Day 0: Startup Setup

You have an idea. Congratulations. You have started telling everyone that you are building something in stealth; but all you really have is some docs, pdfs and AI chats.

Most founders skip the step of setting things up. They jump straight into building. I mean, there is nothing wrong with it if you have been into this game before and you can deal with unstructured progress. But this creates restructuring debt. The longer you wait, the harder(frustrating) it gets to fix.

I would strongly advice you to set things up properly. It will help you measure/see progress and most of the times it helps you to run fast. Now, even though I think, you can build your first prototype for free, I am going to suggest things that will cost you some mulaahh. But trust me, you need to invest some money right now to start right.

Here’s what you need on Day 0.

Your domain is your digital identity. Everything else—email, website, tools—connects to this. If you are still running in stealth; I’d suggest to get a domain of your most plausible name choice. This could become your legally register name. You can choose your brand name later. Just go to any domain websites and buy;

What to buy:

• yourstartupname.com (always .com if available - no matter how fancy you think other domains will sound)

• yourstartupname.in (if you’re India-focused)

• throw in some additional domains of your preferences if you have budget. (It can help you set internal intranet later if needed)

Where to buy:

• GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Google Domains

• Cost: ₹800-1500/year (depending on your domain choice, some of them are crazy expensive - don’t be stupid, choose something non-generic and don’t spend a bomb)

Rules:

• Keep it simple. If people misspell it when you say it out loud, pick a different name(Your SEO team will thank you).

• Avoid hyphens, numbers, or creative spellings.

• Check trademark conflicts before buying. (Detailed Article to follow)

Once you have the domain, don’t touch the registrar settings unless you know what you’re doing. You’ll point this domain to your email and website later.

Stop using your @gmail domain, for god’s sake. You need professional email: yourname@yourstartup.com.

Go straight to Google Workspace (₹125/user/month)

• Pros: Gmail interface everyone knows, 30GB storage, Google Drive included

• Cons: Costs money from Day 1

Now, I can suggest you some free platforms but trust me google workspace will be a blessing after some stage. It’s an open platform with integrations to almost everything. With free Gemini(If your team does not have access to any of the one AI apps, you are doing something wrong) and other Apps from Google Labs, this platform will become a great infrastructure for your team.

Things you get here,

• Email Inbox

• Calendar/Meet for meetings

• Drive for files storage

• Docs / Slides / Sheet

• Gemini / NotebookLM and many more for AI

Setup takes 30 minutes. You’ll have to add DNS records to your domain to verify ownership. Both platforms have step-by-step guides. Just talk to gemini.

Email is for external. You need something faster for your team and internal communications (and no, Whatsapp is not the solution).

Option 1: Slack (Free tier: 90-day message history)

• Pros: Industry standard, integrations with everything, channels keep conversations organized

• Cons: Free tier deletes old messages after 90 days

Option 2: Discord (Free)

• Pros: Completely free, voice channels, better for remote teams

• Cons: Feels like a gaming app, less professional

My take: Slack. The free tier works fine until you have 15+ people. By then you can afford the paid plan. Slack, like google is very open for integrations/automations. These things will come in handy in future. No matter what you choose, use religiously.

Structure:

• #general (company-wide announcements)

• #random (water cooler chat)

• #engineering, #product, #sales (department channels)

One of the most important items of all and yet I don’t see a defined setup in most of the startups(even bigger ones). If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist. You need one place where everything is documented. No, It’s not stupid to put things down. When you are just 2-5 people, this will seem like a redundant task but once you start growing, your knowledge base will help you speedup. As a operator you job should be to create value not dependency.
I will not give you options here, just straight-forward setup.

Information Base: Notion (Free for small teams)

• Flexible, beautiful, databases + docs + wikis in one place

• Go signup for notion now. Setup your Workspace and assingn a team space for each of the dept. To start with you need teamspaces for,

  • Company & HR <Open to all>

  • Product & Engineering

  • Finance & Compliance

  • Marketing & Sales

  • Operations etc.

Files Storage: Google Docs/Drive (Free with Google Workspace)

• Simple, everyone knows how to use it

• Create Shared drives to store documents and files Dept. wise.

