Starting a company

With no company yet, Ergon asks What do you do? and offers a small company for each answer, or Start from scratch. Each company is a standing team: a mission, a head and two or three seats under it, and duties it keeps doing.

You do	Company	Seats	Needs
Developer	Engineering team	Tech Lead, Engineer, Reviewer, QA	A linked Git project
Office and operations	Executive office	Chief of Staff, Inbox Manager, Scheduler, Report Writer	Gmail, Google Calendar
Data and analysis	Analytics team	Lead Analyst, Data Engineer, Reporting Analyst	A linked folder or Google Sheets
Founder or small business	Back office	Operations Lead, Support Agent, Finance Clerk, Sales Researcher	Gmail
Marketing and content	Marketing team	Head of Marketing, Content Writer, Social Manager, Market Researcher	Nothing to connect
Research	Research lab	Research Director, Researcher, Editor	Nothing to connect

A company’s card lists its duties with how often each comes round (every 15 minutes, hourly, daily, weekly, or when assigned) and shows each connector it needs as connected, or Connect Gmail, which opens that app in the Marketplace. A duty that needs a connector waits until it is connected.

Anything a company writes for other people is drafted for you. Every seat is told never to send, post, reply or pay on its own. Calls to Gmail or Google Calendar that only read run on their own. Anything that sends, drafts, replies, labels, deletes or changes the calendar asks you in the Inbox first.

Choosing a company, or starting from scratch, walks the same three steps. Each one is filled in from the company you chose, everything stays editable, and Back or the step names at the top move between them without losing anything.

1. Company. Its name, issue key, mission as the goal, and your default Profile. From scratch, a few example goals sit above the Goal field. A good goal names an outcome, its scope and how you will know it is done; “make the project better” is too vague to steer agents.

2. Team. One card per agent. Each card shows:

   • its name and title;
   • who it reports to;
   • its job;
   • its duties and how often it wakes;
   • its Specialist;
   • a monthly budget;
   • its model.

   Models come only from the company’s Profile. The lead and engineers start on the Profile’s strongest model and routine triage on its lightest. You can pick another; changing the Profile on step 1 picks again, but keeps your own choices where the new Profile still has them. Remove any card but the lead’s, or Add agent. A removed agent’s duties pass to the lead. From scratch, the team starts with just a CEO.

3. First work. The project it works in, each standing duty and who keeps it, the first issue and who it goes to, and each connector the company needs, with Connect Gmail where it is not connected yet.

Create company makes the company and hires every agent at once, as hiring from the Org page does. The lead reports to you and the rest report to the lead. It then links the project, assigns the first issue and opens the Dashboard. Its first-steps list already shows those as done, so what is left is answering the first item in the Inbox.