arrives pre-filled with our guess from your own site. Write over it in whatever words you like: Germany, English-speaking countries, DACH, the Nordics plus the Netherlands, or Anywhere. There is no list to pick from, on purpose; most real answers are not a country.
• Company size starts empty, because nothing on your website says what size of company you want to approach. Mid-market and enterprise, startups under 50, exclude solopreneurs are all fine answers, as is leaving it blank.
• Taps add up: a second suggestion joins the first (Mid-market (51–500), Enterprise (500+)), and tapping a lit one removes it.
• Both are preferences, not filters. A strong company just outside your stated area is still shown to you, and the pitch says plainly that it sits outside it, so the call stays yours. If you mean something absolute, say so in the box (only Germany, never outside the EU) and it is read that way.
• Answering the geography also makes web searches run from your own country where you named exactly one, so results come back the way they would for somebody sitting there rather than from a default locale.
• Change either at any time in Your brief, under the questions. Both appear as Where you hunt in Workspace settings → Workspace configuration, and the next run uses the new answer.

Name a few competitors

The third question asks who you are up against. Two or three names are plenty, in whatever words you like, and it is skippable like everything else. The studio never guesses your rivals off your site, so anything in this answer is yours. It reads the names as a map of your market: suggestions hunt the territory around them (companies that partner with those names, sell alongside them, or serve the same buyers) and are told plainly that a company you compete with is not one to suggest to you. The names also arrive on Counterprospekt as chips, where one tap runs that competitor's report. Answer in whatever words you like: "acme.com as well as fieldlens.io" becomes two chips, not one. Change or add names any time in Your brief; the deeper question there (who do you lose to, and why do you win) is separate, and sharpens how pitches answer the objection rather than whom the studio targets.

• The guided tour opens on your first landing and walks the example pitch a deliverable at a time (fit thesis, deck, cold email, decision-makers, lookalikes) with its card and a ring travelling to the block each step is about, and it ends back on the home screen at the tile that starts a run of your own. You can bring it back by unticking "Do not show this again" on its last step next time it shows, and skipping it never loses anything.
• The home screen, Leads, proposes companies worth pitching next, one card at a time; a thumbs-up starts a real pitch immediately. Each card's facts are read off that company's own website, which the studio opens while it is looking, rather than off a search result about them, so they are checkable by anyone who opens the same page. A card with only two facts on it is the studio declining to pad; a company it could not stand up at all is left off. A card leaves the shelf when you remove it, glance it or run it, including when you run that company from New pitch instead, so the shelf never offers work you have already done. To remove one, press the × on the card and say which kind it is: Not a fit, or Our client. A card naming a company you already sell to is good news (the studio found your customers), and Our client puts it on your suppress list as a customer, onto Who we hunt as one, and the next search hunts for more like it. Anything you glanced is in Library, where you can reopen it. The search for the next few starts the moment your first cards are handed to you, not once you have spent them, so there is normally something waiting by the time you come back. While the shelf is empty it says what of yours is running and links you to it.
• A weak fit is never suggested. The score on a card is out of 100: 75 and up is a strong fit, 50 and up promising, and anything the search would score under 50 is held back rather than shown. You will see two cards, or one, or none, before you see a 42: a shelf that pads itself with a company nobody should call is a shelf you stop reading. When that leaves nothing to show, the screen says how many were held back and asks for the two answers that sharpen the next search most: who already buys from you and who you compete with, both on Who we hunt.
• The shelf learns from what you press. A company you glance at and then research in full is the clearest thing you can tell the studio about what you want, clearer than your brief, because you looked and then you spent. From the second one of those, the next search hunts for that shape. It fades: a press stops counting after three months, so a curious click in week one does not steer you for ever. And one card a search is a deliberate bet outside that shape, marked Adjacent bet on the tile, because a shelf that only ever returns what you already pressed on narrows onto one kind of company and stops being worth opening. Where you have said which way to hunt on Who we hunt, or typed what you are after, that decides instead and the studio does not second-guess it.
• Five companies to rate, before the deck lets you go. Three cards in, the studio puts up five companies and asks one thing about each: would you go after them? None of them is a lead and none is being offered; they are chosen to be different from each other, one squarely what you asked for and the rest a size up, a sector across, a country over, a different way of selling. Your noes are the point. Most people cannot write down what a good lead looks like and everybody can recognise one, so five taps say more than a sixth interview question would. What the answers show is written into What you have corrected us on on Who we hunt, where every later search reads it and a cross takes any line back off. Answers that show no pattern teach nothing, and the studio says so rather than inventing a rule. Skip goes straight past it; the set is offered once.
• The deck ends on one question: who do you lose deals to? It is the same door the fork offers first, reached from the deck if you took the default, and reached in one press if you did not. Name one and the studio reads their site and lists their clients. That list is your prospect list, and it lands in Counterprospekt. The box arrives carrying a competitor your brief already names, so the usual act is one press rather than one more question, and the name you give is written into your brief exactly as the interview's third question would have written it. Skip goes straight to the studio and nothing is lost; Counterprospekt takes a competitor's name any time.
• Lookalikes is the other half of that idea, and it stands on the home screen for good: name customers you already have and the studio finds more companies like them. The tile sits beside Custom pitch; the box arrives carrying the customers you named at onboarding, so the usual act is one press. What comes back lands on For you as ordinary cards: glance one for fifteen seconds to see the roles worth approaching, or run the full pitch. Adding "— why they are a good one" after a name tells the search which way to be alike; a name it has not heard before is written into your brief, and the reasons you gave at onboarding are never overwritten.
• Getting started (/start) is where signing in lands you, and it is the first entry in the sidebar. It has two steps.

