Adding leads & projects yourself¶
In Sofia's story, everything started with an email — the AI team noticed it, created the lead, and carried it forward. But you're never dependent on an email arriving. You can add a lead or a project yourself, any time, and the AI team picks it up from there exactly as if it had come in on its own.
This matters because real business doesn't only arrive by inbox. A prospect calls you. You meet someone at a conference. You decide to start an internal initiative that has nothing to do with a customer at all. Studio OS lets you seed any of these directly — and then does the follow-through.
Adding a lead (a new relationship)¶
Say Sofia had phoned instead of emailing. You'd simply add her yourself.
On the Clients page you'll find an Add client button. It opens a short form — name, company, email, an estimated value, a note about what they're after — and that's it. The moment you save, a new lead appears in your pipeline, and Kairi treats it just like an inbound inquiry: she assesses it, qualifies it if it's ready, and — if there's enough to go on — drafts the first reply for you to approve. If the details are thin, she'll flag what's missing. You did ten seconds of typing; Kairi does the rest.
From there the lead lives on the pipeline board, where you can drag it between stages yourself — from Lead to Qualified to Proposal to Active — whenever you know something the system doesn't. Moving a card is a real signal: pushing a lead to Active, for instance, is you saying "this is won," which is enough to open the delivery project (just as it did for Sofia).
The rule of thumb: if it's about a relationship or a possible deal, add it as a client/lead and let Kairi run with it.
Adding a project (a piece of delivery work)¶
Projects can start three ways, and you drive two of them:
- From a client you've won. On any client's page there's a Convert to project button. One click turns that relationship into a live delivery project, linked back to the client, and hands it to Madis to run — the same handoff you saw at the end of Sofia's story, but triggered by you on demand.
- From scratch, with the New-project dialog. On the Projects page you can open a project directly. This is perfect for internal work that has no customer at all — "rebuild the website," "prepare the Q3 board pack," "set up the new office." These are real projects with a plan and an owner; they just aren't tied to a client. Madis runs them the same way he runs client work.
- Automatically, when a deal is won — which you've already seen.
However a project is born, the experience downstream is identical: Madis scopes it, breaks it into tasks, keeps its record current, communicates through the approval inbox, and moves it through its stages to done. (See Running the project for exactly what that looks like.)
The rule of thumb: if it's about getting work done, add it as a project and let Madis run it — whether or not there's a customer behind it.
Client or project? A quick test¶
The two are easy to mix up, so here's the one-line distinction:
| Client / lead | Project | |
|---|---|---|
| It's about… | a relationship and a possible deal | a concrete piece of work being delivered |
| You add it on… | the Clients page (Add client) | the Projects page (New project) or Convert to project |
| It's run by… | Kairi | Madis |
| Can it stand alone? | yes — a lead may never become work | yes — internal projects have no client |
A client can have many projects, or none. A project can belong to a client, or be a purely internal initiative. You're free to create either, in any order, at any time.
Why this is the point, not a footnote¶
A lot of "AI" tools only react to what lands in front of them. Studio OS works both ways: it catches what comes in and takes what you put in. You stay the one who decides what the company should be working on — a phone lead, a hallway idea, an internal push — and the AI team turns each of those into the same tracked, owned, moving work. You seed; they deliver.
Next: Operating Studio OS — your day as the operator, and how your human teammates fit alongside the AI team.