Quickstart
From a business description to a solved plan. Two paths: the guided interview, or one message with your books attached.
Two ways to your first solved decision. The interview suits a first run; the single-message path shows the fastest possible loop.
Path A — the guided interview
Start a new model
In the left rail, click New Model. Three cards appear; pick Discover with RIA — the one tagged "New to this? Start here."
Describe your business
RIA asks: "What are you trying to figure out?" Answer in a sentence or two — what you make or do, and the call you're never quite sure about. No numbers needed yet. Example from the screen itself: "We run two bakeries and a few delivery vans, and we never know how much of each product to bake."
Press Enter to send (Shift+Enter for a newline).
Answer until the meter says ready
Keep answering. The Readiness meter on the right climbs from Exploring through Taking shape to Ready to build, while What RIA understands so far shows what's been pinned and Worth answering next shows the gaps that matter. You don't have to finish — from Taking shape onward a Build now button appears, and RIA fills the open items with assumptions you review before anything commits.
Confirm the decision frame and build
The footer plays back the frame: You're deciding…, It will tell you…, At stake…. If that's your problem, click Build this model. RIA builds and proves the structure on test data — watch the phases stream: building structure, populating numbers, validating, solving.
Review the Clearance dossier
The build lands on a plain-language review: what was built, every capability quoted from your own words, what was deliberately left out, and the proof that it all checks out. Choose:
- Accept structure — start using the model now, on sample data.
- Load your data… — upload your numbers onto the verified structure first.
Read your answer
The result panel leads with Best answer: $X, with solve time and KPI tiles that trace every number to its source. From there: Open Model Home for the full hub, or Explore scenarios to start asking what-if questions — each becomes a comparable scenario.
Path B — one message, books attached
If you can describe the whole decision in one message — and you have data as a CSV — the chat can do the entire loop at once. A real example, from a restaurant losing money:
- In the RIA chat composer, click the paperclip and attach your books
(e.g.
canyons-books.csv). - Paste a complete description and send it:
I run a neighborhood restaurant. Author and solve an optimization model that picks each week's plan to maximize weekly profit. Weekly decisions: days open, hours per day, price for each of four dishes, perishable food order (spoils if unused), dry-goods order (carries over), cooks, servers, hourly wage, and marketing spend. Each customer uses about 1 unit of fresh food ($4.20) and 0.6 unit of dry goods ($1.40). A cook plates ~9 covers/hour, a server handles ~13/hour. Rent $1,500/week plus utilities. About 380 potential diners a week; marketing has diminishing returns past ~$500. Attached are my last few weeks of books. Give me the single best weekly plan.
- A description this complete routes straight to a build (~30 seconds): eode authors the model from your words and your books, solves it, sets up KPIs (weekly profit, meals served, kitchen utilization), and scans external market factors relevant to your business.
- Ask a follow-up in the same chat: "Give me the exact weekly plan as plain numbers."
Press Enter or the Send arrow — not the sparkle Fast author button. Fast author is a text-only shortcut: it ignores and clears any attachment, so it would silently drop your CSV.
Next
- Core concepts — models, Base, scenarios, workspaces.
- Building models — all three doors in detail.
- Scenarios & what-ifs — compare, diagnose, verify.