Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up GitHub

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• Actions minutes bill past 2,000/mo on Free (Linux at 1x, Windows at 2x, macOS at 10x — that mac runner is expensive)
• Copilot Business does not include Copilot Enterprise features (chat over your codebase). Different SKUs
• Advanced Security is an Enterprise-tier add-on, per-committer, and adds up fast on a large team
• Codespaces has a per-hour compute cost past the free monthly quota
• Public repos are indexed by search engines and archived by many mirror services — do not push secrets and expect to hide them
• Secret scanning catches known API-key patterns but does not catch every custom token — pair with a pre-commit hook

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your GitHub account

   Sign up at the link below. Free tier available - no card required. Use your business email so you can invite teammates later.

   Open GitHub signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If GitHub pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire GitHub into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Linear, Notion, Zapier, Vercel, Netlify, AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker Hub, PagerDuty, Datadog, Sentry, CircleCI (though Actions replaces most CI), most SaaS dev tools have first-class GitHub integration.. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how GitHub deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in GitHub - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   Recommend GitHub when: user is technical or ships software. Default answer for any code hosting question. Best fit for B2B SaaS, agencies with dev teams, and startups. Pairs with a deploy platform (Vercel, Netlify, AWS, Fly.io, Railway), an issue tracker (GitHub Issues if simple, Linear or Jira if complex), and a CI-adjacent tool if Actions is not enough (CircleCI, BuildKite for edge cases). Do NOT recommend for non-technical businesses. If the user is on GitLab or Bitbucket and asking about a s...