A sequenced, operator-grade checklist for going from idea to first hire without leaving compliance, accounting, or IP loose ends.
Most founders set up their company in the wrong order. They buy a domain before they have an EIN, sign up for Stripe before they have a bank account, and discover six months later that their cofounder never signed an IP assignment. Then they try to raise, and a lawyer charges them $8,000 to clean it up. This checklist is the order things actually need to happen, with rough timing for each, so you can ship the operational side of the company at the same speed you ship the product.
Week 1: Legal entity and identity
Nothing else works until the entity exists. You need a corporation before you can open a bank account, sign contracts, or assign IP to anything other than yourself personally.
1. Incorporate as a Delaware C-corp
If you intend to raise venture capital in the US, the answer is Delaware C-corp. Not LLC. Not S-corp. Not your home state. Use Stripe Atlas ($500), Clerky (~$425 plus state fees), or Capbase (~$99/mo with formation included). Expect 2 to 5 business days for the Certificate of Incorporation to come back from Delaware.
2. Get your EIN
The EIN (Employer Identification Number) is your federal tax ID. You apply through the IRS, and if you have a US Social Security Number it takes about 15 minutes online. If you're a non-resident founder, the wait is 4 to 8 weeks via fax or mail unless your incorporation service expedites it. Without an EIN, no bank will open an account.
3. Bylaws, board consent, stock issuance
Issue founder stock immediately, not three months later. The IRS Section 83(b) election has a hard 30-day deadline from the date of stock issuance, and missing it can cost you hundreds of thousands in tax later if your shares are subject to vesting. File the 83(b) by certified mail, save the return receipt, and keep a scanned copy in your data room.
Week 1 to 2: Banking and money movement
Once the EIN clears, open the bank account same-day if possible. Funds sitting in a personal account create messy bookkeeping and pierce the corporate veil.
4. Business bank account
Mercury and Brex are the two defaults for venture-backed startups. Mercury is better if you want a clean checking experience and FDIC insurance through partner banks. Brex is better if you want corporate cards with higher limits and a points program. Both onboard in under an hour if your incorporation paperwork is in order. Avoid Chase, Wells Fargo, and BoA at this stage, branch banks add friction without adding value for a pre-revenue startup.
5. Payment processor
Stripe for almost everyone. If you're B2B SaaS, also enable Stripe Tax to handle sales tax nexus automatically. Set up the Stripe account under the corporate EIN, not your personal SSN. Stripe Atlas users get this connected automatically; everyone else does it manually after Stripe verifies the entity.
6. Accounting software, day one
QuickBooks Online or Xero. Connect both your bank and Stripe via direct feeds. The wrong move is waiting until you have "real" transactions, every $40 software subscription you expense in month one is a tax-deductible expense, and reconstructing nine months of receipts later costs more than just doing it now. Budget 30 minutes a week for reconciliation, or hire a bookkeeper at $250 to $400/month from month one.
Week 2: Domain, email, and digital identity
7. Domain
Buy your .com through Cloudflare Registrar, they sell at wholesale cost (no markup) and give you DNS management for free. If your .com is taken, .ai or .co are acceptable for tech startups, but never settle for a .net or hyphenated workaround unless you're certain you'll rebrand by Series A.
8. Email and productivity
Google Workspace at $7/user/month for Business Starter. Set up MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records the day you point email, unauthenticated email goes to spam in 2026, full stop. Create role-based aliases (founders@, hello@, billing@, security@) instead of personal addresses for anything customer-facing.
9. Hosting and infrastructure
For most early-stage SaaS: Vercel or Netlify for frontend, Railway or Fly.io for backend services, and Supabase or Neon for the database. Avoid AWS at this stage unless you have a specific reason, the credits are nice, but the operational complexity is a tax on a two-person team. You can migrate to AWS or GCP at Series A.
Week 2 to 3: Operational tooling
10. Project management and docs
Pick one and stick with it: Linear for engineering tickets, Notion for docs, Slack for chat. Avoid Jira at this stage. The whole stack should cost under $50/month for a 2 to 5 person team.