Step 1, Customize your workspace: the three things that make every later pitch better: run a pitch, fix a line you would never send, and say what happened. Only the step you are on shows its button; the other two are a line each, so there is one thing to do rather than three. The number beside the sidebar entry is how many are left, and it goes when none are.

Step 2, What can we prospekt for you today? Seven cards, one press each: companies to pitch, one company you name, a competitor's clients, lookalikes of your customers, who to contact, a warm introduction, and a sheet before a call. Once step 1 is finished it disappears (its three acts have permanent homes in the sidebar under For you, Library and What happened) and the seven cards become the whole screen, with one of them recommended.

The one-minute tour lives at the foot of that page, so it is always somewhere to go back to.

• Stuck at any point? Support, at the foot of the sidebar, opens a chat that answers in seconds and remembers where you left off; its 💡 Request a feature toggle sends an idea, an improvement or a bug report straight to the Prospektor team.

The core loop

1. Open New pitch, enter a company name or domain (the field autocompletes and warns if your team already pitched them). Every box in the studio that takes a company name does the same (the outcome editor, Counterprospekt, the suppress list, a new client workspace) and picking a suggestion fills the website box beside it.
2. The run takes minutes and shows six live stages: understand, research, score, draft, people, check. You can leave any time: runs continue in the background and are listed under Running.
3. The finished pitch lands in the Library: summary, fit thesis, signals for and against, deliverables, decision-makers, lookalikes.
4. Edit any deliverable in place (the pencil). Saved edits teach the studio your team's voice (tone only, never facts) so future pitches sound more like you.
5. Record what happened on the card itself: press the badge, pick what happened. Closed deals feed the Leads shelf, so what it offers drifts toward what actually closes, and under those, the glances you paid to research in full.

This documentation

Everything the Support chat knows lives in these pages, and they are also published at prospektor.ai/help, searchable, and always describing the version of the studio that is actually running.

Pointing an AI assistant at Prospektor

studio.prospektor.ai/llms.txt is the door an agent reads: what Prospektor is, and the handful of calls it can make without an account: a first look at any domain, what that look would cost, and this whole documentation corpus as JSON.

There are no API keys yet, so an assistant cannot open your workspace, read your briefs or start a pitch on your behalf. Everything in a workspace still needs a person signed in.

Signing in

There are three ways in, and they all check the same access list.

A passkey is the fastest and the safest. Add one from Your account → Add a passkey while you are signed in; your device makes a key, keeps the secret half where it can never leave, and hands us only the public half. After that, going to the studio and touching your fingerprint sensor is the whole sign-in. Most browsers offer the passkey in the email field's own drop-down before you press anything, and there is a Sign in with a passkey button underneath Continue with Google for the ones that do not.

A passkey only works on this site, and that is the point: a convincing copy of our sign-in page cannot ask your device for it, so there is nothing for anyone to phish out of you.

You can add one on each device you use, see them all in Your account, and remove any of them there. Removing a passkey stops it opening the studio; the key your device still holds simply opens nothing.

