The setup card
When you open your dashboard, you might notice a quiet card near the top called "Set up your studio." It lists up to three things — depending on what you haven't done yet. Each one has an action button and a dismiss. Once you've handled them all, or decided they're not for you, the card disappears and never comes back.
We don't do this to nag. We do it because these three things — push notifications, a passkey, and installing the app on your phone — genuinely change how Vidual feels to use. Not in a dramatic, feature-announcement way. In a "this is just my workshop tool now" way.
Notifications: know the moment a client replies
The single most valuable thing you can do in Vidual is turn on push notifications, for the following reason.
Without push, you find out a client has replied when you next open Vidual. That might be an hour later, or tomorrow morning. With push, you know within seconds. Your phone buzzes, you tap the notification, and you're in the conversation. No email chain to parse, no login screen — you're there.
We default to the two notifications that matter most: client replies and @mentions from your team. Payments and step changes are off by default — they're useful, but they're not urgent. You can change any of this in Settings whenever you like, but the defaults are designed so that from the moment you tap "Enable," you're only getting notifications you want to act on.
On iPhone, tapping a link in an email opens it in Safari — not in an app you've added to your home screen. That's just how iOS handles web links. But a push notification opens straight into the app. So once you've installed Vidual on your home screen and enabled push, the email becomes your daily briefing to read, and the push notification becomes your instant callback into the app. The two channels work together.
Passkeys: no more email links
Every time you sign into Vidual, we send you a magic link by email. It works, and it's secure, but it's a round trip: open Vidual, check your inbox, find the email, tap the link, wait. It's about thirty seconds of friction, several times a day.
A passkey replaces that with your fingerprint or face. Open Vidual, biometric prompt, you're in. The browser remembers your credential — it's cryptographic, phishing-proof, and stored on your device. No password to forget, no email to wait for.
Adding a passkey takes one tap in the setup card. Your device does the rest.
Install on your phone: your studio in your pocket
Vidual works in any browser, but installing it on your home screen changes the feel entirely. It opens full-screen, without the browser chrome — address bar, tabs, bookmarks — that makes every web app feel like a web app. It feels like an app, because at that point it is one.
On Android, the setup card shows an "Install" button that triggers the system install prompt. On iPhone, we walk you through the two taps: share button, then "Add to Home Screen." Either way, it's less than ten seconds.
Once it's there, push notifications land with the Vidual icon, the app badge shows your unread count, and tapping any notification opens straight into the right project. It's the foundation that makes everything else — notifications, passkeys, the morning briefing — work as a cohesive experience rather than a collection of browser tabs.
Custom sending domain: your brand on every email
This one is for the brands who want their client emails to come from their own domain — not noreply@vidual.app, but noreply@yourstudio.com. It's a small thing in theory, but it changes how clients perceive every message you send. It's your brand, your trust, your relationship.
Historically, setting up a custom sending domain meant copying three DNS records from one dashboard to another, knowing the difference between a TXT record and an MX record, and waiting hours for propagation. This is the step where people give up.
So we fixed it. When you go to set up your custom domain in Settings, we pre-fill the domain from your website — stripped of the https:// and the www. and everything else you shouldn't have to think about. If you paste a full URL by habit, we clean it silently. No validation errors, no red text, no "please enter just the domain."
And if your domain is hosted on GoDaddy, Cloudflare, or one of the forty-odd DNS providers that support the Domain Connect protocol, you'll see a green card: "Automatic setup available." One click opens your registrar's consent page, you confirm, and the DNS records are written for you. Thirty seconds, start to finish. No copying, no pasting, no knowing what a DKIM key is.
If your provider doesn't support auto-setup, we tell you who manages your DNS — "Your domain is managed by AWS Route 53" — so you know exactly where to go. And we show the records with copy buttons, not a wall of text.
Every one of these choices is deliberate: pre-filling the domain, stripping URLs silently, defaulting push to the two most important notification types, showing the registrar name so you know where to look, and storing your setup preferences on your account, not your browser, so dismissing something on desktop means it stays dismissed on your phone.
Individually, none of these things is a feature. Together, they're the difference between software that fights you and software that folds into how you already work.
We make this easy because we want you to stay
There's a temptation in software to hide setup friction behind a "getting started" wizard and hope people push through it. We don't do that. We surface the important things on your dashboard, one card at a time, with a clear action and a clear dismiss. No wizard, no progress bar, no guilt.
Because the truth is: Vidual is better when you set it up. Your clients get a more professional experience when emails come from your domain. You respond faster when push notifications are on. You sign in without thinking when you have a passkey. And the whole thing feels like yours — not like a browser tab you forgot about — when it's on your home screen.
Three taps and under a minute, and Vidual stops being a tool you visit and starts being the place your studio runs from.