I will write a more detailed blog on how to setup and use knowledge repository. This setup will help you retain knowledge, make handovers easy, knowledge search handy and will create a memory for your organization.

You’ll have files that don’t fit in Notion. Contracts, designs, presentations, images and a whole lot of backups. Good thing about drive is the generic access control and flexibility to open certain folders for anyone to view outside your organization.

Google Drive (15GB free, or unlimited with Google Workspace)

• Everyone has it, easy sharing, Easy public sharing

• Use google Groups and Shared Drives to create distinction between departments.

Access control: Don’t share the entire Drive with everyone. Share specific folders based on role. If you are in a IP/Data sensitive sector - Drive is not the best choice to share things outside the organization. Use Papermark for sharing docs and files outside. Papermark provides you stricter access controls, Complete access audit, sharing/copy controls etc. Go on, you won’t regret.

Running a company in this age means tons of digital platform across org and maintaining access to those platforms. You’ll have 20+ accounts within a month. Email, domain, Slack, Notion, AWS, payment gateways, social media.

Don’t use the same password everywhere. Don’t write them in a Google Doc. That’s how you get your company compromised.

Option 1: 1Password (₹220/month for teams)

• Pros: Best UX, secure, browser extensions

• Cons: Not free

• When to use: You have budget for security

Option 2: Bitwarden (Free, ₹80/month for teams)

• Pros: Free tier is solid, open source

• Cons: Less polished than 1Password

• When to use: Bootstrapped

My take: Start with Bitwarden free. Upgrade to paid when you have a team.

Shared vaults:

• Company credentials (domain, email admin, social media)

• Payment accounts (Razorpay, bank portals)

• Tools (Slack admin, Notion workspace)

Each team member also has their personal vault.

Bottom line if you don’t want a specialized password manager, then atleast use your browse’s inbuilt password manager but don’t write passwords on document and share them. Makes your look stupid.

Once you start building, you need to track what’s being worked on.

Option 1: Linear (Free for small teams, ₹640/user/month after)

• Pros: Fast, beautiful, built for product teams

• Cons: Opinionated workflow

• When to use: Product/engineering-focused team

Option 2: Notion (you already have it)

• Pros: Free, flexible

• Cons: Not purpose-built for project management

• When to use: Early stage, want to keep tools minimal

Option 3: Jira (₹390/user/month)

• Pros: Industry standard for engineering and Engineers love it

• Cons: Slow, complex, overkill early on

• When to use: Only if you’re familiar with it

My take: Start with Notion kanban boards, free and easy. Move to Linear when you have a dedicated product person.

Bootstrapped (₹500-1000/month):

• Domain: ₹1000/year (one-time)

• Email: Google Workspace (₹250/month for 2 users)

• Chat: Slack (free tier)

• Knowledge: Notion (free)

• Storage: Google Drive (free 15GB)

• Passwords: Bitwarden (free)

Obviously, this is conservative but this is the least you would need to get started. I know, most of these things you might already know but, it helps me structure my series on Operator’s cookbook on setting up a business.

You now have the infrastructure to run a company. Everything works. Next steps (we’ll cover these in upcoming articles):

• Legal setup (company registration, founder agreements)

• Finance infrastructure (bank account, accounting software)

• Product/engineering tools - I will not write much about this because there are tons of getting started guides out there and if you are a techie, you’d already know a lot more.

• First hires (when to hire, how to structure equity)

Generic Tools

• Claude - hands down best AI currently to act as my +1

• Gemini and google AIs - for various tasks from Research, Image generation, marketing collaterals, Decks and Materials.

• Canva for quick designs and collatrals

• Figma for Design tasks

• Webflow for Website

Legal & Finance

• Tally for book keeping (Old school I know, but yet to upgrade, comment if you know any better scalable solution and please no Zoho)

• Papermark for Confidential docs and data handling

• EquityList for Captable and Shareholder management

• Razorpay Payroll for Payroll management and HRMS(kinda meh for this)

Marketing & Sales

• Semrush for SEO and AEO (free version)

• Buffer for Social media scheduling

• ChatGPT for content writing

• Hubspot for CRM

and some more that I am missing, ask me questions and I’ll tell you what I use.

Hope this was helpful. See you in next one.

PS: know my writing sucks atm, but give me time and a few more blogs. I will improve.