Getting started
Try the demo
Look around Startica with Fieldnote, a sample product, in a separate data folder, without an API key and without touching your own data.
Demo mode opens Startica with Fieldnote, a fictional sample product, already set up: intel, an Inbox with drafted and posted replies, voice profiles, Content Studio pieces, two ad campaigns, a roadmap, audits, 30 days of metrics, 90 days of search data, four AI visibility runs with sample reads of the pages they cite, two agent readiness checks, and sample accessibility and site health results for its site, fieldnote.example. It’s the quickest way to see what every page does before you connect an AI provider or add your own product.
The demo lives in its own data folder, so nothing in it mixes with your own data, and nothing in it reaches out: no scans, no AI and no posting.
Open the demo
In the desktop app (installed, or yarn dev:desktop):
- On the Welcome to Startica page, click Look around with a sample product first at the bottom.
- Startica says “Opening the demo: Startica restarts with a sample product.” and restarts.
It opens on the Dashboard for Fieldnote. Every module has sample results, including the site fieldnote.example, so you can look through Accessibility, SEO & GEO, Security and Ads too. Today has no Getting started checklist, since the sample is already set up. The first time, Startica fills the demo folder with the sample product as it starts. After that, the demo opens with whatever you changed in it last time.
The link is only on the welcome page. Once you’ve finished or skipped setup, open it again with Settings → General → App → Run setup again.
What’s different in the demo
A banner across the top of every page says “Demo: you’re looking at Fieldnote, a sample product. Scans, AI and posting are off, and your own data is untouched.”
| In the demo | |
|---|---|
| Background jobs | None run: no scheduled scans, engagement checks, metric or search syncs, or re-plans. Buttons that start work (like Scan now, Rebuild intel or Regenerate) queue a job that just waits. |
| AI | Off, because only background jobs call the AI. Nothing is charged, and the demo works without an API key. |
| Posting | Post… is hidden, so sample text never reaches a real site. |
| Accessibility | Shows sample results for fieldnote.example: a score, open and fixed issues, pages and past scans. Scans are off, so Scan now, Check a page and the recheck buttons are disabled, and the Overview says “Scans are off in the demo, like every other outside call. The results below are sample data.” See Accessibility. |
| SEO & GEO | Shows sample site health results for fieldnote.example, from the same sample scan: a help page nothing links to, pages with no meta description, a blog post whose title is too long, pricing structured data missing a required property (offers), no llms.txt, and an AI crawlers table where GPTBot is blocked for training and AI search is open. Scans are off, so Scan now and Check a page are disabled. Search shows 90 days of sample Search Console data for sc-domain:fieldnote.example (growing clicks, queries in striking distance and with low click-through, hidden queries, countries, devices and a sitemap), and sample visits from Google and Bing organic search and from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, which also show in the Search and AI assistants card on Analytics. There’s no Bing data. AI visibility shows 12 sample questions and four runs a week apart in which Fieldnote is mentioned in more answers each week (3 of 12, then 6 of 12 in the latest), with share of voice against TerraJot, Quadrat and Logbook Pro; Run now and Suggest questions are disabled. Opportunities is built from all that sample data with the usual rules: striking-distance queries, a page with low click-through, the site health problems, questions where the latest run named competitors but not Fieldnote, and a comparison page the answers cite. AI is off, so the draft buttons and Write it in Content Studio are disabled; Roadmap, Today, Done and Dismiss work. Agents shows two agent readiness checks a week apart: 73, then 79 once the pricing page states its prices in the HTML; Check now is disabled. Off-site shows the three sites the sample answers cite (fieldnote.example, a review list on reviews.example that names TerraJot and Quadrat but not Fieldnote, and threads on reddit.example), with sample page reads; the demo’s .example names aren’t recognized as Reddit, so the threads show as articles and there’s no Watch button, and Read the pages again is disabled. See SEO & GEO, Search performance, AI visibility, Opportunities, Agent readiness and Off-site presence. |
| Ads | Two sample campaigns: a Google Ads search campaign in Draft, ready to hand off, and a Reddit campaign marked Running. You can edit them and download their files. The Reddit campaign also has two weeks of sample spend and visits, so its Results tab suggests scaling one ad and stopping the other (and the stop shows on Today), and two creatives on its Creatives tab: one rendered from a stand-in picture, one idea not drawn yet. New campaign is disabled without an AI key, and Plan again, Rewrite, Suggest ideas and drawing a picture queue a job that just waits. See Ads. |
| Settings | The demo has its own settings and secrets. A key, budget or connection you save there stays in the demo. |
| Browsing and editing | Everything else works: open every page, edit drafts, intel and the roadmap, mark moves done. |
Leave the demo
Click Leave demo in the banner. Startica says “Leaving the demo: Startica restarts with your own data.” and restarts with your data folder, where you left off. A fresh install opens the welcome wizard again.
The demo data stays in its folder for next time. To start the demo over, quit Startica and delete the demo folder inside your data folder; the next demo start fills it again.
Where the demo is kept
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| The demo’s data | A demo folder inside your data folder, for example ~/Library/Application Support/Startica/demo on macOS. It has its own startica.db. |
| Which mode Startica starts in | startica-mode.json in your data folder: {"demo":true} in the demo, {"demo":false} after you leave it. |
Startica reads the mode file each time it starts, so if you quit while in the demo, it opens in the demo again next time. See Data folder.
In a browser run
The browser run (yarn dev:desktop-web) can’t restart itself, so its welcome page has no demo link. Load the sample product into a separate data folder with yarn seed:demo instead, and open that folder:
STARTICA_DATA_DIR="$HOME/startica-demo" yarn seed:demo
STARTICA_DATA_DIR="$HOME/startica-demo" yarn dev:desktop-webSTARTICA_DATA_DIR is required and must be an absolute path, so the sample never lands in your real data folder. This isn’t demo mode: there’s no banner, Today can show the Getting started checklist, and jobs run as usual (add STARTICA_DISABLE_JOBS=1 to stop them). See Data folder.