Every business I have set up or reorganized has needed the same small set of things before anything else could happen, and the order matters more than the choices do.
This is not the interesting part of starting a company. It determines how much friction every subsequent month contains, which is why I keep writing it down rather than assuming people know.
The domain is an asset, not a formality
Register the name you intend to keep, register it to the company rather than to whoever happened to be at a keyboard that afternoon, and record where it lives. I have been called in to untangle more businesses than I can count where the domain was in a personal account belonging to someone who left, and the recovery is always slower and more humiliating than anyone expects.
Take the obvious variants if the budget allows, but do not spend a founder’s energy on a portfolio. One name you control properly beats nine you half-own.
The free email address costs you money
A business using a generic consumer address is making a statement about its permanence, whether it means to or not. It reads as temporary, and it reads that way to precisely the people you most want to take you seriously — suppliers extending terms, corporate buyers running a procurement check, anyone deciding whether you will still exist next year.
An address at your own domain costs a few dollars a month and removes the question entirely.
The productivity stack
The realistic choice is between the two large suites, and both work. The relevant differences are collaborative editing, how much administration the thing demands of a company with no IT function, and how cleanly it handles people joining and leaving — which is the part nobody evaluates on day one and everybody deals with by year two.
I have generally landed on the lighter-touch option for small teams, mostly because simultaneous editing without version fights saves more hours per month than any feature comparison suggests. But the advice is narrower than a recommendation: pick one, put everyone on it, and don’t let a parallel set of personal accounts grow alongside it.
What comes after
Project management, accounting, customer records and the marketing stack all come next, and all of them are easier to choose once you know how the company communicates and where its documents live. Doing it the other way round—buying the exciting tools first and retrofitting the plumbing—is a common failure, and it produces a company that owns nine subscriptions and cannot find anything.