The Startup Checklist

7Establish Your Brand with Online Public Profiles

As you have seen in the preceding chapters, you can go a long way toward starting up your company without actually being a company. You can figure out your business model, start your lean planning process, research the competition, team up with potential cofounders, create your minimum viable product (MVP), and even track how customers react to it, all from your bedroom if you like.

But why stop there? Although you might not yet be incorporated (tackled in Part II) or actually taking money from customers, it's a good idea to establish an identity for your venture. That way, when people hear about the new thing you're working on, they can tell their friends, “Hey, take a look at Project X, it's really cool!” Besides, how can you be a startup CEO without a startup? Seriously, though, having an identity for your startup, whether or not you're actually a legal entity, means that you are in play. Employees might want to work for you, other companies might want to work with you, customers might beat down your door to buy from you . . . and if you're really hot, investors might even come calling.

There's an old joke in the software field that the very first thing an entrepreneur does with a new company is to design the T-shirt. But in fact, it's not a joke! The days of having to go to a Madison Avenue advertising agency for “corporate identity development” and pay Don Draper hundreds of thousands of dollars for a logo are gone. Instead, ...