Don’t Sweat the Small (Business) Stuff—Get Going!
Four months into this whole small business ownership adventure, our team came together to reflect on things. Between deciding to take the plunge 😬, turning in our aprons at our former agency 🥺, launching our business 🫣, and taking on our first few clients 🥳, Q1 of being certified POD #bossbabes was kinda a blur, not to mention an emotional roller coaster 🎢.
Spoiler alert—there’s a lot of un-glamorous, business-y stuff that goes into starting a company:
- Making a legit business plan (2 legit 2 quit, hey-hey)
- Navigating LLC status with the IRS
- Opening a business bank account (and not misspelling your company name on associated paperwork)
- Transitioning to self-insurance
- Estimated taxes and Quickbooks in general (EEEEK!)
For us, none of this was second nature, and it meant learning (and Googling) on the fly to get all our ducks in a row (pun absolutely intended). If you’re a small business owner who’s already been in our shoes, hopefully this sounds familiar and relatable?!
But, through the whirlwind of launching Pair of Ducks, we learned a few things about ourselves and the process:
First …
We discovered that our tiny team of three can totally name and register a business, create essential branding, and launch an SEO- and mobile-friendly Squarespace site in as little as two weeks!*
Second …
We figured out all the un-glamorous nitty gritty business launch steps mentioned above, and we managed to navigate everything like we knew what we were doing without breaking a sweat.
*After years of working with bigger teams and months-long project timelines, we were thrilled to find out that decent branding, site design and development, and SEO can all come together so quickly once we trim the fat.
So, now that the dust has settled, we figure we might have something to offer the budding-new-business-owner-community. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur interested to know the step-by-step (Cliff’s Notes version) of getting your business off the ground, you’re in the right place. If you’re like us, you may have your share of fears about starting. We’re here to give you our quick-and-dirty roadmap and the extra confidence you need to rip off that start-a-business band-aid and go for it. If our tiny team of three can do it, so can you!
How to Name + Brand + Strategize + Copyright + Design + Develop + Launch Your Company + Website + Social Media in 2 Weeks
Our Step-by-step Process at a Glance
1. Make a Business Plan
Ours included an executive summary, a company description, market overview and research, services, employee list, design process, location info, a marketing and launch promotion plan, and a financial analysis.
2. Get a Name for Your Biz
We did this in a couple late-night sessions following the same process we would for naming services with our clients. We moodboarded our top three contenders then ran them by some of our closest design friends to pick the winner.
3. Register Your LLC with the IRS.
Online registration wasn’t too painful, but it wasn’t totally straightforward for first-timers either. An LLC worked for us, and it’s where most small companies start out.
4. Start the Trademarking Process
In a perfect world, we’d finish this before branding and website domain stuff gets underway … but we were in a time crunch and our gamble paid off.
5. Register a Website Domain
We purchased our domain through Namecheap, and settled on a “.design” address because it was substantially cheaper.
6. Design the Eye Candy
Our logo combined a doodle of Staci’s Dilly Ducks with a bubble letter font called Sniglet that we’d had on the cutting room floor of fonts-we-like-but-don’t-use since maybe 2004.
As for the rest of our brand visuals, we had some ideas: yellow, bold, playful, typewriter text, and metallic gradients. Derek brought our launch look to life with a brand toolkit full of colors, icons, a custom photo filter, and lots of design treatments ready to shine.
7. Claim Your Social Handles + Custom Emails
We wanted our handles to be consistent across the platforms we’d be using, and we picked @pairofducksdigital since it hinted at services and was available for Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Custom email domains through Gmail are pretty affordable and make you look profesh.
8. Make a Website
Definitely minimizing this whole process—copywriting, prototyping, SEO, service descriptions, surprise custom-coded Ukrainian flag hover images, it’s all really another post for another day, but we did it. And, if you need some friendly folks to make your killer site, obvi we’re here for it!
9. Setup a Client Management Tool
Need an easy way to accept new project inquiries that will walk your would-be clients through a seamless customer experience? We found HoneyBook on a late night scroll through Pinterest, and it is seriously the best!
10. Connect Your Invoicing Software to Accept Online Payments
Our HoneyBook tool integrated directly with Squarespace and was easy to connect to our business bank account, so getting paid was smooth from day one.
11. Launch Your Site + Start Promoting Your New Biz!
We launched after a day of link-checking and mobile optimization. Then we posted ‘Hello, World!’ type stuff on social channels, sent an announcement email to friends, family, professional peers, essentially every email address we had on hand.
Tools, Tech + Startup Costs (For Our Small Design Business at Least)
Every company and industry is different, and your small business will come with its own overhead and a spreadsheet that looks wildly different than ours. (In all honesty, a work-from-home digital design business can run pretty cheaply!) But, in the name of transparency, here’s what our expenses looked like when we launched, and maybe these tools and prices will be of some help.
| Software | Functionality | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Namecheap | Domain provider | $10/yr |
| Squarespace | Website builder + hosting (We paid extra for some convenient, design-boosting plugins.) | $360/yr |
| Google Analytics | Website traffic + analysis | FREE |
| Gmail | Business emails w/ custom domain (Comes with Google Meet, which is way cheaper than Zoom!) | $36/mo |
| Trello | Project management (Allows up to 10 boards for free!) | FREE |
| HoneyBook | Client management + billing + payments (We love this tool so much, plus you can use our HoneyBook discount for 25% off!) | $24/mo |
| Quickbooks | Accounting (Better than spreadsheets + makes tracking mileage easier come tax time) | $30/mo |
| Slack | Internal communications (The free version has all the remote chat capabilities we need.) | FREE |
| Adobe Creative Suite | Design, illustration, editing + animation (Not cheap, a necessary evil) | $85/mo |
| Figma | Website prototyping, moodboards + presentations | $12/mo |
| Klaviyo | Email marketing (Our all time fave email builder + full functionality free for up to 200 subscribers!) | FREE |
| SEM Rush | Keyword research + SEO (We used only free tools to launch our site + will pony up later.) | FREE |
| TOTAL STARTUP COSTS (Including laptops + equipment not listed) | <$10K/yr |
Start-your-own-business Speed Run Complete!
Now all you have to do is find some clients and get busy makin’ your magic—easy! 🤑
And yeah, two weeks was a bit of a mad dash full of late nights and lots of coffee for us. Technicaaaallly, you could do all this on a more leisurely timeline. We have read Tortoise and the Hare after all (or at least watched the Bugs Bunny version). Still, when it comes to business, time is money— you’ve gotta hit the ground running (unless you’re independently wealthy or your dad can afford to buy you an Oompa Loompa)! That’s not us, and we bet that’s not you either.
Scrappy business owners unite!
