First visit, the tour, daily photo, and proverbs

What this covers

Three small things that every network admin sees on day one: a five-step welcome that shows itself exactly once per person, the tour and the per-section first-visit screens it hands off to, and a briefing card at the top of the feed that carries a new photo and a short proverb every day. Neither is a compliance tool or a signal. They are the calm framing around the network intelligence underneath, and this article documents exactly what they show, when they show it, and how the timing is decided.

Where to find it

Both live on the HQ Feed, the landing page for HQ at hq.verinode.ai/feed, reachable from the top of the sidebar. The Feed became HQ's landing surface on 2026-05-23 (it used to be the Network page); the welcome moved here at the same time.

The first-visit welcome

What it is. A five-step welcome that opens automatically the first time a person signs in to a given network, and never opens automatically again for that person on that network. Each step is a moving drawing beside a short explanation, in the same style every first-run screen in IQ and HQ uses. It orients a new HQ admin or invited teammate to what HQ is for before they start reading the feed.

When it opens. It waits a moment after the page loads so the briefing card lands first, then slides in. It only opens at all if the server has determined this is the first visit: it checks the intro_seen_at column on the row that ties your account to this specific network membership and shows the welcome only when that column is still empty. The moment it opens, that column is stamped with the current time, and the welcome will not open again on a future visit, on this or any other device, because the check happens on the server before the page even renders.

The gate is per person, per network, not per network overall. If your network already has three admins who have all seen the welcome and a fourth teammate is invited, that fourth person still gets the full welcome the first time they sign in, even though everyone else on the network dismissed theirs months ago.

What each step covers:

1. "The whole network, in one place." What HQ is: the layer above your members' own IQ accounts. Each member runs IQ on their own data; every night the numbers roll up, and HQ shows the network as a whole. Built for franchise networks, multi-location enterprises, PE platforms and associations; not a job management tool, not a CRM. The drawing shows members' IQ accounts rolling up into HQ and a standing, a benchmark and a decision coming out.
2. "What HQ shows." The four reads, every one an aggregate: a standing for every member, the network against the industry (which fills in as more operators contribute), programs and compliance, and decisions pushed and counted.
3. "What feeds it." Where the data comes from: a member's IQ account, the network's own record (programs, standards, decisions, broadcasts, the roster), and published industry data. This step carries the privacy commitment: a member's documents stay in their own IQ account, and the identifying details in them are encrypted under a key scoped to their business; what reaches HQ is the aggregate; no member's rows are shown, and no operator's data is ever sold.
4. "Where to start." The directory is the roster. Add members by name and location or import a list, send each one an invitation to IQ, and a member who connects their data appears with a standing the next morning. Logo, brand color and vault key are under Settings.
5. "Where things are." The HQ screen in miniature: the rail and its bands, the section page, the feed, and Ask IQ. Its button reads Take the tour and opens the tour described below.

The wording of every step uses your network's own word for its members: franchisees for a franchise, locations for an enterprise, members for an association.

Controls. A counter in the top-left reads "Welcome to HQ · 1 of 5" (etc.). Skip, top-right, closes the welcome immediately from any step; skipping counts as having seen it, since the stamp is written on open. Dots at the bottom show your position and are clickable to jump to any step directly. Back appears once you are past step one. The primary button reads Next on steps one through four and Take the tour on the last; left and right arrow keys move between steps as well.

Never re-shown once seen for this membership. There is no re-trigger and no admin setting to reset it for someone else. The tour, however, can be replayed any time.

The tour

The tour is a spotlight over the real HQ screen rather than a set of slides. It dims the page, frames one thing at a time, and says in a line what is there: each band of the sidebar (Home, Intelligence, Network, Revenue, Operations, Risk, and the Membership or Expansion bands your kind of network gets), Search, Notifications, your account menu, your feed, and Ask IQ. Bands your network does not have are skipped rather than shown empty. Open it from the last step of the welcome or from your account menu under Take the tour; Next, Back, Skip and the arrow keys work the same way as in the welcome.

The first visit to each section

Every HQ section also introduces itself the first time you open it: Network, Leaderboard, Workforce, Accounts, Programs, Compliance, and the rest, each with its own five-step screen in the same style. The steps say what the section does with the network's data and from which sources, what HQ gets from it, what feeds it (a member's own documents in their IQ account, or a record the network authors here, such as a program or a standard), where to start, and what happens next. The eyebrow reads "[Section] setup · 1 of 5" with the section's own name, and the last button opens the place the work happens, for example the directory or the program catalog.

Each section's screen is tracked separately from the welcome, again per person and per network, so an invited teammate meets each section on their own first visit. Under a section's hero, a slim Get IQ up to speed band then lists what still feeds the section (for example "0 of 3 sources that feed Programs"), each with what it needs and a door to it: Invite for anything that comes from members' data, Open for anything the network authors itself. The band retires on its own once every source is in. On the phone, the section screens appear too; the band is a web surface.

The first-run "Tune your feed" card

Separately from the welcome, if you are a first-time HQ user whose feed preferences have never been tuned, a "Tune your feed" card appears as the very first slide in your feed's card stack (before any network signals). It asks two quick questions, how much industry news and learning content you want riding alongside your network signals, and which content formats (articles, video, podcast, and so on) you actually want to see, then retires permanently once you tap Save or Not now. You can always revisit your focus areas later in settings.

