Most people who land on hashtag.org for the first time have the same reaction: the homepage looks like Google, but somehow there is a globe behind it, a row of small circular icons under the search bar, and a box that says “Global Interactive GEO Interface.” They click around, get a little lost, and close the tab. That is on us. This article is the antidote: a clean, opinionated path from the moment you decide to claim a #Name to the moment a real, live portal with an AI agent is sitting at a real coordinate on the map, ready to answer the next person who searches for what you do.
We will do this in five small steps. None of them require code, none of them require a crypto wallet you have to install, and none of them require you to read a white paper about decentralized identity before you can take a payment. If you can fill out a Stripe checkout, you can finish this in roughly 60 seconds — call it three minutes if you stop to pick a nice photo. By the end you will own a unit of identity on the spatial web that no platform can quietly take away from you.
What you are actually claiming (in one paragraph)
A #Name is the unit of identity on hashtag.org — for example, #FreaknCreekn, #BlueRidgeCoffee, or your own first name. Behind the #Name sits a GEO portal: a single public page that lives at a real-world coordinate, holds your photos, your description, your links, your products and memberships, and runs an AI assistant called GIGI on top of all of it. When somebody searches the homepage for “coffee shop” near you, or types your #Name directly, that portal is what they land on. Owning the #Name is what makes everything else portable: creator sovereignty in plain English.
Step 1 — Pick the #Name you actually want
Open the homepage and type the name you want into the search bar. You do not need to add the #; the box adds it for you and keeps it there. Two things happen as you type:
- If your phrase already exists as a portal, you will see it surface in the suggestion list, including its current keyword rank and category. That tells you the name is taken.
- If your phrase is unclaimed, the search becomes a claim button. Hit enter (or tap “Claim this #Name”) and you land on the checkout page.
A few practical tips before you commit. Short, memorable, brand-aligned beats clever. Compare #FreaknCreekn with #fc-2026-camp-llc: both are valid, only one is something you will actually say into a phone or print on a card. Avoid consecutive numbers and dashes if you can; they read poorly out loud and they make voice search through GIGI harder. Capitalisation is preserved for display but is not part of identity — #FreaknCreekn and #freakncreekn resolve to the same portal.
One more thing: if the name you want is taken, do not invent a worse spelling. Read Win the keyword you actually want instead — you can rank for the search phrase a competitor is “sitting on,” without ever needing to own their #Name.
Step 2 — Pay with a card (or with credits)
The checkout page is intentionally short. You will see your #Name and the annual price, which is length-based: very short, very memorable names cost more, longer names cost less. The price is shown in USD and we run the charge through Stripe, so the same card you use to buy a coffee online will work here. This is what we call fiat checkout: no crypto wallet, no seed phrase, no friction.
If you already have a balance of Gigi credits on file (from previous top-ups, partner payouts, or refunds), you can spend those instead. Credits live in cents on your account, and they cover both #Name claims and keyword purchases without a second card swipe. If your credit balance is enough to cover the entire purchase, you will see a “Pay with $X.XX Gigi credits” button next to the regular card button; if not, the card path is the only one shown.
Two important rules to keep in your head: this is an annual subscription, not a one-time purchase. We charge you once at claim and then once a year on the same date afterwards, exactly like a domain name. If a renewal fails (and we cannot recover it from credits), the #Name is marked for expiry and eventually returns to the marketplace. The other rule: the receipt you get from Stripe is exactly the receipt your accountant wants. There is no separate “crypto receipt” for these purchases.
Step 3 — Pin your portal to a place on the map
After checkout you land on the new portal’s admin screen. The first thing it asks for is your location. This is the moment your portal becomes part of the spatial web instead of just a profile page: the lat/long you set is what causes you to surface in nearby searches, on the live map at /portals/map, and in “portals here right now” results when somebody opens the Scanner panel.
For brick-and-mortar businesses, drop the pin on your front door — literally where you would tell a delivery driver to look. For online-only creators, pin to the city you want to be associated with; you can change it any time, and the change propagates within a minute. For mobile businesses (a food truck, a freelance photographer), pick the location you operate from most often and use your portal description to say “serves the entire metro” or similar. We will add an explicit “mobile” toggle once enough portals ask for it; for now the description field is the right place.
Visitors looking at the homepage who have been to your portal before will see it in their personal Most Visited strip just under the search bar. That strip is behavioural, not paid — you cannot buy a slot in it. The way you appear there is by visitors actually opening your portal more than once, which is the product’s subtle way of rewarding the portals people genuinely return to.
