Guided setup right after you pay

New

Guided setup right after you pay

Right after you pay, FirstSales now walks you through the setup you need before your first campaign can send: a test email, importing your contacts, fixing anything wrong with your audience, and checking your sending schedule.

What changed

New accounts used to land in the product right after payment with no clear next step, and no guarantee that the pieces a campaign actually depends on were in place. Now, activation runs as a guided sequence that covers those pieces directly.

The flow sends a test email so you can confirm your inbox is connected and sending correctly before you rely on it for real outreach. It walks you through importing your contact list, so your first campaign has an audience to send to. It checks that audience for problems, bad email addresses, missing fields, duplicate contacts, and helps you repair the ones that need it, instead of letting bad data sit unnoticed until a campaign is already running against it. And it confirms your sending schedule is set up correctly before your first campaign goes out, so you're not discovering a schedule conflict after emails have already started sending.

If a step fails, for example a contact import errors out on a bad file, or a test email bounces, the flow doesn't leave you stuck or force you to start over. It recovers cleanly: you see what went wrong, fix it, and pick the flow back up from that step, keeping whatever you already completed in the steps before it.

How to use it

After you complete payment, you're taken directly into the guided setup. Follow the steps in the order they're presented. Start with the test email: check that it arrived in the inbox you expect and that it looks the way you want your outreach to look. Then import your contact list, using whatever source you normally work from, a CSV export, a CRM list, or however you've gathered your prospects.

Once your contacts are in, review anything flagged during the audience check. This might be a handful of email addresses that look malformed, a missing name or company field the AI needs for personalization, or duplicate entries that would otherwise send the same contact two emails. Fix what you can directly in the flow, and skip anything you'd rather handle later; the flow doesn't require every issue to be resolved before you continue.

Finally, check the send schedule for your account: the days and times your campaigns are allowed to send. Confirm it matches when you actually want your emails going out before you move on to building your first campaign.

If any step fails partway through, read the message it gives you closely. It's built to tell you specifically what needs fixing, a particular contact field, a connection issue with your inbox, a conflict in the schedule you set, rather than a generic error. Address that specific issue and continue; you won't lose progress on the steps that already succeeded.

Why it matters

Account setup used to be silent about which prerequisites your first campaign actually needed, which meant the first time you found out something was missing or broken, it was usually because a campaign had already failed to send, or worse, had sent to a broken contact list. Surfacing those prerequisites up front, and failing early and specifically instead of late and vaguely, saves you the time of building out a full campaign only to discover your inbox connection or your contact data wasn't ready to support it.

Clean recovery matters just as much as the checks themselves. A guided flow that forces you back to the beginning after one failed step is worse than no guidance at all, since it punishes you for hitting a problem that was likely out of your control, like a malformed export file from a source system. Recovering in place means a single hiccup in one step doesn't cost you the steps you'd already gotten right.

Together, these four checks mean a new account's first campaign is built on a foundation that's already been verified, rather than one you find out is broken only once you're relying on it. You're not sending your first real outreach through an inbox connection that's never actually been tested, or against a contact list that turns out to have a third of its email addresses malformed, or into a schedule window that doesn't match when you actually want emails going out.

Taking the flow seriously

Take the flow seriously even if you're eager to get straight to building a campaign. Every step exists because a campaign built without it in place has a specific, predictable way of failing later, either quietly, with emails that never send, or visibly, with a test that catches a broken connection before it costs you a real prospect. Five minutes spent here saves the debugging time you'd otherwise spend after your first campaign doesn't behave the way you expected.

If you skip a step or leave an issue unresolved, know that you can come back to it. The flow is meant to unblock your first campaign, not to gate every future one, so an audience issue you chose to skip during activation can still be revisited later from your contacts view.

Why the order matters

The steps run in this order for a reason: a test email confirms your sending identity works before you build anything that depends on it, contacts come in before you can check them, the audience check depends on having contacts to check, and the schedule check makes the most sense once you know your audience is ready to actually receive something. Trying to shortcut the order, for example importing contacts before your inbox connection has been confirmed with a working test send, is the most common way this kind of setup goes wrong outside a guided flow, since problems compound instead of surfacing one at a time.

Availability

This applies to new accounts going through activation immediately after payment.