I was misspelling my own company

For the first two weeks of SocialPost.ai's existence, the Mailchimp weekly summary referred to the company as "SocialPOstAI."

Capital P. Capital O. Lowercase s. Then the rest.

I did not notice for two weeks. The first weekly summary, the second weekly summary, the billing estimate. All three documents had it spelled wrong. By me. About my own company.

I caught it sometime before the March 20 report, because that one finally said "SocialPostAI."

This is what the first month of a startup actually looks like.

The unglamorous truth
There is a version of the founder story we like to tell. The big launch. The first customer. The deck that closes the round.

The real version of the first month is this:

You discover that the email signature on the address you just paid for is wrong. The favicon on the placeholder site is still the registrar's default. Your DNS records have a typo. The display name on the SaaS tool you just bought is capitalized like a 2007 BlackBerry sent it. The Stripe account has the wrong business address. The Mailchimp footer points to the wrong city. The header image is 8 pixels off.

You spend the first month not building. You spend the first month fixing the plumbing that you set up wrong on day one because you were moving too fast to notice.

That is the job.

Why I am not embarrassed
I could pretend I caught it on day one. I did not. I caught it after twenty days of receiving emails from my own tool that misspelled my own company, addressed to me, paid for by me.

The reason I am not embarrassed: that is what every founder does, every time. The ones who pretend otherwise are the ones who spent six months perfecting the logo before activating the email account.

I would rather ship the typo and fix it in week three than wait until week thirty for the perfect version.

The contrarian read
Move fast and break things is a tech bro slogan. The actual founder reality is closer to: move fast and fix the typos in week three.

What separates the ones who make it from the ones who do not is not who avoids the mistakes. It is who notices the mistakes, fixes them quietly, and keeps going. Without making the fix a big announcement. Without sending a long apology email. Without rebuilding the whole site.

You change the display name. You re-send nothing. You move on.

What I actually decided this week (looking back)
Audit your own surfaces in week three. Every SaaS dashboard, every email signature, every favicon, every footer. Read it with the eyes of a customer who has never met you. Half of it will be wrong.
Do not announce the fixes. Just fix them. The world did not notice the typo. The world will not notice the correction either.
Use the first month for plumbing, not glamour. The visible part of the company can wait. The boring part cannot.
What I would tell a founder doing this today
Open every SaaS tool you have paid for in the last 30 days. Look at the company name field. Look at the logo upload. Look at the from-address. Look at the unsubscribe footer.

If you are doing your job right, three or four of them are wrong.

Fix them this week. Do not tell anyone. By week six it will look like you never made the mistake.

The question
What is the dumbest first-month mistake you found in your own startup? I will share mine if you share yours. Mine is on record. I cannot delete it. The receipts are in my inbox.