A mission of mercy — startup starter pack

Brendan Griffen

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Feb 23, 2017 · 15 min read

Welcome to the bunker. Indie Bio.

This post is a summary of our learnings of participating in Batch 4 of Indie Bio—a biotech accelerator based in downtown San Francisco. If you’re interested in being part of this journey then head to their website to apply. You have four months to go from zero to one so you’ve got to learn quickly.

Like David and his sling, equipping yourself with the right tools early, will save you endless hours of torment down the road. I’ve put together a list of tools which have made our lives easier. It isn’t a one size fits all solution. Keep evolving.

If you’ve just started — don’t worry, I’ve broken it down into chunks. Just work your way through them one-by-one and you’ll be up and running.

Before I get to that, all of this assumes that you have incorporated your company and have the backend setup (e.g. cap table). If you want some background, here is some solid detail from Stripe. If you are coming to America from overseas, this great post by Geoff McQueen might help that process. Just ignore the specialist visa information.

Lastly, before I get started, I want to give a special thanks to Ryan Pawell of Indee who gave us some great advice leading up to and during Indie Bio. Some of what you’ll read about below was based on his recommendation.

OK, let’s dive in.

Corporate Hygiene (Bookkeeping & Finance)

1. Credit Cards — Nerdwallet will compare card options for you (with a kickback to them). After some deliberation, we found the American Express Gold Business Card is what worked best for us. No hard limit on credit. You can add employee cards at no cost. Free for the first year then $175 for subsequent years. This can be integrated with Xero when they are registered as monitoring agents. Use this as early as possible to start accruing points. We left it late and lost thousands of rewards points. Don’t do what we did — get it early. Update: We suggest upgrading to a higher tier card once you know you’re still going to be in business after Indie Bio. Always push back on annual fees. One 10 minute call a year can save you your next flight to BIO.
2. Bank Account; First Republic have been good for us. There are pros and cons for all options (we looked into at least five others in detail). FR will likely be visiting early in the program.
3. Xero — Online bookkeeping ($20/month).
4. Scrubbed — your CFO, $250/month which includes Xero subscription. You simply forward any receipts you get to certain email based on your company name and the team at Scrubbed reconciles all outstanding amounts. This has saved us hundreds of hours alone. They also generate monthly account reports which we just copied into our board pack meetings each Monday (burn rates etc. are easily known).
5. Clerky — Robo-lawyers with many common templates (e.g. NDAs, MTAs, financing documents, incorporation documents). You get $1550 credit when you sign up with First Republic bank. Verify with FR first.
6. Gusto — Online HR solution for payroll, contractors, workers compensation, benefits, payroll tax. The industry standard.
7. Capshare — cap table and various useful form templates (e.g. 409A evaluations which are $99 vs. $2-3,000 from an accountant).
8. Use Moo to get business cards and StickerMule for stickers/labels.

