What are all the things a startup web service needs?

So you focus on getting your “don’t worry be crappy” code together to bootstrap your startup and get something the real world can play with. All the user-oriented features you need are there for 1.0.

But what about the rest? What about the things you need to make the service tick, to keep in touch with the users etc? These things are really important, as you can bet things are not going to go smoothly all the time, especially at the beginning.

We’re just going through this phase – all the basic 1.0 coding is near completion, and now we need to make sure we don’t miss out any major “duh” features we need to keep things going.

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following:

• Effective web stats so you can see how people are using the site
• Database backup policy and off-site backup of your users’ data
• A mechanism to easily send downtime/update/marketing emails to all your registered users
• The ability to add a banner on the site to indicate scheduled downtime
• Terms of use
• A predefined plan of action to take if the servers are swamped
• A way to update key content without a redeploy (= scheduled downtime!)
• Basic reporting to see how many new users you are getting, and what they are doing – over and above webstats, a summary of your domain objects etc.
• Make sure load/health reporting is set up and working in advance
• Detailed functional tests and/or manual test plans ready and in place. You tested 1.0 right?

Do you have anything to add to this?

UPDATE: commenters have also very wisely suggested -

• Screencast showing users how to use the service
• Issue tracker for support
• Privacy policy / data protection policy