diff --git a/docs/getting-started.rst b/docs/getting-started.rst
index 08346ded..01583051 100644
--- a/docs/getting-started.rst
+++ b/docs/getting-started.rst
@@ -1,6 +1,10 @@
 Getting Started
 ===============
 
+.. note::
+
+   New to fromager? Start with :doc:`quickstart` for a simple first build.
+
 The basic process for using fromager to build a collection of wheels is
 
 1. Make a list of the top-level dependencies (applications, extension libraries,
diff --git a/docs/index.rst b/docs/index.rst
index f73a6159..7ef856d9 100644
--- a/docs/index.rst
+++ b/docs/index.rst
@@ -27,6 +27,7 @@ those special cases directly into fromager.
    :maxdepth: 2
 
    using.md
+   quickstart.rst
    getting-started.rst
    customization.md
    concepts/index.rst
diff --git a/docs/quickstart.rst b/docs/quickstart.rst
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..68ba489a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/quickstart.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
+Quick Start
+===========
+
+This guide gets you from zero to your first wheel build in under 5 minutes.
+
+Prerequisites
+-------------
+
+You'll need Python 3.11 or later and network access to download packages from PyPI.
+
+Installation
+------------
+
+Install fromager using pip:
+
+.. code-block:: console
+
+   $ pip install fromager
+   $ fromager --version
+   fromager, version X.Y.Z
+
+Your First Build
+----------------
+
+Let's build a simple package and its dependencies from source. We'll use
+``stevedore``, a lightweight package with minimal dependencies.
+
+Create a ``requirements.txt`` file with the package name:
+
+.. code-block:: console
+
+   $ echo "stevedore" > requirements.txt
+
+Run the bootstrap command:
+
+.. code-block:: console
+
+   $ fromager bootstrap -r requirements.txt
+
+   primary settings file: overrides/settings.yaml
+   per-package settings dir: overrides/settings
+   variant: cpu
+   ...
+   100%|████████████████████████████████████████| 3/3 [00:08<00:00,  2.67s/pkg]
+   writing installation dependencies to ./work-dir/constraints.txt
+
+Check your results:
+
+.. code-block:: console
+
+   $ ls wheels-repo/downloads/
+   pbr-6.1.0-0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
+   setuptools-75.1.0-0-py3-none-any.whl
+   stevedore-5.3.0-0-py3-none-any.whl
+
+You've built ``stevedore`` and its dependencies (``pbr``, ``setuptools``)
+entirely from source. Fromager downloaded the source distributions from PyPI,
+figured out the build and runtime dependencies, built each package in the
+correct order, and created wheels in ``wheels-repo/downloads/``.
+
+For a detailed explanation of the output files and directories, see
+:doc:`files`.
+
+Pinning Versions with Constraints
+---------------------------------
+
+For reproducible builds, use a constraints file to pin specific versions:
+
+.. code-block:: console
+
+   $ echo "stevedore==5.3.0" > constraints.txt
+   $ fromager -c constraints.txt bootstrap -r requirements.txt
+
+The ``-c`` option ensures fromager uses exactly the versions you specify.
+
+Next Steps
+----------
+
+Now that you've seen fromager work with a simple package, you might want to:
+
+* Learn to debug build failures with a more complex example in :doc:`getting-started`
+* Customize builds with settings, patches, and variants in :doc:`customization`
+* Check specific guides in :doc:`how-tos/index`