Managing Content

1. Use G Suite: create your company portal (emails, documents, spreadsheets, media). You are a startup so get real about using “entry level” tools — go for the pragmatic solution. You get 30GB of data and each email account costs $5/user/month. Dropbox isn’t worth it as it is really just a bit better version of Google Drive (pro-tip: Dropbox is ideal for managing code between servers and locally without Git overhead as GDrive doesn’t play that well with Linux). You need the whole ecosystem which goes with Google, not just Google Drive. These two coupons provide 20% discounts: C9UPQXM4L44KQKD, R9RP4X6HUUVGALU.
2. Use Google Drive. Once you have G Suite setup, you can now just download the Google Drive app and sign-in. Now create your company’s folder structure. This is key for staying organized. We’ve found more high-level folders is better than deep rabbit holes. Some folders might include, marketing, customers, legal, PR, HR, finances, hardware, software, data. Get everyone to sign-in so all documents are sync’d up. You should never be attaching files to emails again. Pro tip; create Google documents within Google Drive, not within docs.company.com. This is because you can’t seem to make a shared Google Doc appear in the a given shared team member’s Google Drive account. You should aim to keep cloud content anchored to organized folders on your computer and not just a growing blob in the cloud. Update (2017–04): Google is now offering Google Drive File Stream which allows much easier permissions to be set and for on-demand streaming of files (i.e. you don’t need to store them locally as the are pulled from the cloud as you ned them. You can still set folders to be stored locally). Update #2 (2017–07): Team Drive is now in production mode.
3. Zapier: Connect events in platforms across platforms. Want a text when your materials are viewed by an external party via DocSend? Want to automatically add any investor interactions added to Airtable also added to your newsletter mailing list? Want your job applicants via a company email (careers@company.com) to be added to a table in Airtable for processing? Zapier does all of this and more. Free accounts get 5 “Zaps”.
4. Add photos and videos taken with your phones to your company Google Photos. Make albums, keep it organized.
5. Use Airtable — if you want a lightweight CRM to keep track of all your interactions with customers and investors then use Airtable. It is basically a glorified spreadsheet with one key feature — pivot tables. This allows you to view trails of conversations with different people. Make one for customers, vendors, investors and conferences. I’ve put together the following example tables: 1. a customer relationship management table (CRM), 2. conferences, 3. a company task lists which helps you divide up tasks for each team member. Yes, we’ve tried Trello, Asana and more— Airtable is free and just as good in our view. 3. Keep track of recurring subscriptions with this table (e.g. G Suite, Clerky etc.). Update (07/17): As we’ve grown, we’ve moved the company task lists to Asana. Airtable is still our most used tool — from robotic liquid handling to our CRM. Update (01/19): We’ve moved to Notion, which combines Todo lists, Evernote and Airtable (they’re a startup too!).
6. Task Management —use Asana . Now there are many, many, MANY tools trying to improve your productivity and manage tasks. There is no one size fits all here. We started with an Airtable base (see above), then moved to ToDoist, then Trello (as a side study, checkout this post on where Trello falls down) and now we are on Asana. There is no single reason and I won’t dive into the comparisons now. Asana captured the best of all our previous systems with few downsides. We recommend trying all of these for an hour or two, then finding what works best for your company. Update (01/19): We’ve moved to Notion, as it combines Evernote, Airtable and documentation.
7. Use Feedly to keep up with blogs and authors. No strong feelings over what you use but this has worked for us. Setup a “Board” for your company to keep a silo of all company related news items. Use the Buffer button at the top of each post to simultaneously time posts to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn pages (it is literally two clicks). Add 14 articles on Sunday night to ensure you have an articles going out to your followers during their commutes for that week and two weekend reads. If you use Premium, you can share the Boards with the rest of your team that uses Feedly.
8. Use Pocket to save articles you found during each week which are relevant to your industry. Save them to a list (you can integrate it into Chrome and Firefox). Use this content in your newsletters to demonstrate that you’re keeping abreast of your field.
9. Use Evernote. If nothing else than a dumping ground for random links, thoughts etc. to come back to when you have more time. I personally have notebooks for each part of the company: e.g. “HR”, “PR”, “Accounts”, “Talks” as well as one for “Meetings” and a general “Cabinet” for assorted.
10. CamCard — snap a photo of your business cards and it uses OCR to scrape the info and creates a contact in your G Suite through the cloud.

Lab Management

1. Use Quartzy to manage your lab inventory. Indie Bio teams now get VIP treatment on Quartzy with a few great perks. Talk to the Indie Bio team about these deals. They still don’t have an API built yet which is a tad frustrating for internal tool building.
2. For Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), there is no single solution — it really depends on the kind of biology you’re working with. Some may suggest Benchling, but here’s my take. Unless you are developing mAbs or work primarily on bacteria and yeast (i.e. not tissue culture), Benchling may not be best value for money. Which brings me to my next point — they charge $15k/year for “startups” beyond the trial period which in my mind, is a tad off the deep end — keep in mind, that is 6% of your Indie Bio seed funds per year. You’d be surprised at the mileage you can get out of Notion and Airtable alone. Less is more. Yes, we’ve tried eLabJournal, LabGuru, Protocols.io and more.

Analytics

1. DocSend — This is single-handedly the best platform we have used. It gives you the ability to a) determine how much time people spend on each page, b) control over who is looking at your content and c) update content as you improve your messaging yet the links people have to that content remain the same. Pro tip: Get the Gmail plugin so you can create links for new accounts without having to go back to DocSend every time. Additionally customize your URL for your presenter tools so you can live present from http://docsend.com/companyname.
2. Google Analytics — for your website. Understand your traffic this obviously is particularly important for consumer facing businesses and there is a plethora of info online to this end.
3. Google Alerts — use keywords related to your industry, including your own name.

