Having worked at/with multiple web/software startups there are a certain set of tools I’ve gotten used to leveraging to save time and $. Some of these tools didn’t exist even 2-3 years back, so this list might / will get stale pretty fast!

The list that follows assumes these things:

• Time is money (duh!).
• Speed is everything (at least in a startup).
• Humans are expensive, machines are cheap.
• The “cloud” is safe, and everything is going to move there. If you’re a “cloud” startup and don’t buy into it, then go live in a cave.
• Your “startup” can afford $100-200/month of costs using these online services that make your team productive.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the day, should we jump right in?

1. Google Apps – Please don’t waste time using MSFT outlook, or dreamhost, or Godaddy for your email needs. Setup a Google Apps account, it takes less than an hour (at max). You get 50 users for free, can’t beat that.Its safe, fast, Gmail rocks, Google docs works, wiki is barely usable.
2. Servers – Use Amazon EC2, Slicehost or Linode. If you’re new to server administration then stick with Slicehost or Linode.
3. Github – Source control is important. Its so important that Subversion doesn’t cut it. There I said it. Bitbucket (mercurial) would be the only other thing thats even remotely good. Trac/Assembla/running your own git/svn server etc. are all bad solutions!Notice I am not saying “git”. I am saying Github. It gives you permissions, ssh key based access, easy branching, commenting on code, reviewing merges, integration with 25 external services etc. Its a no-brainer.
4. Ticketing / issue tracking – There are many options here. On one extreme is Pivotal Tracker (a steep learning curve). In the middle are the likes of Fogbugz. On the linear/boring side are Assembla or Lighthouse app or even Basecamp todo’s!I really like Pivotal Tracker, but only if you’re a truly agile startup with realistic deadlines and goals. I find it useful even when working on a project alone (instead of in a team).
5. External Monitors etc. –  Every developer should have a dual monitor setup (minimum of 21″, ideally 24-27″), a fast machine and a chair to sit in that costs around 4-5 hours of their salary/pay-rate. Anything less than any of this doesn’t cut it and you’re pinching dollars where it matters least. Really.
6. Payment Gateways –  There are lot of (shitty) options out there. On one extreme you can go with Paypal. Thats a reasonable solution from a setup perspective. Sadly their API’s (still) suck … a lot!If you’re ok with getting your own merchant account setup etc. I highly recommend using Braintree Payment Solutions. They have amazing customer service, a well written/thought out API and an API wrapper written in most popular languages (Ruby, Java, Python, PHP etc.).
7. Online contracts/NDA’s – If you’re hiring employees, contractors and vendors you’re probably going to be signing a ton of paperwork! Do your brain a favor and use Echosign. It makes getting contracts, NDA’s, I-9 forms signed a breeze.

I’ll limit myself to these 7 things. There are other problems like invoicing (solved by Freshbooks), CRM (solved by 37Signals Highrise or Salesforce), wiki (solved by pbworks.com), sharing files (solved by Dropbox) etc. that need solving too.

But I’ll leave that an exercise for the reader. Just refer to the bullet points I mention above, and if the solution/tool you choose meets/exceeds the goals specified there then you’re good to go!

It was a long time coming! Yahoo! chose to use Flash (Flex?) to build the online version of messenger. Will I use it, probably on my personal laptop at home (one less piece of desktop software to install… phew!). Does it even come close to the Gtalk that comes integrated with Gmail (launched more than a year back)? Not for me, but I can imagine people who would want all the bells and whistles of their regular desktop messenger (fonts, text size, bold/italic etc.) to like the new Yahoo! Web Messenger. Some of my comments on this new products and ways to improve it:

History: So finally I can see my chat history. But why not give a search box right at the top instead of making me click on a link? Pretty basic interaction designer stuff I assume? Instead a web search box is provided at the top.

Cntrl-W / Cntrl-G / Cntrl-Tab: None of these nice shortcuts works. Cntrl-W should close my current chat tab, Cntrl-G should let me buzz my friends (my friends can buzz me, but my window doesn’t vibrate!) and Cntrl-Tab should let me move between chat tabs, just like I can on my Firefox (or at least Tab like the way it does in the Gmail/Gtalk)

Copying multiple lines: Doesn’t work. Only one line at a time. Thats pretty lame.

