Notable
Team Empathy × Nico · Build Kickoff

Everything's ready

Your setup doc, answered end to end

Updated 6 August 2026 • Living document, we'll keep adding to it

Hey Nico! This is the running answer to your setup doc, and the short version is that everything on our side is done. Domain, DNS, GitHub, every account, all the API keys, and the full brand pack.

You should have invites waiting for GitHub, Cloudflare, DataForSEO, Neon and Resend, and your two API keys came through Slack as one-time links. The brand zip is attached in the channel.

It's a live page, so we'll keep it updated as things move rather than firing you a dozen Slack messages. Anything marked with you is yours to run with.

You're unblocked. Nothing on this page is waiting on us any more. The two-week clock starts whenever you're ready, and the first milestone is the source landing in the repo.
Done With you With Ben Blocking

The decisions, settled

Product nameNotable
Domainnotableaisearch.com (registered)
Business modelOption B, managed. Team Empathy creates and configures each client account and bills through our own invoicing. Public sign-up, pricing page and checkout stay switched off at launch.
Payments in-appNot for now. Leave LemonSqueezy in the codebase but disabled. No merchant of record, no tax setup, no Shopify App Store billing conflict.
Sign-inKeep both Google Auth and email magic link. Both are already built, so there's no cost to keeping the pair.
User rolesNot needed from day one under the managed model.
Task trackingJira for Notable. Team Empathy client delivery stays in our own systems.
TargetLive within two weeks of us handing over the blocking items below.
On self-service. Managed first doesn't close the door. The self-serve machinery stays in the codebase and we may switch it on later. If someone wants the platform before then, we'll onboard them and invoice directly.

1. Branding Done

The full brand pack is attached in Slack as a zip. Notable has its own identity rather than a Team Empathy reskin, so the palette is genuinely its own.

The direction is called Tide: light canvas, deep teal blocks, teal accent.

Block colour#0B3B4A — hero, CTA and footer bands, app sidebar
Accent#0E7490 — CTAs, links, key data
Light accent#7FD8EC — blocks only, see the warning below
Default themeLight everywhere, app and marketing both. The brand guide mentions a dark app scope, but ignore that for now. We're starting light across the board to keep things simple, and dark can come later as something users opt into if they want it.
FontsManrope 700/800 display · Hanken Grotesk 400/500/600 body · JetBrains Mono 400/500 labels. All Google Fonts under the OFL, so self-host those weights.
IconsLucide, 24×24, 2px rounded stroke. ISC licensed.

What's in the zip:

The one rule that catches people. The light accent #7FD8EC is block-only. It reads 7.4:1 on the block but only 1.6:1 on white, so it must never carry text, icons or borders on a light surface.

Every colour token ships with its measured contrast ratio in the comments, so you can pick confidently without re-checking accessibility as you go.

2. Domain and DNS Done Records with you

Domainnotableaisearch.com
RegistrarCloudflare Registrar, bought directly on the Team Empathy account, so no third-party registrar in the loop
DNSLive and active on Cloudflare already. Nameservers benedict.ns.cloudflare.com and lady.ns.cloudflare.com. Nothing to migrate.
Your accessInvited as an Administrator on the Cloudflare account, under your own login

The zone is already active, so you can start adding records as soon as you accept the invite. Nothing is waiting on us here.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are yours to set up, so the magic-link emails actually reach inboxes rather than spam.

3. Email Half done Last step with you

Cloudflare Email Routing, free, no mailbox to buy.

Public addresshello@notableaisearch.com
Forwards toben@teamempathy.co.nz
Done alreadyEmail Routing enabled on the zone, destination address added and verified

Could you finish this one off? You've got Cloudflare Administrator access, and honestly you'll do it faster than us since you're already in there for DNS. Three steps:

Watch the SPF collision. Cloudflare Email Routing will want to add an SPF record, and Resend will want one too when you verify the domain for outbound. A domain can only have one SPF record. Two separate ones and deliverability quietly breaks. Merge them into a single record carrying both includes rather than letting each tool add its own.

Worth being clear these are two different jobs: Cloudflare Routing handles inbound (hello@ reaching Ben), and Resend handles outbound (magic links leaving the platform). Both touch DNS on the same domain.

Bug reports and user feedback land in the same inbox for now. We'll split them out later if the volume justifies it.

4. Socials and company details With Ben

Point all the socials at Team Empathy's existing profiles for now. They're real, active and already have something on them, which beats linking to empty Notable pages. Once we've actually built an audience for Notable we'll swap them over, so just make them easy to change in one place rather than hardcoded across templates.