Google is the front door for anyone with a Google account, and it is the only door besides a passkey that can carry Prospektor's own operator role.

An emailed link is the fallback for an address that cannot use Google. It works once and expires after 15 minutes, and your access is checked when you click it rather than when it was sent.

Your recovery phone number

We ask for it once, behind the Complete your account info line on the dashboard, after your first leads and the tour, never in front of them, and you can skip it. It is there so that if you lose access to your email (the thing every other way in depends on) there is still a way to get you back into an account you are paying for, and so there is a way to reach you about the account itself.

Pick your country from the dropdown first, then write the number the way you normally would: 0176 1234567 under Germany, 415 555 0134 under the United States. Both become the same international number underneath. If you would rather type the whole thing with a + in front, that works too and overrides the dropdown.

It is used for nothing else unless you say so on the next question. It is never sent to a model, never appears in a pitch, a proposal or a shared link, and is never used for marketing without your say-so. Change it or clear it any time in Your account.

How we may reach you

The same card asks which ways of contacting you are all right. Four separate questions, all off unless you turn them on:

• Product news and tips, by email: what shipped and what other teams get out of it, a few times a month at most.
• Text me about my account: security alerts, and help getting back in.
• Product news, by text: the same news as the email, if a text suits you better.
• You may call me: about your account, or to ask what would make Prospektor more useful to you.

They are four questions rather than one on purpose: wanting a security text is not the same as wanting a marketing one, and you should not have to take both to get either.

If you bought your workspace on prospektor.ai, the payment step there carries the same unticked Product news and tips, by email box. A tick given at checkout is recorded against your address before you first sign in, so you are not asked twice, and it is undone the same way as any other answer, in Your account → How we may reach you or by the one-click unsubscribe on any such email.

Account email is not on that list, because it is not optional. Sign-in links, receipts and service notices come with having an account; there is no way to turn those off and still have one.

Today none of these actually send anything: Prospektor has no mailing list, no text-message provider and nobody making calls. We ask now because you are already filling in a form, and turning any of them on or off later is one click in Your account.

The getting-started course: eight emails, one a day

Every member of a workspace gets one short email a day for eight days, starting the morning after they join, each teaching one thing the studio does, in the order you meet them: where you land, the companies under For you, what one Prospekt gives you, the edit that teaches the studio your voice, saying what happened, importing your network, warm paths, and letting your own tools call the workspace. Each is a few lines and one link.

It is not the product news box above and does not need it: it goes to you because you have a workspace, the way a your run is ready email does. One click on any lesson stops the rest, without signing in, and a stopped course does not restart. Sign-in links and emails about your own work are unaffected.

What your company is called

Your workspace's name goes on every brief, pitch and shared link it produces, so if it was created from a checkout field, by an agency, or from an uploaded list, the first owner or admin to sign in is asked to confirm it reads the way you would write it. Changing it there rewrites your brief, which is what every pitch is composed from.

If you made the workspace yourself by typing your company name, nobody asks you again; you already answered.

Once it has been answered, it holds. The studio reads your site again in the background (when the first research lands, and every time you accept a rescan months later) and it forms its own opinion about what your company is called from the way your marketing pages write it. That opinion never overrules yours: whoever confirmed the name is the last word on it, and a later reading can change everything else in your brief without touching it. On a workspace nobody has confirmed yet, the studio's reading is still the better answer and does replace the name the checkout or the uploaded list came with.

Your setup call

Getting your brief right is the one thing everything else runs on: the fit scores, the research, the drafts, the shared links. So on your first arrival at the front door you are offered a call to set it up with you. It is included in what you already pay, it takes about half an hour, and it is the fastest route to a pitch you would actually send.

Press Book a time on the account card and your own calendar opens on a real person's availability. If you would rather get on with it, take Skip for now: the offer waits a few days and then asks once more, and it stops asking as soon as you have saved your first deliverable; at that point you got where the call was for.

You can ask for one at any time afterwards from the support panel (the same place you ask a question or request a feature) under Book a setup call. That door does not close when you skip the card, and it does not close once your workspace is working: a call is worth having whenever you are stuck.

What we record is that the offer was made and what you did with it: a timestamp, no more. The calendar itself belongs to whoever you booked with; the studio never sees who else is on it or what is in your diary.

If your studio shows no such offer, this deploy has no calendar attached to it yet, and there is nothing to book.