Your first week on Maelo

Maelo takes the booking admin off your phone. A client fills in one form, their enquiry lands in your inbox with their brief and their references attached, you send back a price and some dates, and they pay a deposit to lock it in. The appointment appears on your calendar, the reminders go out on their own, and the money arrives in your bank account.

You do not need all of it on day one. This page is the order to do things in, so nothing you set up depends on something you have not done yet. Work through it in an afternoon or spread it over a week, but do keep the order: your hours and your rates feed your quotes, and your quotes need Stripe to collect anything.

Each step below links to the page that covers it properly. Do them in this order.

1. 1

   Finish your profile

   Your name, your photo and your username. The username is your public address, so picking @yourname gives you maelo.app/@yourname and every link you ever share hangs off it. Change it now rather than later. See your account settings.

2. 2

   Set your timezone, your studio and your hours

   Everything in Maelo is measured in your timezone, not your client's, so set it first. Then add where you work and the hours you take clients on each day. Those hours are what a client sees when they pick a date, so an empty week means nobody can book. See your working hours.

3. 3

   Set your rates and what you offer

   Pick your currency and your hourly rate, then create the things a client can actually book: a small piece, a full day, a consultation, whatever you run. Each one carries its own length, price and deposit. See appointment types and rates.

4. 4

   Connect Stripe and set your deposit

   Stripe is how you get paid, and it is the one step you cannot skip if you want money to move. It asks for your ID and your bank details, and approval usually comes through the same day. Once it is connected, decide what you ask for up front to hold a booking. See setting up Stripe and deposits.

5. 5

   Build a page, or skip it

   Every artist gets a booking page automatically. A full website on top of it is optional. If you already have a site, or you just want a link for your bio, take the fast path instead and come back to this later. Otherwise see building your page.

6. 6

   Publish and share the link

   Nothing is public until you press Publish. Once the button turns into a green Live pill, your page is up. Copy the link and put it in your bio, your story highlights and your email signature. See your public page.

7. 7

   Take your first booking

   When an enquiry arrives you get an email and a badge on Requests. Open it, read the brief, and either approve it with a price and some dates or decline it with one tap. See the requests inbox and approving and taking a deposit.

You do not have to remember any of that. Your dashboard carries a card called Finish Setting Up Your Profile with a progress bar and a tile for each job. Tap a tile and it drops you straight onto the right settings panel.

Three tiles are marked Required: Connect Stripe, Set Location & Hours and Publish Your Page. Those three only tick themselves off once the thing is genuinely done, so the card cannot tell you that you are ready when you are not. The rest are optional and carry a small X if you would rather not see them.

The whole card disappears once every tile is done or dismissed. That is the signal that setup is behind you.

Open your own booking page and fill it in as if you were a client. Five minutes here saves a week of confused messages. Look for:

• •The dates on offer are dates you would actually work. If a closed day is selectable, your hours are wrong.
• •The deposit is the number you meant, in the currency you meant. A client seeing $150 USD when you meant $150 CAD is a refund waiting to happen.
• •Your booking policies say what happens if someone cancels or reschedules. Clients agree to them when they send the request, so they are only worth having if they are written. See booking policies.
• •Your booking rules match how you like to work: how much notice you need, and how far ahead you will take work. See booking rules.

Plenty of Maelo is worth having and none of it is urgent. Leave these until you have taken a booking or two and know how you want to work.

• •Flash. Uploading designs so clients can claim one without messaging you first.
• •Email branding. Putting your logo and colours on the emails Maelo sends for you.
• •Client notifications. The reminders and check-ins your clients get before and after a session. Sensible defaults are already on.
• •Tap to Pay. Taking a card payment on your own phone at the end of a session, with no reader.
• •Your dashboard widgets. Fun to set up, and it changes nothing about whether you can be booked.

Every page in Maelo has a ⋮ menu, and most of them have a Show me around option inside it. That runs a short guided walk through whatever screen you are on, pointing at the real buttons. Run it as many times as you like.

If the answer is not here or in the guide, message us from the help page. Tell us what you were trying to do and what happened instead, and we will pick it up.