Minou

Getting Started

This page covers your first hour in Minou: creating a workspace, switching on the apps you want, connecting Strava, and knowing where things live.

Create your account

Minou is in early access. Join the waitlist to get an access code, then open the sign-in page and enter the email address the code was sent to. A sign-in link arrives in your inbox; there is no password to set.

The first thing you do after signing in is create a workspace.

Workspaces

A workspace is the top-level container for your data — activities, goals, plans, scenarios, recipes, events, and each app's settings. Every account starts with one. You can create more to keep separate contexts apart, and you can invite other people into any of them.

Creating your first workspace
Creating your first workspace

Switch apps on and off for a workspace under Workspace Settings → Apps. See Workspace.

Basecamp

Basecamp is the training app. It reads your Strava activities, classifies them against a 4-zone heart-rate model, and reports training load, race readiness, and long-term progress. It reads your whole history rather than a recent window, and gets more precise as you add measured data such as a lactate threshold test.

Connect Strava

  1. Open Basecamp → Settings → Connections.
  2. Select Connect with Strava. You are redirected to Strava to authorize access.
  3. Grant Minou permission to read your activities.
  4. Strava returns you to Minou with the connection confirmed.

Minou then syncs your full activity history and picks up new activities as they arrive. You can start a manual sync at any time from Basecamp Settings.

Minou reads distance, duration, heart rate, pace, elevation, cadence, power, calories, and route polylines. It never modifies or deletes anything on Strava.

Set up your training profile

Entering your five-zone watch boundaries is enough to start:

  1. Open Basecamp Settings → HR Zones and enter the heart-rate boundaries your watch uses. Basecamp approximates the Johnston zones from these until it has something better.
  2. Open your Profile and choose metric or imperial for distance, pace, elevation, and weight.
  3. Review the race goals Basecamp created after your first sync. Set target times, add elevation for mountain races, and delete the goals you do not need.

Two optional additions make the analysis more precise:

  • A lactate threshold test (Basecamp Settings → Lactate Threshold) replaces the estimated zones with your measured LT1 and LT2, and adds pace targets per zone, race time projections, and the aerobic deficiency check.
  • Body composition (Basecamp Settings → Body Composition) calibrates the volume ceilings a generated plan will use.

What Basecamp gives you

  • Activity analysis — every synced activity with its splits, zone distribution, and Training Effect scores
  • Heart rate zones — the Johnston 4-zone model applied to every activity that carries heart-rate data
  • Training load — weekly bTSS, fitness and fatigue trends, and intensity distribution
  • Running Tolerance — the weekly impact load your recent training has adapted you to
  • Training plans — periodized week-by-week plans built around one event
  • Race goals and projections — target times with Riegel-based projections and your best efforts
  • Route heatmaps — every GPS activity on one map

See Basecamp.

Gatherings

Gatherings is the hosting app. It is built around a recipe library that grows as you cook: events group the recipes for one night, and the grocery list combines them into one shop.

Plan a meal

  1. Create an event — a name and a date, description optional. "Saturday dinner", "Camping trip".
  2. Add recipes — link one or more recipes from your library. Each carries its own ingredients and serving size, and stays in the library for the next event.
  3. Generate a grocery list — Minou combines ingredients across every linked recipe, adding compatible quantities together. 2 cups flour and 1 cup flour become 3 cups flour.

You can skip events entirely and build a list by selecting recipes directly on the Grocery List page. That is the quickest way to compare menus: select a few candidates and see how much they overlap before you decide what to cook.

Shop from the list

The grocery list has 3 tabs, and quantities are already combined across every selected recipe:

  • To Buy — what you still need to pick up
  • Already Have — what is in the pantry, either marked on the ingredient or moved here by hand
  • Bought — what you have checked off on this trip

Switch between U.S. Standard and Metric at any time. Mark as Done clears the bought items and resets the recipe selection for next time.

Recipes and ingredients

  • Recipes carry a serving size, ingredients with quantities and units, preparation steps, and recipe type and diet tags. They are reused across events rather than belonging to one. Import and export in bulk as CSV or JSON.
  • Ingredients are a shared library behind the recipes. Tag them by type — Produce, Dairy, Meat — and mark your cupboard staples as Already Have once, so they stay out of every future shopping list.
  • Find Duplicates groups ingredients entered under slightly different names so you can merge them. Worth running occasionally: duplicates stop quantities combining, which is what makes the list useful.

See Gatherings.

Finance

Finance is the money app. It models financial independence as a set of scenarios you compare rather than a single date to believe.

FI Scenario Planner

Set your current age, a portfolio value to project from — where you stand today, or a target you want to test — and a range of annual return rates. Add an inflation schedule and a withdrawal schedule, each with per-age overrides. Calculate, and the planner projects your balance year by year for every return rate in the range, so you see the spread your assumptions permit rather than a single date to believe.

Nothing is added along the way, so each projection shows what your current portfolio becomes if you stop contributing today. Every calculation is saved with its assumptions, which makes a re-run months later a comparison against what you last assumed.

See Finance.

Your home screen

The home screen is a grid of widgets you choose. Open the widget drawer to add, remove, reorder, and resize widgets from any app you have switched on, and to pick up to 5 metrics for the bar above them. Changes save to the workspace as you make them.

See Customize Home.

Getting around

The sidebar holds every section. Each app has its own group — Basecamp, Gatherings, Finance — and the workspace selector at the top switches between workspaces. On mobile, the menu icon opens the same navigation as a drawer.

There is a help icon in every app. It opens a panel with 2 tabs: Help searches the documentation, and Messages reports an issue without leaving the screen you are on.

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