Resources · Digital Foundations · 12 min
The first-week checklist
You have decided to start something and you do not know what to do first.
1. Decide what you are called, and check it is free
Before anything is designed, search your state's business registry, a domain registrar, and the two social platforms you actually intend to use. A name that is taken on the one platform you will live on is a name to drop now, not after the sign is printed.
You are not looking for perfect. You are looking for available, sayable over the phone, and spellable by someone who heard it once.
2. Register the business and open a separate bank account
The separate account is the part people skip, and it is the part that costs the most later. Mixed personal and business money turns a one-hour tax conversation into a weekend of reconstructing which coffee was a client meeting.
This is also the week to write down how you will get paid. Not a payment processor integration — just the answer to "a customer wants to pay me today, how?"
3. Claim the free listings before you build anything
A Google Business Profile is free, it is the single highest-leverage thing a local business owns, and it takes about twenty minutes. It will also outrank your own website for your own name for the first several months, which is fine.
Claim the handles you will use even if you will not post yet. Reclaiming a handle later is not a thing you can do.
4. One page that says what you do and how to reach you
One page. Not a site. What you do, who it is for, what it costs or how pricing works, and one way to contact you that you will actually check.
The full site can come when you know which three questions every customer asks. In week one you do not know that yet, and building around a guess is how a site gets rebuilt in month four.
5. What can wait
A logo system, a brand colour palette, business cards, a newsletter, a blog, an app, a CRM, ads. None of these earn anything in week one, and every one of them is easier to do well once you have talked to ten real customers.
If someone is selling you one of these in week one, they are selling their availability, not your need.
Did you get week one right?
- Can a stranger find you by searching your business name?
- Can they tell what you sell in under ten seconds?
- Can they contact you without calling?
- Is your business money in a separate account from your grocery money?
Want someone to do this part?
The quiz tells you what to do first and roughly what it costs. Or talk to us for fifteen minutes — no deck, no pressure.
The founder brief
One practical email for people building something — a clear idea you can use, no pitch. Free, unsubscribe anytime.