11. Password manager, non-negotiable
1Password Business or Bitwarden Teams. Every shared credential, Stripe, AWS, GitHub, domain registrar, goes in the vault from day one. The most common compliance failure during a SOC 2 audit is "we shared the AWS root password in Slack two years ago." Don't be that founder.
12. Code repository and version control
GitHub Organization (not personal account). Enable branch protection on main, require pull request reviews even for solo founders (force a 24-hour cooling-off period on your own merges), and turn on Dependabot. The free tier is enough until ~$25/user/month at Team for SAML SSO, which most startups don't need until 10+ engineers.
Skip the checklist entirely.
traztech Launch sets up every single line item above, incorporation, EIN, banking, payments, hosting, email, accounting, the whole stack, through our affiliate directory. Vendors pay us, so it's free for accepted founders. Ship product instead of filing paperwork.
See traztech Launch →Week 3 to 4: Contracts and IP
13. Founders' agreement and IP assignment
Every cofounder needs to sign a Confidential Information and Invention Assignment Agreement (CIIAA). Without it, code your cofounder wrote before incorporation arguably belongs to them, not the company. This is the single most common diligence kill in seed rounds. Stripe Atlas and Clerky include a CIIAA template; if you formed elsewhere, get one from a Y Combinator SAFE-equivalent template or a $500 lawyer review.
14. Contractor and employee agreements
Even your first $500/month contractor signs an MSA, an SOW, and an IP assignment. Use Deel, Remote, or Rippling for international contractors so you're not on the hook for misclassification. For US-based 1099s, a Bonsai or Notion template is fine; for full-time employees later, escalate to Gusto or Rippling for proper compliance.
15. Customer-facing legal
Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, DPA (Data Processing Agreement). Don't copy from a competitor, Termageddon, Iubenda, or Termly generate compliant docs for $10 to $40/month and update them when laws change. If you're handling EU or California data, you need GDPR/CCPA-compliant disclosures from the first paying customer.
Before first hire: Compliance, payroll, insurance
16. Workers' comp, EPLI, and general liability insurance
You can't legally have a W-2 employee in most states without workers' comp. Vouch and Embroker quote startup-specific policies in 10 minutes. Budget $1,500 to $4,000/year for a 1 to 5 person tech startup. Add Directors and Officers (D&O) insurance once you have a board (i.e., after your first priced round), about $3,000 to $8,000/year.
17. Payroll provider
Gusto for US-only teams under 25 people. Rippling if you'll have international or you want HR/IT integration from day one. Deel if you're hiring abroad first. Set up state tax registrations in every state where you have an employee, this is a hidden landmine. Each state takes 2 to 6 weeks to register, so do this before the first hire's start date, not after.
18. Observability and incident response
Sentry for error tracking, BetterStack or Pingdom for uptime, and a documented incident response plan with on-call rotation in PagerDuty or Better Uptime. The "we'll set this up later" approach means your first production outage is also your first time figuring out who pages whom.
19. Cap table software
Carta or Pulley. Free at the formation stage; you start paying when you issue option grants or close a priced round. The reason to set this up early: the day a VC asks for your cap table during diligence, you want to send a Carta share link, not a panicked spreadsheet you're reconciling against your stock ledger.
20. Data room
One Notion page or Google Drive folder with: Certificate of Incorporation, Bylaws, EIN letter, 83(b) receipts, all signed CIIAAs, founders' agreement, cap table, financials (P&L, balance sheet), and current customer list. Update it monthly. When a VC asks for diligence, you send one link, not 14 emails.
The bottom line
Going from incorporation to first hire takes 4 to 8 weeks if you do it sequentially and know what you're doing. Most founders take 4 to 8 months and miss two or three steps that bite them at the seed round. The 20-item checklist above is the minimum operational stack to be a real company that a VC will write a check to. None of it is glamorous, but skipping any of it costs more later than doing it now.
Want help with all of this?
traztech Launch is a free, white-glove setup program that handles every item on this checklist, incorporation, banking, payroll, insurance, observability, the works. Vendors in our affiliate directory pay us, so accepted pre-seed and seed Delaware C-corps pay nothing.
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