First 7 Days with Junior: A Setup Runbook

The single biggest predictor of whether a team gets value out of Junior in month one is not the team's size, the tools they use, or the workflows they care about. It is whether they set Junior up in the right order.

Most teams who stall in week one made the same mistake: they connected everything on day one, asked Junior to do five things at once, and ended up with five half-working pipelines and no clear sense of whether Junior is delivering. The teams who get value in week one connect one tool, run one workflow to completion, and only then add the second tool.

This is the runbook the operators we work with closest follow. It is sequential. The order matters more than the speed.

Day 1: Hire and connect the surface

Goal: by end of day 1, Junior should be visible in your Slack or Teams workspace and have read your team's recent conversations.

1. Sign up. No credit card. $100 trial credit. The signup flow asks for your work email and the role you want Junior to play (e.g. "sales coordinator", "marketing analyst", "ops lead"). The role you pick shapes Junior's first-week prompts; pick the one you'd actually hire a human for.
2. Name your Junior. Most teams name it like a colleague: Maya, Rin, Theo. Avoid "Junior Bot" or "AI Helper". A name signals to the team that this is a coworker, not a tool, and the resulting conversations are noticeably warmer.
3. Connect Slack or Microsoft Teams. This is the only integration that's mandatory on day 1. Junior installs as a workspace app; a Slack admin needs to approve once. After that, individual channels can opt Junior in or out without going back to admin.
4. Tell Junior which channels matter. "@Maya, watch #sales and #leadership for now, but stay out of #random". You can adjust later. The point is to be explicit; without scope, Junior will be too cautious and you'll think it's broken.
5. Connect Gmail or Outlook. The second of two day-1 integrations. Junior needs to read email to understand who your team talks to, what cadence, and what the brand voice sounds like. It will not send anything yet.

Stop there. Do not connect HubSpot, Stripe, your data warehouse, or anything else on day 1. Junior needs a few hours of reading your existing conversations before it should write into your systems of record.

Common day-1 mistake: connecting the CRM first because that's where the highest-value workflow lives. Junior connected to HubSpot on day 1 without context from Slack and email will produce drafts that read like a stranger wrote them. CRM goes in on day 3.

Day 2: Watch Junior read

Goal: by end of day 2, Junior has surfaced 2-3 observations about your team in chat. Your job is to react to them.

Day 2 is the day you spend the least time setting up and the most time prompting Junior to read. Junior spends day 2 reading recent Slack threads, recent email, and (if your team has them open) the public Notion / Google Drive docs it has access to. Ask Junior what it has noticed (@Maya, what patterns are you seeing in #sales this week? Any recurring topics in my inbox?) and you typically get back things like:

• "I noticed @Marcus posted a sales recap in #sales every Friday for the past 4 weeks. Want me to draft next Friday's?"
• "BrightCorp came up in 3 different threads this week. Want me to consolidate the context into a brief?"
• "Three customer emails this week mention pricing confusion. Want me to flag this pattern?"

Your only job on day 2 is to reply to one of these observations. Pick the one closest to a real recurring need. The other observations can sit; ask again the next day if you want more.

Most teams overestimate how fast they need to scale Junior in week one. The teams that get the most value in month one are the teams that run one workflow to completion in week one, not three that almost work.

Day 3: First recurring workflow

Goal: by end of day 3, Junior has one recurring workflow you've approved and scheduled.

By now Junior has a feel for your team's voice. Pick one of the three patterns that pay back fastest in week one:

Pattern 1, Morning briefing. Junior posts a daily plain-English summary into a channel each morning at a time you pick. What it pulls from depends on which integrations you've connected. With just Slack + Gmail, the briefing is "what was discussed yesterday across these channels" plus "emails worth attention". Already useful on day 3 for a single operator, even before CRM or ads tools are connected.

Prompt to try: @Maya, every weekday at 8:30am, post a briefing in #founders. 3-5 bullets, plain English. Cover anything urgent from the previous 24 hours across #sales, #leadership, and my Gmail inbox. Skip stuff that's clearly not for me.

Pattern 2, Weekly recap. Junior writes a weekly digest of what happened across the channels and tools it can see. Goes out Friday afternoon or Monday morning. Great for teams with a recurring investor update or board email.