Time Management

1. Use Google Calendar (now accessible via calendar.company.com)! Create a company label with a unique color and make sure everyone has access. Additionally, create a color for each team member so their individual business commitments can be tracked so as to avoid clashes.
2. RescueTime — this might be too much over the privacy boundary but for me it has improved my productivity. It monitors what you are working on (just current active program) and puts them into categories (adjustable) of whether you’re having a productive or unproductive day. You can set time quotas for certain tasks which I’ve found useful for not letting tasks blow out.

Marketing

1. Website For Non-Tech Savvy: If none of you or your friends are tech savvy, use Squarespace or Wordpress.
2. Website For Tech Savvy: Use Dreamhost for hosting. In order to integrate your G Suite you need to update your MX records. Just login to your domain host and go to “Manage Domains” then add the records at this link.
3. Social media accounts (at least Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and AngelList).
4. Make a Buffer account and connect these platforms. Play around with Buffer. Make sure your post is reinforced with a different variations, 3 days later, 1 week later and 1 month later. Pro top: for higher traffic, release during peak social media reading times (i.e. weekends and commutes, already set as a default on Buffer). Using IFTTT I’ve set a trigger to post articles marked “Scaled Biolabs” in Feedly to our social media platforms.
5. Create a Medium account. If you want the URL blog.company.com instead of medium.com/company, then you need to do what you did to with your web hosting records but for your Medium account — i.e. add the appropriate MX records (see link). You need Medium tech help to provide you with CNAME records as well, so contact them and wait for those details.
6. Sign up for Mailchimp and send out a newsletter once a month and keep sending it out on the same date. Include a science and business update and put your top 3 highlights up front in bullet format. Nothing is more toxic than opening an email to a paragraph. Refine with the analytics Mailchimp provides. Always include a picture of something. Make it sort of informal and open, not a scientific report. Add a section about events or articles you’ve found relevant to your industry in the past month. Link to your latest blog post. Add a link to something which isn’t your industry but philosophically similar to your company’s approach. Sign up for our newsletter here! Fun fact, Mailchip has zero investors and has $500M/year in revenue.

Email

Create the following accounts (through G Suite!):

1. media@company.com — these are for media enquiries
2. mail@company.com — these are for general enquiries
3. careers@company.com — for potential jobs
4. employee1@company.com — for each employee

OK, so now you’ve got a few emails coming in. You need a system to track your interactions. Use Gmail labels.

Create labels for each part of your business (investors, customers, legal, klenty etc.). Within each of these make nested labels which allow you do know the current status of conversations. I’ve found it useful to make a label for each team member so I know who is leading each thread. Don’t go overboard on the number of labels for the sake of it. Be ruthlessly utilitarian in your approach. Less is more. Here are our simple ones for our careers email account.

Use Boomerang to send emails back to you to ensure you follow-up. Though they do promise secure servers etc. they do get access to your email so pass on this one if you aren’t comfortable.

Pro tips for Boomerang:

1. turn off “put to the top” in your Boomerang settings so you don’t duplicate emails.
2. Just use the “mark as unread” setting and use “Priority Inbox” in your Gmail settings to make sure starred and unread emails appear up the top. So if you said to someone “sure, lets re-connect in one month”, Boomerang will mark that email as unread at the specified time (one month) and priority inbox will put it to the top to make sure you don’t miss it. Then you can quickly write back “Hi, its been one month, lets meet-up”. This way, time or potential connections don’t slip through the cracks.
3. Boomerang also creates their own labels so you can see which emails are in the pipeline to be sent back to you later.

Sales

Third prize is you’re fired. ~ Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross.

You need a system. Here is one system that works for us.