This card and the welcome are deliberately kept from stacking on top of each other: the tune card only renders if the welcome is not currently showing. In practice, on a genuinely first visit you will see the welcome first, and the tune card sits waiting underneath as the first card in the feed once you dismiss it.

The daily briefing card

What it is. The very first card in your feed, every day, whenever the feed's All filter is active. It is not a network signal and it does not scroll away with the rest of the feed content, it is a full-height photo card with a greeting, a proverb, and the day's photo credit.

What you see, top to bottom:

• Greeting, personalized by time of day: "Good morning, [your first name]" before noon, "Good afternoon" from noon to 5pm, "Good evening" after that. If your name is not available it just reads "Good morning" / "Good afternoon" / "Good evening."
• Subtitle, network-flavored: "Here's your network & industry briefing" earlier in the day, or "Here's tonight's network briefing" in the evening.
• Briefing stats (only when there is something to report): short lines like "3 decisions need attention," "5 new articles," "2 videos to watch," "1 podcast to listen," or "4 upcoming events," one line per category, only for categories that actually have items in your current feed. If none of these categories have anything, this section is simply absent, no placeholder line.
• Recognition badges, top-right, for account rank and founder or trustee status, if you have earned any. These only render once the underlying status check resolves; if you have none of these, nothing shows there.
• The proverb, in quotes, italic, with its reference underneath in smaller type (for example, a line from Ecclesiastes or Proverbs with the chapter and verse). This can be turned off entirely for a given feed render; when it is on (the normal case), it rotates daily, explained below.
• Location label, bottom-left, naming where the day's photo is from (for example "Yellowstone, Wyoming" or "Chicago, Illinois").
• Photo credit, directly under the location, reading "Photo by [Photographer Name] on Unsplash" with both the photographer's name and "Unsplash" as clickable links back to the source, per Unsplash's attribution requirement. If the photo came from Verinode's static fallback pool rather than a live Unsplash lookup, the credit shows the photographer's name as plain text with no link.
• "Swipe up to begin," bottom-right, a plain instruction to scroll down into the rest of the feed.

Why HQ's photo and proverb are never the same as IQ's on the same day. Verinode IQ (the operator product) shows its own briefing card with the same layout on the operator feed. Both IQ and HQ pick their daily photo and proverb by rotating through a fixed list based on the day of the year, so that everyone on the same surface sees the same photo and proverb on a given day, which keeps it a genuine "daily" touch rather than something that changes on every refresh. Without any adjustment, HQ and IQ would land on the exact same photo and the exact same proverb every single day, since they both start counting from the same day-of-year. To avoid that, HQ's rotation is shifted by a fixed offset (23) before picking, on both the photo query and the proverb. The offset is deliberately not a round number and does not divide evenly into either list's length, so the two surfaces' picks stay spread apart across the year rather than periodically re-syncing. The practical effect: an operator using IQ and an admin using HQ at the same company, or two people who happen to check both products the same morning, will never see the same photo or the same line from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, or similar, on the same day.

Where the photo comes from. Verinode pulls a fresh, US-themed landscape or city-skyline photo from Unsplash's photo search once per calendar day, using a rotating list of specific queries, named national parks, city skylines, and regional landscapes across the country. The same photo is cached and reused for every HQ visit that day (it does not change on refresh), and the cache resets at the start of the next calendar day (UTC). If the Unsplash lookup fails for any reason, quota, network issue, or a missing API key, the card falls back to a fixed, pre-selected static photo pool built into the product, so the card never shows a broken image. That fallback photo shows without a clickable credit link, only the photographer's name as text.

Where the proverb comes from. A fixed list of short scripture lines themed around teamwork, diligence, encouragement, and generosity (drawn from books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Galatians, and Philippians), one per day, rotating by day of year the same way the photo does, offset by the same fixed amount described above. It is deterministic: everyone viewing HQ on the same calendar day sees the same proverb, and it does not change if you reload the page.

How to use it

Neither the welcome nor the briefing card requires action from you. The welcome is a one-time orientation, read it once, take the tour if you like, and move on into the feed. The daily card is ambient framing at the top of your feed, its function is to mark that a new day of network intelligence has started; the network signals, benchmarks, and compliance items you are actually here for are one swipe below it. There is no setting to turn the photo or proverb off from the operator side of HQ; showProverbs is a platform-level toggle Verinode controls, not a per-network preference.

Empty states

• Welcome: if the server cannot confirm your intro_seen_at status (a transient read failure), the welcome simply does not open. Nothing is shown in its place, the feed loads normally.
• Briefing stats line: any category (decisions, articles, videos, podcasts, events) with zero items that day is omitted outright, there is no "0 decisions" placeholder.
• Recognition badges: if you have no rank and are not a founder or trustee, no badge area renders at all, top-right sits empty.
• Photo: if the day's live Unsplash photo fails to load in your browser, the card silently swaps to the static fallback photo without any error message.
• Photo credit: shown only when a photographer name is available; on the static fallback path the credit still shows but without a link.

Related reading

• Verinode HQ overview
• Network health
• HQ compliance
• Broadcasting to your network