Quickstart — signup to first brief in five minutes.
The shortest possible path to "I see what this thing does." Five numbered steps. Every step shows the expected outcome and the most common way it goes wrong. If you have your work email and a target account in mind, you're ready.
TL;DR
Sign up at signalmama.com/start. Skip the wizard if you want — you can configure ICP later. From the Overview, search for a target account, click "Generate brief," and you'll see signals, decision-makers, voice, and lookalikes in about 40 seconds. The first brief is on the house and doesn't count against your monthly quota.
01Sign up with your work email
Mama is sold seat-by-seat and most teams want billing tied to a company domain, so signup is intentionally work-email-only. Personal email signups (gmail, hotmail, etc.) get a soft block with an explanation, not a hard reject — you can still proceed if you're solo or evaluating.
Go to signalmama.com/start and enter your email
Email + password, or Google SSO if your domain has it set up. No credit card. No 30-day countdown. The free tier persists indefinitely with a soft quota of 10 briefs / month.
02Skip the wizard (yes, really)
The onboarding wizard is 6 steps and takes about 8 minutes if you do it carefully. For the quickstart, skip it. You'll see a "Skip onboarding" link in the wizard header — Mama will configure a sensible default ICP from your company domain and you can tune it from /docs/onboarding-walkthrough later.
Click "Skip onboarding" in the wizard header
The wizard configures ICP scoring, signal preferences, default cadence, and a few other things. None of them are required to generate your first brief — they tune relevance, not capability.
03Search for your first target account
From the Overview, you have three ways to start a brief — search the database, paste a domain, or upload a CSV. Quickstart uses the search box because it's the fastest path to "did Mama find it."
Type a company name in the top search bar
Mama indexes ~14M companies — anywhere from a 5-person Series A to a Fortune 100. Type "Notion," "Linear," "Anthropic," whatever's relevant to your ICP. Autocomplete kicks in after 3 characters.
04Click "Generate brief"
This is the moment. On the account page, the top-right "Generate brief" button is the big green CTA. It triggers a fan-out across all of Mama's data sources (~12 of them) and assembles the brief in real time. Median time: 38 seconds. P95: 1m 20s.
Hit Generate brief and watch the streaming progress
The brief streams in section by section: signals first (fastest), then decision-makers, then voice, then lookalikes (slowest because it runs the archetype matcher). You can start reading the top sections while the bottom is still loading.
05Read the brief top-to-bottom
This is where most users spend the next 4-5 minutes — and where the product earns its place in your stack. The brief is read top-to-bottom because the most-actionable info is at the top. The full anatomy lives in Reading your first account brief.
Read the headline, then signals, then decision-makers
The headline tells you "why now" in one sentence. Signals show you the events that triggered the brief. Decision-makers shows you the 3-7 humans you should be threading. Voice quotes show you how they actually talk about their work. Lookalikes show you the next 5 accounts to brief.
What's next
You've seen the loop. Now spend the next 20 minutes investing in the four pages that make every subsequent brief better.
Common quickstart mistakes
From the first month of signups, here's what we see go wrong most often. None are fatal — all are correctable in under a minute once you know.