It seemed fitting to spend some time this Thanksgiving holiday to finally write a post about the launch of Alternate Allele Consulting. We officially opened doors on September 1, 2012 and haven't slowed down since. Like most small businesses, we've relied on friends, family and our extended networks to get things off the ground. I wanted to take a moment to recognize those folks now.
Alternate Allele's guiding principal is to do useful work and to do it thoughtfully and honestly. This blog reflects that mentality. We won't post unless we have something useful to say, which means we might not post that often. We hope that hearing about the decisions and people who helped us get started might help those considering a similar endeavor.
Starting a company (particularly in California) comes with a lot of paperwork and as is true in most endeavors, it helps to have a very good lawyer. We were fortunate to have the counsel of a long-time college friend Joel Westbrook, of Miles and Westbrook. We were similarly fortunate with our accountant, hiring family-friend Jim Crofoot at Crofoot Accountancy Corp to get us through the tax maze.
Curtis works his magic.
For our logo design, we used 99designs to crowd-source a design. Hasto Anggoro designed the winning logo and business cards. Keeping with our "be useful" mantra, we printed an IUPAC table on the back of our cards and Hasto made it look like art. Speaking of art, Curtis Kautzer is responsible for the awesome labware photos that you see across the site. We are to blame for any clipping and filtering of the photos - sorry Curtis.
Finally, we have to give credit to Katie Kong of Kong and Associates and Andrew Boudreau of Gentelligent - two good friends who also struck out on their own. Their sage advice and encouragement convinced us that Alternate Allele was an idea worth pursuing. Also, our thanks to 5AM Solutions where J learned the ins and outs of the consulting business. We still actively collaborate with 5AM and recommend them highly for developing rock solid applications for the life sciences.
Some of the tools we've used to launch Alternate Allele:
- Google – email, calendar, documents
- FreshBooks – invoicing and time tracking
- BitBucket – source code repository
- SquareSpace – web site hosting
- 99designs – logo design