# Build your first workflow > Sign up for a demo organization, take the tour, and get your first workflow running end to end. Your first session has one goal: get real data to travel the whole loop, from something arriving to something you can look at on a dashboard. Budget half an hour. ## Create your organization Start from **Start free** or **Start with a demo org** on the Hodoflow home page. Sign up with an email and password, or switch to the **Magic link** tab and have a one-click sign-in link emailed to you instead. The progress strip at the top of the page shows where you are: **Email**, **Verify**, **Profile**, **Workspace**. The profile step asks for your first and last name, plus an optional phone number — the name is what your teammates see on the workflows and dashboards you create. Hodoflow then provisions the organization itself. When it finishes you land on **Your demo org is ready**, which names the organization it created for you and offers two buttons: **Take the tour** or **Skip for now**. A demo organization lasts seven days. One demo per account — see [Account and access](/help/account-access) for what happens at the end of it. ## Take the tour The tour is seven stops and walks the app in the order the data flows: Workflows, Monitor, Warehouse, Dashboards, Connectors, Settings, and finally Home. Each stop moves you to the real page and spotlights the region it is describing, so by the end you have visited everything once. You can leave at any point with **Skip**, and pick it back up later from your avatar menu in the top-right corner: **Take a tour**. The tour is desktop only. ## Describe what you want to keep Go to **Warehouse** and choose **New Data Model**. A data model is the shape of one business entity — an order, a customer, an inventory item — with a field list, a type per field, and one field marked as the entity's primary key. Everything downstream leans on this. Workflows map onto it, the warehouse groups records by it, and dashboards offer its fields as things to chart. Start with a handful of fields; you can add more later. See [Data models](/help/data-dashboards/data-models) for the field editor and for importing a shape instead of typing it out. ## Build your first workflow Go to **Workflows** and choose **New Workflow**. That opens the builder — a canvas where you drag steps from the palette and wire them together. The connections are what matter: an arrow from one step to the next means "wait for that, then run". A first workflow that produces something useful needs three things: 1. **A trigger.** A webhook trigger gives you a URL to POST to; a scheduled trigger fires on an interval. Either one is what starts a run. 2. **A step that produces data.** Usually an HTTP request out to an API, or the trigger's own payload if data is being pushed to you. 3. **A Map to Data Model step.** This is where the payload gets mapped onto the data model you just made — one mapping per field, each a plain formula over the fields upstream — and saved to the warehouse. Nothing is written until you press **Save**, so you can rearrange freely while you work. Positions on the canvas are cosmetic; Hodoflow lays the graph out for you each time you open it. [Workflows](/help/workflows) covers every step type, and [Persisting data](/help/data-dashboards/persisting-data) covers the mapping formulas. ## Activate it A saved workflow is not a running workflow. Open it and press **Activate**. Activation is where Hodoflow checks your work, and it will refuse until the graph holds up: the workflow needs at least one trigger, every step needs a complete configuration, field mappings have to be valid, and there can be no cycles or disconnected steps. Fix what it names and try again. Activating a version also deactivates whichever version of that workflow was live before, so exactly one version of a workflow is ever running. ## Watch the run Go to **Workflows → Monitor**. This is the real-time execution history: every run appears as it happens, and opening one shows its steps in order with each step's outcome and payload behind it. Turn on **Live Tail** to have new runs stream in without refreshing. If a run failed, this is the page that tells you which step failed and what it was holding at the time. ## Read the results Back in **Warehouse**, open the data model you created. Its records are the mapped output of your runs — one entry per entity, browsable and searchable. Open a single record and you get its change timeline: every version that was ever written, with a date picker to scrub back and see the record as it stood at an earlier moment. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is deleted, so the timeline is complete by construction. ## Put it on a dashboard Go to **Dashboards** and choose **Create Dashboard**. Add widgets, point each one at a field on your data model, pick an aggregation, and pick a time range. Widgets recompute as new records land — no refresh. Once the dashboard looks right you can share it publicly with a token and drop it into another site as a live embed. See [Dashboards](/help/data-dashboards/dashboards) and [Embeds](/help/data-dashboards/embeds). ## Where to go next **Home** now has something to show: run states and data model activity for whatever the time range picker in the top right is set to, plus your recent throughput. That page is the loop you just built, viewed from above. From here: - [Persisting data](/help/data-dashboards/persisting-data) explains why the warehouse only ever adds to a record's history, and what that buys you. - [Triggers and webhooks](/help/workflows/triggers-and-webhooks) covers pointing a real external system at your workflow. - [Credentials and connections](/help/credentials-connections) covers storing credentials once and reusing them across workflows.