1. Get a list of prospective companies you want to contact.
2. Put them into a Google Sheet (now you have that setup!).
3. Add five columns; “first name, last name, position, email, phone”.
4. Go to Upwork and search for “sales leads”.
5. Advertise for someone to find these emails. We found someone for ~$10/hr which had an overall bounce rate of 10%. They are out there.
6. Sign up for Klenty (email sales funnel platform) — connect your Gmail account and Google Sheets account. (Yes, you can also use HubSpot.)
7. In Klenty, add all those contacts you just imported from Google Sheets to a list; e.g. “cell therapy”.
8. Create a template email which is personal (use their first name and the company name). There is an art to this but the basic rule is keep things simple and always remove 30% more text after you’ve drafted it.
9. Create an account called “cold emails” inside your DocSend account and add the deck you wish to send. No more than five slides.
10. Blogs get this wrong; don’t use “top 10 things you need to know to improve your KPIs”. Use a subject line which sounds like it is coming internally; “meeting this week?”. This boosted our respond rate by 20–30%.
11. Always include an exact time and day you would like to have the meeting. It doesn’t matter if they all conflict. Re-schedule once they respond. The key is to get them to engage.
12. Click all the emails in the list and create a “mail merge”. Research suggests the best time for an email (i.e. highest response rate) is Tuesday at 10am.
13. Send them out and label them as they come back. Respond ASAP.
14. Follow-up on Friday. You can select candidates which read your email and create a slightly different message for those didn’t. Don’t resend the same message. If they didn’t get back to you it is because you don’t have something they want. They might not know you have something they need and it was lost in the message. I’m of the opinion that you can get anyone on a call with the right email message. You don’t have to always sell, but even a learning opportunity should not be overlooked.
15. For those that have looked at your deck (remember you can see this via DocSend), get into the analytics, go and find out how much time they spend on each slide. Time a friend of yours reading your slides and get feedback outside of your universe from both non-bio people and experts. We updated our deck at least twice a week based on analytics and friend feedback.
16. Don’t forget to track all conversations inside your CRM on Airtable.

You can see the fruits of this funnel labor in our Demo Day pitch.

Pro Tips — Market Research, Security, Health Care etc.

• Market Reports & Journal Access — if you come from a university, it is highly likely you still have access to the library system using your student/staff ID. These often contain a wealth of market research reports and scientific journals. Ensure you are complying with the terms and conditions.
• It is important to make sure all team members use the same platforms because it makes for sharing content a whole lot easier.
• Slack is often cited as a great tool but I’ve found for companies of a few people, it really isn’t worth it. One thing it can be used for is to get an immediate prompt on your phone when someone is looking at your decks (sometimes an email notification takes too long to see). Connect them up using If This Then That.
• Password Security: use 1Password. This creates unique passwords for every account of our business and integrates well with Chrome and Firefox. Whilst it might be a pain to migrate everything over, using it sooner rather than later will save you time in the long run. It has pros and cons but this gives us good peace of mind.
• Register domain variants surrounding your own. Just like patents, look at where you are heading and plan for it. It is only ~$4/year for most domains.
• Backup your stuff. Google Drive through G Suite takes care of some of this overhead but in general, it is good personal and business sense to backup everything. Get an external hard drive for <$100 for daily backups.
• Healthcare —company plans aren’t worthwhile for a few employees. Individuals will have to pay themselves. Go to California Covered and sign-up for healthcare ($250/person/month) and dental (~$16/month). Obviously the details depend on your circumstances. We found Zenefits isn’t worth it when you’re this early. Maybe when you’re 5+ people. Update (2018-04): We have now switched to a company plan. More on this soon.
• Register your business on Google. People often use it to navigate to Indie Bio for meetings. It also improves your overall company rankings on Google.
• Scientific papers — I used Papers in academia but for collaborative work we switched to Readcube (which is a partner). It integrates well with most browsers. It has a cloud function for you all to add to the company reading list. You can get a student license for $50. Zotero is another great option. Update: we will likely be switching to Zotero in the near future as Readcube is now~$255/year for three seats. Insane.
• Extra help will come up organically within the program (e.g. corporate council). Don’t be afraid to ask for help!
• If you need to transfer money internationally (personal use), your bank will likely take a hefty margin on any transactions. Use Transferwise, its fast and you get near market rates. That link will give you $500 in free transfers.

That’s it!

These are the “tell me what to use” tools. As with all things in life, your own homework helps too.

These tips will not be the reason your business fails or succeeds.

They will not help one bit with the quality of your product/service nor your ability to build strong relationships with people— the two things that actually matter.

My tips are about trying to make your life easier so you can focus on solving the higher-order problems of the day.

Please reach out if you have any questions. Either leave a comment below, contact me via email or on Twitter.

Hopefully, I’ll bump into you at Indie Bio soon. Good luck!

Disclaimer; some of the links above are referral links. You do get a sign-up bonus should you use them but so do we. If you’d rather not use them, then feel free to Google the companies and go in organically — no hard feelings.