I had this really great post on Hacker News forwarded my way. It was worth reprinting here so I can reference it later when I need it.
What you need on day one:
- Something which solves problems for people. I assume you’ve got this covered.
- Some way to charge people money for solving their problems. I like Paypal with e-junkie — total integration time under 2 hours. Your mileage may vary if you do subscriptions rather than one-time payments. Subscriptions scare me. Look into Spreedly.
What you may eventually want to build, buy, adapt from OSS code, etc (I have all of these in production and run a very small business):
- Analytics software. Google Analytics is an easy snap-in for 1.0.
- Conversion tracking. Again, GA for easy snap-in.
- Funnel tracking. I like Mixpanel as opposed to GA. You can find out why later.
- A CMS to publish content (for any definition of content) in a fashion which scales out of proportion to your personal time invested.
- Blogging software because every small business should have a blog. WordPress is an easy snap-in.