Company details for the footer, privacy and terms pages are coming from Ben: legal entity name, registered address, company number, the contact address for legal and privacy notices, and the copyright line.

5. GitHub Done Accept your invite

Agreed, and you were right to push for it: a GitHub organisation, not a personal account. It's created and owned by the company rather than by Ben personally, for exactly the reasons you gave.

OrganisationTeam-Empathy-NZ, owned by Team Empathy Limited
RepositoryTeam-Empathy-NZ/notable, private
Your accessAdmin on that repo, invite sent to nicolas7fernandez-lgtm

Admin rather than plain push, so you can set the repo secrets for the scheduled jobs yourself without waiting on us. Check your GitHub notifications for the invite.

Still to do as part of setup: the scheduled job currently pointing at the old product's domain needs repointing at ours.

First milestone. The first payment is triggered by the complete source landing in that repo. It's ready and waiting for you, so this is the one thing that unblocks everything else.
First milestone. The first payment is triggered by the complete source landing in that private repo. So getting the org up is the very first thing on Ben's list, and the code being in version control is the thing that unblocks everything else.

6. Accounts All created Accept your invites

All created under the Team Empathy owner account, with you invited as a named member on each. Ownership sits with the company, you get your own login, and nobody is relaying verification codes across time zones.

GitHub✅ Invited as admin on the repo, per section 5
Cloudflare✅ Invited as Administrator
DataForSEO✅ Added as a collaborator, account funded
Neon✅ You're on as Editor, which covers projects, branches and connection strings
Resend✅ Invited as Member, so you can manage emails, domains and webhooks. The notableaisearch.com domain and its SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are yours to add.
Vercel⏳ Waiting on you. The account is live but on the free Hobby plan, which doesn't allow team members at all. Pro unlocks it and we'll upgrade as soon as you confirm the account setup below.
Upstash⏳ Waiting on you. Only a Personal workspace exists, and adding people needs a Team. Happy to create one, or if you'd rather just take the two env values (UPSTASH_REDIS_REST_URL and _TOKEN) and skip console access, that works too since it's only the rate limiter.
One question before we go further. We've put everything under our teamempathyaccess account, so ownership and billing sit in one place and you get named access on each service rather than shared passwords. That felt like the right call to us, but you're the one living in these daily.

Is that setup fine with you? It applies to Vercel, Upstash, Resend and Neon. Give us a yes and we'll go ahead and upgrade Vercel to Pro and spin up the Upstash Team straight away. If you'd rather any of them were standalone Notable accounts, now is the moment to say so, while moving them is still cheap.

7. Paid API accounts Anthropic + OpenAI done Rest with Ben

These sit on Team Empathy billing with a spend cap on each, so the cost is visible and bounded.

AnthropicDone. Key notable-platform, in its own Notable workspace so spend never mixes with Team Empathy's own usage. Billing live.
OpenAIDone. Key notable-platform.
DataForSEODone. Account funded and you're added as a collaborator, so no shared password. Note the login and password are the API credential.
Gemini + PerplexityTo come, for the extra engines. Tell us if you want them from day one.
Your keys are on their way. Both keys have been sent to you directly in Slack as one-time secret links, deliberately not posted on this page. They self-destruct the moment they're opened, so open each once, save it straight into your environment, and give Ben a shout if either link is already dead so he can reissue it.

On your point about onboarding cost: agreed, and we want to watch it. Every new client fires a full research and AI visibility pass automatically, so we'll agree a per-client budget before the first real one lands rather than discovering it on an invoice.

One thing to note. Team Empathy already runs Anthropic and OpenAI keys for its own internal systems. Notable gets brand new keys with their own caps, never the existing ones. That keeps platform spend separate from ours, so we can see the true cost per client and price properly, and a runaway job on one side can never take down the other.

8. Sending credentials With you

Your rules, and we'll hold to them in both directions. Nothing sensitive through Slack or email. Either a one-time secret link, a shared password manager item, or delegated access on the account itself. Delegated access is the preference wherever the service supports it, since no secret changes hands at all.

What happens next

Done on our side:

Still coming from us, none of it blocking:

On you:

Anything unclear, just ask. A few of these are much easier to talk through than to read, so grab Ben on the weekly if it's quicker.

Let's get Notable live.
Two weeks from handover, then we start migrating the client book.
Team Empathy Limited • Auckland, New Zealand