Your First Message

This tutorial walks you through the entire setup — creating an account, connecting Coop Desktop, and sending a message from both the dashboard and the API.

By the end, you'll have a working Coop setup and understand how messages flow from your app to a recipient's phone.

Prerequisites

• An email address
• A Mac (or Mac Mini) signed into iMessage with an active phone number
• The Mac needs to stay powered on and connected to the internet

Step 1: Create your account

Go to the Coop dashboard and click Sign Up.

Fill in your name, email, and a password. You'll be prompted to create a new organization — this is the workspace where your team's messages, contacts, and settings live. Pick a name and continue.

You can also sign up with Google. If you do, you'll be asked to create an organization on the next screen.

You're now logged into the dashboard.

Step 2: Install Coop Desktop

Coop Desktop is the app that runs on your Mac and bridges iMessage to the cloud. Without it, Coop has no way to send or receive messages.

Download and install

During onboarding, the dashboard provides a download link for Coop Desktop. Download the DMG, open it, and drag Coop to your Applications folder.

Connect

1. In the onboarding wizard, click Open Coop Desktop
2. The dashboard generates a registration token and passes it to Coop Desktop automatically via the coop:// URL scheme
3. Coop Desktop registers with your organization — no manual token copy/paste needed

Coop Desktop will:

• Authenticate with the Coop API
• Sync your existing iMessage contacts and conversations
• Start listening for incoming messages
• Begin processing your outbound message queue

Verify

Back in the dashboard, the onboarding wizard automatically detects the connection and advances to the next step. You can also check Settings > Relays — your Mac should appear with a green Online status.

Step 3: Send a message from the dashboard

1. Go to Messages in the sidebar
2. Click New Message
3. Enter a phone number (use E.164 format, e.g. +15551234567)
4. Type a message
5. Click Send

Watch the status update in real-time: queued → processing → sent → delivered.

That's it — you just sent an iMessage through Coop.

Step 4: Send a message from the API

Now let's do the same thing programmatically.

Create an API key

1. Go to Settings > API Keys
2. Click Create Key
3. Give it a name and click Create
4. Copy the key — it's only shown once

Send the request

curl -X POST https://api.coop.example.com/api/v1/messages \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "to": "+15551234567",
    "body": "Hello from the Coop API!"
  }'

You'll get back a response with the message ID and status:

{
  "id": "msg_abc123",
  "status": "queued",
  "to": "+15551234567",
  "body": "Hello from the Coop API!",
  "createdAt": "2025-01-15T10:30:00Z"
}

Check delivery status

curl https://api.coop.example.com/api/v1/messages/msg_abc123/status \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

{
  "id": "msg_abc123",
  "status": "delivered",
  "attempts": 1,
  "sentAt": "2025-01-15T10:30:02Z",
  "deliveredAt": "2025-01-15T10:30:05Z"
}

What you've learned

You now have a working Coop setup:

• An organization with your team
• Coop Desktop running on your Mac, connected to the API
• The ability to send messages from the dashboard and from code

Next steps