Beautifully put. The people who build successful startups are the people who build stuff.
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.
> 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.
This is also part of a good product. To "worry" about these things doesn't mean you have to deal with right now, but you have to aware these, otherwise you might shoot yourself on foot. E.g. picking a programming language determines the architectural style, picking a continuous delivery tool, PaaS vs IaaS decision will determinate the devops style, etc. Maybe it not significantly right now but also modifies the people you will be able to hire.
I think you're discounting the overhead of finding tools to use, as well as the benefit of discovering tools that could reduce the amount of time you have to spend on things that, ultimately, don't contribute to building a successful project and organization.
It's like programming, in a way. If you're putting together a SaaS app, don't roll your own web framework if you don't need to: use Express or Rails.
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.