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

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

Distribution at a low cost.

users. product/market fit.