When you decide that you want to bootstrap your new technology business there are some basic things that you need. So in this video I am going to take you through very quickly the basics of how you set-up the PERFECT mini IT infrastructure that you need in your startup business.
Very quickly, you’re going to need a domain name, an email service, somewhere to keep your files, a laptop, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and a backup solution. So, let’s do it.
And I am going to do this, really, really fast – you find a summary in the description.
In terms of hardware, you will need a laptop. If you are happen to be leaving your job in order to become self-employed, one trick is to ask your employee to gift you your laptop, or sell you your work laptop. This is a good way to get a laptop either for free, or for – ideally not more than -- £200.
If you need to buy a laptop, you should budget £600+VAT. The best way I’ve found to do this is to buy a refurbished until from the Dell Outlet store. These units oftentimes are just cancelled orders, or units that have been sent out and come straight back as returns.
Details will be in the description, but you should buy a laptop with an Intel i5 processor, it MUST run Windows 11 Pro (I’ll explain why in a second), and have 16GB of RAM. It also needs to have an SSD – at least 256GB, but 512GB is fine. Oftentimes they are shipped with 8GB of RAM, and if Dell won’t upgrade it, it’s fine you can get this upgraded by your local computer repair shop for, e.g. £100.
It’s absolutely critical that your laptop is encrypted. This means that the data on the device is scrambled such that if your laptop gets stolen, the person who nicked it can’t read it. This is critical because if your laptop gets stolen and it is UNENCRYPTED, you have to report it to the ICO and you will be obliged to tell all of your customers that you lost all of your data. You don’t want this.
If you buy a Pro version of Windows, the encryption is less manageable compared to a Home version. If you buy a laptop from John Lewis, or Amazon, or Currys, that laptop will only come with Windows 11 Home. This is very murky, but Windows 11 Home devices CAN be encrypted, but in my experience it’s less headache to buy a Pro version – besides, when the business grows you will want all the laptops in your fleet running Pro versions.
In terms of antivirus, DO NOT buy “retail antivirus”, i.e. the type of antivirus sold to you at Currys/PC World. Windows already has an antivirus that is perfectly adequate to the task. Don’t be sucked in – Norton, or McAfee, or any of that stuff is not worth the money.
In terms of mobile devices, just use whatever phone you use personally. You don’t need a “special phone for work”.
The domain name for your business should be bought from GoDaddy. Do not buy any of their other email or Microsoft 365 services from here – just buy the domain name. Make sure that the password you use for GoDaddy is very long and very secure, print it out and ideally put it in a fireproof safe at home. If someone gets hold of your domain, they can steal your entire business – your domain name is LITERALLY your crown jewels.
Some new businesses feel they need to make a choice between Google Apps and Microsoft 365. For a very small business, this isn’t really a choice – in order to do commerce with the other humans, you will need Word, Excel and PowerPoint, even if you think you can get away with using Google Docs and Google Sheets.
The collective term for Google Apps and Microsoft 365 is “groupware”, and most businesses will choose one or the other to sit at the centre of their IT infrastructure. Very small businesses should always choose Microsoft 365 as their groupware solution because of this need to have the Office apps like Word and Excel. There is no point in buying two subscriptions – one with Google and one with Microsoft.
As a BUSINESS, it’s very important that you buy Business versions of the Microsoft 365 applications. I have never known any newbie to this not get confused, but then Microsoft having confusing licensing for its products is a tradition as old as the IT industry itself.
Microsoft operate two versions of Microsoft 365 – one for home, and one for business. I have a rich tradition of not giving Advice with a “capital A” around Microsoft licensing, but for commercial use, you strictly speaking need to use the business licenses. However, for a startup there is a more important thing here in that the business licenses come with an email service and a file storage service, and the home licenses do not.
In order for you to have your email come through for your business domain – e.g. “hellopatissiere.co.uk”, you need an email service. Do not UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES use the email service provided by your web hosting company. (I appreciate we haven’t spoken about web hosting yet, I’ll get to that.) These services are junk, and exist purely to add an additional revenue stream for the web hosting company.
You need your email through a “Tier 1” email provider, and there are (practically) only two Tier 1 email providers, Microsoft and Google. As you’re going to be choosing Microsoft 365 as your groupware solution, your email provider should also be Microsoft. To tie that back – that means you need a business version of Microsoft 365, not a home version because the home versions do not come with an email service.
With the business versions of Microsoft 365 you also get SharePoint and OneDrive, which is where your business will store its files.
I mentioned web hosting – this is starting to stray into marketing, but there are a bunch of ways you can do this. You can use Wix or Squarespace as a self-service website builder. WordPress is now a slightly more old-hat version of this. You can hire an agency to build you a website, but if you are a very new business I would spend the least amount possible on this until you worked out what your market access strategy will be. It’s too easy to kind of go, “I have a new business, I need a website”, when actually the website needs to fit much lower down in a more considered marketing strategy.
Anyway, don’t use your website providers email service, even if they beg.
I appreciate we’ve been through that quite quickly, but as I say there is a summary in the description to this video that acts a checklist to make sure you have got everything. If you follow my specification here, you can get decent IT infrastructure for your small business, without overspending.