Banner ad on the right: Was it very essential to put that ugly banner ad on the right, specially when a new product like this launches? If I were the Product Manager on the web messenger team, I’d instead match (and rotate every 10 minutes or less) text ads related to my past/current chats. I’d bet this would increase CTR significantly. Irrespective its worth an experiment for sure. Simple bucket test to conduct.

Login popup: Why does a new popup window need to be opened to make my login? Its a very jarred user experience, different from every other Yahoo! property I’ve used before.

Gmail has been down for me for the last couple of hours, out here in India. Anyone else facing this downtime too? I’m getting the following message:

Temporary Error (502)
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

I wouldn’t really call more than 2 hours “temporary”. Someone missed their SLA targets!

UPDATE 1: Its weird, I get the following error now (choosing the HTML view does open up my inbox… its broken though since I have no vertical scrollbars?!?):

Loading…

This seems to be taking longer than usual.

If you are using a slow Internet connection, you can wait a bit longer for this page to finish loading, or just use basic HTML view for now.

If you are using your normal Internet connection and you usually get past this loading step without any problems, please refresh this page in your browser. If you continue to have trouble loading your account, please visit the help center for troubleshooting information.

UPDATE 2: Its finally up after a 4-5 hour outage!

UPDATE 3: Its been 5 days since I wrote this post. But as can be seen from the comments below (and the traffic I am getting to this post), people are still facing this issue with their gmail accounts (I am not). This seems to be a user specific access issue, rather than a mass outage. It might be that gmail is performing some system/software upgrades. Being patient is the only way out! I did not lose any of my emails/data, so don’t see a need to be concerned as of now.

My first post on Google Calendar improvements can be found here. In this post I focus on Gmail:

Spam Sort: Gmail spam detection is great, but I’ve had an occasional mail or two marked as spam; when they were really meant for my reading pleasure! For anyone who gets a few thousand spam messages a week (I do), its a pain to have a glance at all of them and try and make sure nothing non-spammy has gotten in. What I’m suggesting is a section within the spam label, that lists emails to me, that were on the borderline for being marked as spam. A 0-10 ranking would be even better, but I guess a binary label would be better, so as not to give the secret sauce (some advanced Bayesian Filtering) behind Gmail spam filtering.

Viewing big messages: By big I really mean long. For anyone who gets emails with thousands of lines in them (code reviews anyone?) this is a great feature. If your email is too long, Gmail gives you a link at the bottom saying “View entire message”, clicking which opens another window with the entire email contents. The problem with this is that if you want to reply to that email with inline comments, you’ve to open it its entirety, copy the email contents, paste them back in gmail and then type your reply. You of course lose all the nice indentation etc., plus this is a real pain cause the new window that was opened has a the Google logo and other HTML and selecting a few thousand lines without that is a pain! Hence I suggest having a “no clipping” option for long emails (if I’m willing for the nifty gmail AJAX to take a while loading my message… so be it!). Or possibly a simpler solution (from a development perspective) would be to have a reply option in the new window thats opened for viewing the entire message.

Attach notes to emails: I’d like the ability to write notes associated with email threads/specific emails in the thread. This would be in addition to being able to label/star messages. These notes should be part of my Gmail index and automatically appear in my Google notebook (with a special gmail label) with links back to the appropriate email thread/email in my gmail inbox. I’d say notes should be allowed on more Google apps (currently on Calendar only… but these don’t appear in notebook), hence Google notebook becoming an even more central part of my daily routine, a one stop place to see all my notes, not only ones I explicitly typed in there!

Quoted text: Gmail automatically recognizes text that has been quoted from a previous email in an email thread. This is a great feature since it saves me time, in terms of being able to see new text written by someone and not see old contents. But sometimes I’d wish all the quoted text be shown with a single click (instead of me having to click “Show quoted text” 10 times in an email). This definitely is low hanging fruit cause it would take 2 minutes from a JavaScript developer to code!