Week one of running the business side of Done & Dustless Ltd - setting up the business.

Full disclosure, I use an small business accountant and you will hear his voice throughout this journey. He's amazing, and he helped set up and run my wife's business too. His name is Jon - details below (tell him I sent you*).

Before I even got to our own product, I had to get the actual business set up with Companies House, all the boring-but-necessary stuff. Jon did all of that.

This was my first flow mistake: I should have set up the VO first, so I could use the address at the point of company formation. The issue is that you then have to wait for the reference code before you can go in and change the address - this meant that my first bits of mail ended up with Jon and not me. And then i went to add my company address to register for other services, and because I hadn't used the VO address, I had to wait for my verification code before I could register with those services. It ended up adding an additional week to my business set up.

Tip 1: Set up your VO before you register the business so you can benefit from the start.

We are now done, registered and set up - here's the public record

My feedback on our sign up journey:

• The billing page: I added the Director's Service Address for full privacy. As you can add more than one Director you need a sub-price against the category and it looked like I was being charged twice (logically correct, visually confusing)
• Our verification flow had a few awkward steps: during sign-up you have to verify who you are - a legal requirement - and there were two moments where it wasn't super clear what to do next, and the second felt like an additional step.

All-in-all, none of it was catastrophic. But it added friction at exactly the moment I should have felt like "yes, good choice" — and instead I felt a bit like I was working it out on my own. Even these small elements can make a big difference to how you feel.

I've already briefed this into the team and it's being worked on.

Setting up a new business usually means stacking together a pile of different sign-ups — banking, registration, tools like ours, and everyone else's.

What's been the smoothest sign-up experience you've had recently, with anything?

I want to know what good actually looks like, so I've got something to hold us to.

*Accountant: Jon Vyse https://www.pearllily.co.uk/