The information system of a company just starting out: where to begin

A company just starting out almost always repeats the same sequence of mistakes: it buys software before deciding what the business actually does, piles up subscriptions nobody controls, hands its domain and mailboxes to a provider who holds them on its behalf — and discovers at the first hire that everything has to be redone. It is not a budget problem. It is an ordering problem.

Four things to set up in week one

• A domain registered in your own name. Not the agency’s, not a relative’s. A domain held by someone else is the most expensive dependency to undo: it blocks email, the website, every linked account and your online identity.
• Professional email on that domain, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured. Without them your messages land in spam and anyone can write in your name.
• Named accounts and multi-factor authentication on what matters. One shared account between two founders is the most common and most costly mistake: nobody knows who did what, and one departure forces you to change everything.
• A backup whose restore has actually been tested. A backup never restored is not a backup, it is a hope. The 3-2-1 rule — three copies, two media, one off-site — still applies to a one-person company; we covered it in this article.

Three things not to buy yet

• A full ERP. A consultancy issuing eight invoices a month doesn’t need an integrated management suite; it needs a correct invoice template and one place for its documents. The trigger for an ERP like Dolibarr isn’t ambition: it’s volume, multiple hands on the same data, or invoicing obligations a spreadsheet can no longer carry.
• A ten-page website. A launch page that says plainly what you do, for whom, and how to reach you converts better than a brochure site written before talking to ten customers.
• An AI assistant wired into everything. Before the tool you need clean documents, a written boundary of what you never feed it, and one person accountable for what it produces — the framing we described in governing AI usage.

The real cost over twelve months

The trap isn’t the purchase price, it’s accumulation. Fifteen subscriptions at €12 a month is €2,160 a year for tooling nobody ever arbitrated. Good practice fits in one spreadsheet row per tool: monthly cost, who uses it, and what breaks if you stop it. Many companies discover at that point that they pay twice for the same function.

For reference, our own published prices run from €29 to €89 per month depending on the plan for a managed service, and €49 per month for hosted Dolibarr up to twenty users: a complete foundation is the order of magnitude of a business phone plan, not of an IT project.

The one criterion that says it’s time for the next step

It is neither revenue nor headcount. It is the moment when one piece of information exists in two places and nobody knows which one is authoritative: the customer list on the phone and the one in the spreadsheet, the quote in the mailbox and the one in the shared folder. That day, a management tool pays for itself. Before it, it only adds work.

Decide before you build

Laying technical foundations before deciding what the company does, for whom and with which capabilities means building fast in the wrong direction. The order that works is always the same: decide the architecture, then build the information system, then organise who does what between founder, automation and agents. The minimal version of that loop, for a one-to-ten-person organisation, is described in TEAF Light. And if you are starting a company right now, five places are open in the 5 Founders programme: twelve weeks of support, free of charge, applications until 11 December 2026. To start on your own, our diagnosis journey hands you a prompt to paste into your own AI assistant: it runs the interview and writes the report, with no sign-up and nothing collected on our side.