Prompt to try: @Maya, every Friday at 4pm, draft a recap of the week's wins from #sales and #marketing. 250 words max. Numbered list. Put it in the #leadership channel as a draft for me to approve before sending.

Pattern 3, Inbox triage. Junior reads your inbox and proposes drafts for messages that need replies. Particularly strong if you respond to similar emails repeatedly (lead inquiries, partnership pitches, support escalations).

Prompt to try: @Maya, twice a day at 10am and 4pm, review my inbox. Find emails I'd reply to but haven't. Draft a response in the thread. Don't send. Just queue the draft for me to send myself.

Pick one. Not two. Run it for 48 hours. The point of week one is to ship one workflow that you trust, not to demonstrate breadth.

Day 4-5: Tune the first workflow

Goal: by end of day 5, Junior is running its first workflow without you intervening more than once.

By now Junior has run your day-3 workflow 2-3 times. It's almost certainly not perfect. The corrections you give it in days 4-5 are the most important learning Junior does in week one.

Common corrections that pay back disproportionately:

• Brand voice: "Maya, you're a little too formal. Match the register I use in #sales: shorter sentences, less business speak."
• Audience: "Maya, the morning briefing is for me, not the team. Cut the 'good morning team!' line."
• Scope: "Maya, skip anything from #random. That channel is noise."
• Format: "Maya, use bullets instead of paragraphs. Each bullet under 20 words."
• Recipients: "Maya, only ping me if the answer is genuinely needed. Status updates can stay in the channel without an @mention."

Corrections you ask Junior to "remember" persist across future runs. You should make 3-5 corrections in week one. By week two, corrections are rare.

Day 6: Add the second integration

Goal: by end of day 6, Junior is connected to one additional tool that powers your day-3 workflow.

Now, only now, connect the tool that matters most for your week-one workflow:

• If you picked morning briefing: connect Notion / Google Drive so Junior can read your docs alongside Slack and Gmail.
• If you picked weekly recap: connect HubSpot or Salesforce so Junior can pull deal stats and customer milestones into the digest.
• If you picked inbox triage: connect your calendar so Junior can propose meeting times directly in its drafted replies.

One tool. Not three. The day-6 connection upgrades the day-3 workflow; it doesn't add new workflows yet.

Day 7: Review and decide week two

Goal: by end of day 7, you have a clear answer to "is Junior earning a slot on this team?"

Spend 20 minutes on day 7 reviewing:

1. What did Junior ship this week? Open the channel where Junior posts. Count the deliverables. Most teams find 5-15 by end of week one.
2. How many corrections did you make? Scroll back through Junior's thread replies (or check the Audit tab in the dashboard) to count. The trend across days 1-7 should be sharply down; if you're still correcting basic voice or scope on day 7, the role wasn't well-specified on day 1.
3. What workflow do you wish Junior also ran? If your answer is "I don't know yet", week two is about running the day-3 workflow more confidently. If you have a clear second workflow, set it up on day 8.
4. Should anyone else on the team start interacting with Junior? Most teams keep Junior single-operator through week one and bring teammates in starting week two. The teammate onboarding pattern: invite them into the channel where Junior posts and let them watch for a few days before they @mention Junior themselves.

If the week-one workflow shipped value, hire commitment for month one. If it didn't, the most common fix is not "Junior didn't work" but "the role on day 1 was too broad" → restart with a tighter role definition for week two.

The short version

Day 1: Slack + Gmail. Name Junior. Set channel scope. Day 2: Watch Junior read. React to one observation. Day 3: Pick one workflow. Schedule it. Day 4-5: Tune the workflow with corrections. Day 6: Add one more integration that powers the workflow. Day 7: Review what shipped. Decide week two.

The principle behind every step: ship one thing, learn from it, then expand. Teams who try to connect everything and run five workflows in week one almost always end week one feeling like Junior is "almost working". Teams who run one workflow to completion in week one almost always end week one with a clear, shipped output and momentum into week two.

If you're ready to start, hire Junior here: free trial, $100 credit, first workflow live in under 10 minutes. The runbook above starts the moment you finish signup.