Getting Started
A friendly walkthrough of your first hour on GoldenHour — from creating your account to landing a paid booking.
What is GoldenHour?
A complete studio-management CRM for photographers, videographers, and event creatives.
GoldenHour is the all-in-one studio for creative professionals. It gathers leads, manages clients, books sessions, sends contracts and invoices, automates the busy-work, and delivers galleries — all from one place. If you currently juggle a calendar app, an email tool, a contract service, and an invoicing tool, GoldenHour replaces every one of them.
- Capture leads from your website with embeddable forms
- Send proposals, contracts, and invoices that clients sign and pay online
- Automate every repeat email and follow-up with no-code workflows
- Deliver galleries through a branded client portal
- Ask Luxe — your built-in AI assistant — to draft emails, build proposals, or summarise your week
Create your account
Sign up, confirm your email, and pick your studio name.
- 1
Visit the sign-up page
Click 'Start free' from the landing page or go directly to /signup. You can use email + password, or sign in with Google or Microsoft if those are enabled for your studio.
- 2
Confirm your email
We'll send a one-time link to your inbox. Click it to verify the email address. The link is single-use and expires in 24 hours.
- 3
Choose a studio slug
Your slug becomes part of your booking-page and client-portal URLs (for example yourstudio.goldenhour.app). Pick something short, lowercase, and memorable. You can change this later in Settings → Brand.
Use your business email
Sign up with the same email clients already know you by — it becomes the 'reply to' address on outbound emails by default.
The Luxe onboarding tour
When you first log in, Luxe walks you through every major area of the platform.
On your very first login Luxe — your built-in AI assistant — appears in the bottom-right corner and offers to give you a personal tour. The tour highlights the navigation, shows you where to find common actions, and offers to set up your first booking page automatically. It takes around five minutes.
Restart the tour any time
Settings → Profile → 'Restart Luxe onboarding tour' will reset the tour so you can run through it again — handy if a teammate joins later.
The Luxe tour highlights each area of the platform with friendly call-outs.
Your first-hour checklist
Six quick wins that get you ready to receive your first booking.
- Upload your logo and pick a brand colour (Settings → Brand).
- Add your studio address and contact info so it appears on contracts and invoices.
- Create your first event type — for example 'Portrait Session' with a default price and duration (Settings → Event Types).
- Connect your Google or Microsoft calendar so personal events block your availability (Settings → Integrations).
- Build a booking page so clients can self-schedule (Calendar → Booking Pages).
- Connect Stripe or Square so clients can pay invoices online (Settings → Payments).
Ask Luxe to do it for you
Open Luxe (Cmd/Ctrl+K) and say 'Set up my first booking page for portrait sessions, $300, one hour.' Luxe will build it and link the right event type automatically.