The Basic Bitch Business Setup

THING 2: YOUR COMMAND CENTRE

Systeme.io — free

This is the big one. If you only take one thing from this entire document, let it be this.

Systeme.io is an all-in-one business platform — which sounds corporate and complicated, but what it actually means is: everything lives here. Your sales page is built here. Your digital product is delivered from here. Your email list lives here. Your automations run from here. Your checkout is here.

One login. One platform. Free.

Here's why this matters: most people starting an online business think they need to stitch together five or six different tools — a separate website builder, a separate email platform, a separate course platform, a separate checkout system. They spend weeks researching which ones are compatible, how to connect them, what happens when something breaks.

Plus, all those platforms get really pricey really fast.

You don't have to do any of that. Systeme.io does all of it, in one place, for free, and it's specifically designed for exactly what you're building.

Is it the most sophisticated platform on the market? No.

Does it matter? Also no.

The woman who made $7 million selling a single digital product with no team used a setup like this. She didn't spend six months evaluating platforms. She set up the simplest possible thing and she started selling.

Simple works. Start there.

THING 3: YOUR BUSINESS EMAIL

Zoho Mail — free

Now that you have a domain name, you can have a proper business email address.

Not yourbusiness@gmail.com. Not the one you've had since 2009 with the embarrassing username. A real, professional email address that says you@yourbusiness.com — one that tells people immediately that you are a legitimate operation and not someone who set this up on a whim last Tuesday.

(Even if you did set this up last Tuesday. That's between you and me.)

Zoho Mail is an email service that connects directly to your domain name. The setup takes about thirty minutes and mostly involves copying and pasting some technical-looking text into your domain settings — which sounds scarier than it is. Zoho walks you through it step by step, and there are tutorials on YouTube if you get stuck.

Once it's done, your business email is set up forever, for free, and you never have to think about it again.

THING 4: HOW YOU GET PAID

Stripe — free to set up

When someone buys your product, the money has to go somewhere. That somewhere is Stripe.

Stripe is a payment processor — the invisible infrastructure that sits between your buyer's credit card and your bank account.

When someone pays you, Stripe handles the transaction securely and deposits the money into your account. They charge a small percentage of each sale (around 2.9% + 30 cents in most countries) — you pay nothing upfront and nothing monthly. You only pay when you're already making money, which is the most reasonable fee structure imaginable.

Stripe is what Systeme.io connects to for your checkout. Setting up the connection between them takes about twenty minutes and mostly involves copying an API key from one place and pasting it into another. There are instructions inside Systeme.io that walk you through exactly how to do it.

Once it's set up, you never touch it again. It just works.

THING 5: HOW STRANGERS FIND YOU

Instagram — free (and you're already on it)

Here's something that might reframe how you think about social media:

You are already spending time on it. The difference between what you're doing now and what you'll do as a business owner is that some of what you post will point people toward your money machine. That's it. That's the whole strategic shift.

You do not need to become an influencer. You do not need to post your face if you don't want to. You do not need to go viral, build a massive following, or become a content machine. You need to post consistently about one specific problem for one specific type of person, and you need a link in your bio that goes somewhere useful.

These days, Instagram is primarily a marketplace, so you can think of your IG account as a shop front that leads into your online store.

Once you have your Instagram account going strong you can always expand your social media presence onto other platforms.

But to start, we are not spreading ourselves across six platforms. We are on one platform, showing up consistently, for long enough to see it work.

(Because... we're Keeping It Stupid Simple, you silly goose)

This is the basic bitch approach to social media.

One platform. One type of content. Repeated until it works.

** You can obviously start with a different social media platform if you prefer (you're a free agent!) but the reason I suggest IG is because it's the easiest to automate for free when just getting started. We want to keep your monthly overhead low until you start rolling in the dough like a basic bitch.

THING 6: SO YOU'RE NOT GLUED TO YOUR PHONE

Meta Business Suite - Free

One of the fastest ways to make running an online business feel like a full-time job is to post content manually, in real time, every single day.

We are not doing that.

Meta Suite is a cross-platfrom content management app that includes a scheduling for your Instagram and Facebook pages. You create your posts, reels, and stories in advance — maybe in one focused sitting on a Sunday afternoon, maybe whenever your brain is actually switched on and focused — and Meta posts them for you automatically at whatever time you choose.

You batch the work. Meta posts it. You go do something else.

And it's completely free.

This is not a shortcut. This is what it looks like when your business runs like a money machine instead of a constant to-do list.

THING 8: SO YOU LOOK LIKE YOU DID THIS ON PURPOSE

Canva — free plan

You need to look like a brand.

Not because aesthetics are everything — they're not — but because visual consistency signals that you're a real business that takes itself seriously. A logo, a colour palette, and two fonts used consistently across everything you create will do more for your credibility than almost anything else at this stage.

Canva is a free design tool that makes this genuinely accessible to someone with zero design experience. It has templates for everything — logos, Instagram posts, reel covers, PDF documents, sales page graphics. You'll set up a brand kit (your colours, your fonts, your logo) once, and then every piece of content you create after that pulls from it automatically so everything looks like it belongs together.

Fair warning: Canva is a rabbit hole. You will spend more time in here than you planned on day one, and you will emerge with a brand kit and an unreasonable sense of accomplishment.

Both of those things are just the way the good lord, jeebus louis, intended it. Just set a timer.