Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up Riverside

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

• **The "each participant records locally and uploads in the background" promise fails when the local upload process itself breaks - and it does more often than the marketing suggests**: reviewers document blank guest screens where files never uploaded, files marked 100% uploaded that cannot be downloaded, and dropped connections on Safari and mobile Firefox that left interviews unrecoverable, with Chrome being the only officially reliable browser (SaasFlags Riverside review with 11 documented complaints, Trustpilot Riverside reviews, 2026). Force every guest into Chrome on desktop, and consider a parallel backup recording (guest hits Record on their local voice-memo app) for high-stakes interviews.
• Some 100%-uploaded files direct to a missing XML file on download - support recovery is inconsistent.
• Editing is buggy on longer sessions - do heavy edits in Descript or Premiere, not in Riverside.
• Free tier watermarks are non-negotiable - upgrade before publishing anything.
• Guest browser compatibility should be disclosed to guests BEFORE the call, not discovered mid-interview.

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your Riverside account

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

   Open Riverside 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 Riverside pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire Riverside into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: Dropbox and Google Drive (auto-upload), Descript (session export), YouTube (direct upload), Spotify/podcast RSS via manual publish flow, Zapier for lightweight automations, direct download of raw tracks for use in any editor. Not deeply integrated with marketing/CRM stacks - this is a content-produc.... 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 Riverside deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in Riverside - 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 Riverside when: use case is remote podcast/video interview recording where quality matters, business_size is 1-20, and the alternative is "record the Zoom call and hope." Do NOT recommend for live streaming (Streamyard/Restream), heavy editing (Descript), or teams that need generic video conferencing (Zoom). Always flag: force guests into Chrome on desktop, warn about the local-upload-failure edge case for high-stakes recordings, and keep a parallel local backup on the guest's device f...