

Ask HN: Startups, what are your most pressing needs? - hatter10_6

I am working on a startup, and it seems that I could use all kinds of help, e.g. honest feedback, introductions, testings, beta testers, and the list goes on.<p>I know there are services that specifically target these needs, but I wonder if there are more opportunities out there.<p>So, startups, what are some of your frequently occurring needs, and how do you usually solve them?
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mindcrime
Time. I saw something recently that made the point that "founder bandwidth is
the most precious resource at startups," and I believe it. There's a nearly
infinite amount of work to be done, and a fairly limited amount of bandwidth
to go around between the founders, as we're doing the self-funded / bootstrap
/ still-working-day-jobs route right now.

That said, beyond time, then feedback and introductions are definitely huge.
Of course that all ties together, as the time I spend networking trying to
meet people I need to build relationships with, is time I'm not writing code,
and vice-versa. It's a non-stop battle of priorities and a never-ending stream
of trade-offs and judgment calls.

 _I know there are services that specifically target these needs, but I wonder
if there are more opportunities out there._

Not sure... I'd guess there are quite a few free/low-cost SaaS apps that many
(most?) startups could gain some value from using. Steve Blank keeps a list
like that on his blog somewhere, FWIW.

Personally, something I took a flyer on recently was building a simple web-
based tool for managing competitive intelligence. We'll be entering an
established market when we ship, and there are plenty of competitors out
there. Of course we think we have a unique spin that will give us an
advantage, but I've just recently decide to sit down and do some serious
competitive analysis and start paying a little bit of attention to "the other
guys." I needed a way to keep all that data organized, so I built a one-off
tool for it. I'm actually toying with making it open-source and/or launching
it as it's own SaaS offering, but I want to play with it a little more first,
and maybe do a "Ask HN" to see if anybody is interested in that sort of thing.

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Smerity
Focus. Both from my own ventures now and from start-ups I've worked with
previously in the past, I see focus as one of the largest needs of a start-up.

Without focus, successful start-ups move on to too many fields, dividing their
resources amongst too many projects. Early start-ups can distract themselves
by losing sight of the primary issue they're aiming to solve and losing
traction on those core concepts can be a death knell.

Sadly there's no easy way to outsource focus :)

~~~
hatter10_6
But there are ways to outsource the chores, right? What would be some of the
chores that you could potentially outsource? I'd say this would count as a
need.

~~~
steventruong
Most startups in the earliest stages can't afford to outsource anything.

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balajiviswanath
There are three essential things that are important in running a startup:
Focus, Focus and Focus. ;-)

At a startup, the entrepreneurs could do build a million different things and
I found it sometimes hard to curtail both my ideas and those of the other
founders. For instance, in one of the months we toyed with 20 different
technologies as each day some developer would come and say "why not we use
platform Y & API from X to do Z?" then everybody would just start chasing all
the APIs and build a simple prototype (that will get forgotten after the next
day's idea). That is an extreme case, but you get the point.

Once you have focus and determination, the rest usually falls into place.

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davyjones
Getting the word out on my product. Working on adding some killer features to
take out some established players in that feature market.

Hopefully, it will go viral within the niche community.

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ronik
Distribution at a low cost.

------
robot
users. product/market fit.

~~~
rosstamicah
Users here too.