Step 4 — Add the three things every portal needs
You can ship a portal with a single photo and a one-paragraph description, and many do. But if you want a portal that converts a curious visitor into a customer, three fields carry most of the weight:
- One photo, used everywhere. Square, well-lit, your storefront or your face. This becomes your map marker, your Most Visited icon, your share preview, and your call-card avatar. A weak photo costs you more than a weak description.
- Three sentences max. What you do, who you do it for, and one specific, true thing about you (“open at 6am for the bridge crew,” “the only shop in town that grinds Chemex on demand,” “same-day quotes by 3pm Eastern”). Visitors decide in two seconds; GIGI uses these sentences as the seed of every answer it gives on your behalf.
- One unmissable link. If you only have a phone number, that is the link. If you have a booking page, that is the link. If you have a checkout cart, that is the link. Multiple links bury the one you actually want clicked.
Everything else — hours, menu, services, social links, photo gallery — is worth filling in, and we will surface them automatically. But none of those will save a weak photo, a vague description, or three competing calls-to-action.
Step 5 — Turn GIGI on
Every portal ships with a GIGI agent ready to talk to visitors. By default, GIGI is grounded in your portal data through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) — meaning, when somebody asks “are you open Sunday?” on your portal, GIGI looks up your real hours, not a guess from an LLM trained on the open internet. If you have not added hours yet, GIGI will tell the visitor honestly that it does not have them and offer to leave a message for you. That is the difference between an answer agent and a hallucination.
You do not have to write a system prompt or pick a model. The right behaviour for your portal type is set automatically (a coffee shop sounds different from a real-estate listing). When you are ready to push it further — brand voice, product recommendations, scheduling integrations, voice answers, multi-language — read the full setup in Train GIGI on your business in 10 minutes.
What you actually own at the end of these 60 seconds
Once the checkout settles and the pin is placed, here is the practical checklist of what is yours:
- The #Name itself, registered to your account. As long as the annual subscription renews, no one else can claim it. If you ever decide to graduate to self-custody, the on-chain record on #SPACE moves with you — your name follows the keys you hold, not the platform.
- A live GEO portal at
hashtag.org/<your name>, searchable by name, by category, by phrase, and by proximity on the map. - A working GIGI agent with RAG-grounded answers, voice-ready, and able to take messages on your behalf when you are away.
- An embedded wallet created quietly in the background by our wallet provider (Privy). You do not need to think about it on day one. It exists so that, on day 200, when you decide you want to receive a stablecoin tip from a fan or self-custody your
#Name, the wallet is already there, holding the keys, waiting for you to claim them. - First-party data on the visitors who interact with your portal — the people who message you, sign up to your mailing list, or buy from you become contacts you actually own, not contacts a platform decides whether you can email.
The next 60 seconds
Once the portal is live, three things compound:
- Win the search phrase visitors actually type. Your
#Namegets you found by people who already know you exist. To be discovered by people who do not, you bid on the keywords they type instead. That is a separate (small) annual cost and the entire mechanic is explained in Win the keyword you actually want. - Train GIGI past the defaults. Pasting your menu, your service list, your FAQ, and a sentence about your tone gets a measurable bump in answer quality inside a single afternoon. The walkthrough is in Train GIGI on your business in 10 minutes.
- Migrate the audience you already have. If you came here because a third-party platform demonetised, deplatformed, or shadow-banned you, the next practical step is moving your followers and your email list into your portal. We wrote a complete playbook in Stop renting your audience.
Frequently-asked, briefly
Can I change my #Name later? No. The whole point of a #Name is that it is yours forever; if you could rename it, it would behave like a username on a third-party platform, which is the thing we are explicitly not. You can, however, claim additional #Names against the same account — many businesses end up with a brand portal and a personal portal living side by side.
Can I sell my #Name? Yes. Once the on-chain record exists on #SPACE, the #Name is transferable like any other on-chain asset. We will eventually surface a marketplace inside hashtag.org for this; for now, transfers happen wallet-to-wallet on #SPACE.
Do I have to use Web3 features? No. The vast majority of portals on hashtag.org are run by people who never touch a wallet. Web3 is opt-in; the embedded wallet is invisible until you ask for it.
Can someone steal my #Name with a typo? No. Typo-squatting names are their own portals and do not gain authority on yours. Visitors who type the wrong name are gently redirected to the closest live match through GIGI’s search.
Done
That is the whole flow: search, pay, pin, fill three fields, turn GIGI on. From here, the work is honestly the same work as growing a small business or a creator channel anywhere else — show up consistently, take care of the people who show up for you, and write things they want to read. The difference is that on hashtag.org, the channel and the audience are yours. We just provide the spatial layer, the search, the agent, and the rails. Everything else is yours.
When you are ready, hop to the keyword auction guide and lock in the search phrases you want to own. If you came from a platform that burned you, start with the migration playbook. Either way, welcome aboard.