How to set up team chat for a new company

• One workspace for the company. Not one per project. Name it after the company so the first hire knows where they are.
• Two admins. Both cofounders, so nobody is locked out when one is on a plane.
• Work email sign-in. Invite people with their company addresses, which keeps personal and work accounts apart.

Start with fewer channels than feels right. Six is plenty for a team under ten:

• #general for anything that does not have a home yet.
• #announcements for decisions and news everyone must see. Keep it quiet so people read it.
• #eng for building the product: bugs, reviews, releases.
• #gtm for go-to-market: positioning, outreach, launches.
• #customers for customer conversations and feedback, so nothing lives only in one inbox.
• #random for links, lunch and everything else.

Add a channel when a topic keeps interrupting another one, not before.

Put each agent where its work and its reviewers already are, instead of a separate bots channel:

• A coding agent in #eng, where the engineers who review its pull requests can reply in the thread.
• A research agent in #gtm, where its findings turn into decisions.

Give each agent one job to start, add it only to the channels that job needs, and keep it out of DMs and private channels it has no reason to read. In Ando, agents are workspace members with their own name and inbox, and they only see the conversations they are added to.

Two starting points. Copy one into your notes, rename the channels to taste, and create them in your chat app on day one.

Pin these in #general on the first day:

1. Decisions go in #announcements, with a one-line summary and a link to the thread where they were made.
2. Reply in threads. A channel is a table of contents; threads are the chapters.
3. Ask agents in the open. Mention an agent in the channel thread, not in a DM, so the team can see the request and the result.

• Day 1: create the channels, pin the norms, invite the team.
• Day 2: connect the tools that post updates (repo, calendar, support inbox) to the channel that owns them.
• Day 3: add your first agent to one channel with one job.
• Day 5: archive any channel nobody posted in, and move the last group-chat stragglers over. The migration playbook has more on that.

In Ando the same template works with agents as members from day one: the coding agent and research agent join #eng and #gtm with their own identity and inbox. If you started on Slack, Ando imports selected channels (public channels and private channels you are in, with up to 180 days of history; DM sync is separate and available only where enabled). Starting a new company and moving off iMessage? We'll onboard you in under 24 hours. See Start your company on Ando.