Paperboy – A community of entrepreneurs sharing handy tools for startups

There are very important things at a startup (building a product people want, growth), and there are ancillary things (programming language choice, cron job management, team communication, etc). You really don't need to worry about the ancillary things until they become massive problems, and by that point you'll know they are massive problems. Otherwise, spending any time or effort on ancillary things is a waste of time and energy that should have been spent on making your product better.

Since you can't really give broad advice about how to build a great product or how to grow that product, most lists of "handy tools" are just tools which solve ancillary problems. Are these interesting tools on the list? Yes. Are some of these tools themselves great products? Yes. But, if you are trying to build a successful startup, this list of tools will serve you almost no benefit.

I, for example, would love a service that would let me create a pdf invoice with a simple PUT or POST. I don't need a payments solution, or bookkeeping software, or a recurring billing service. Stripe gives us 95% of what we need. But our European users need invoices that show what they paid, and it's a manual process for us. I've been searching and I've found a couple options but none really scratch my itch.

On the flip side, I run a SaaS business (which I added to Paperboy), and we've often heard things like I didn't know I needed your service until I discovered it.

There are a lot of great tools out there and it's discovery and curation is not solved. Look at the success of Product Hunt, for example.

Let's say every dev spends most of their time working on and talking about the problems they're solving, and then a little bit of time on the tools; because every one shares that tool discussion it seems much more common than it really is.