You're right. Just because it isn't the first doesn't make it right.
That being said, Disqus has been around since 2007 and after six years of building trust with businesses and the community they decided to make this change without notifying anyone.
Any "startup" that meets your criteria is not a startup, but either a) a very successful business with money to burn, or b) riding the VC train to shutdowns-ville.
Ask not what your startup can do for you, but what you can do for your startup.
P.S. Calling these "needs" makes you sound incredibly entitled
We are an early customer of Tracelytics. We are also a happy New Relic customer. They are both great tools and not necessarily an "either or" decision. New Relic gives great info about what is slow from a single app perspective...being able to trace down to the layer where the issue is.
Tracelytics, on the other hand, tracks across applications and down to the individual machine serving each part of the request. This means that I can track each individual request through multiple applications/services as the request traverses different physical machines.
This has become important as our infrastructure has grown to the point where we might have 20-30 machines in a particular layer. When an app server, or network interface, or something else unforeseen goes wonky, it is extremely challenging to determine specifically what is causing the problem and where it is. With Tracelyitics, if I go into my dashboard and see that the 500 errors are all coming from a single physical server, I can take that machine out of the loop, remove the problem from the production environment, and then troubleshoot the bad box.
It's a bit more than a "useful product" — for example an engaging game like Farmville isn't "useful" but it does quite a bit of brand building within the product. In many ways you an give software a personality (example: gamification), and those little touches might not be useful in and of themselves. A good real world example would be that the old Macs booted up with an icon of the computer with a smiley face — that wasn't useful but it was a great brand building exercise. Contrasting with that Acer did the same thing with their monitors and their logo was so ugly it made the brand cheap.
I think the product is the obvious part of brand experience and the one that most startups think is the silver bullet. It isn't...there is no silver bullet. It is about delighting people every single time they come in contact with your company.
In a B2C context, the only contact the user may have may be the product in which case focusing the brand experience around the solely around the product may make sense.
In a B2B context there are touch points such as support and customer service, billing, development, etc. Whether you know it or not, you are have the opportunity to build a relationship with that customer at every single touch point. If they have an experience that blows them away at every time they come in contact with your company...this is something that goes way beyond just having an engaging product. This is something they will want to tell others about.
Hey, I don't want to come off like I'm just shilling for my company, but what you are trying to do may possibly be more easily done with a video hosting platform with an API.
By taking this approach, you won't have to worry about tuning encodes yourself, dealing with problem videos, etc. while also getting access to many other features that the client might be interested in (playlists, analytics, video SEO, etc.).
If you want to talk sometime and discuss various options and pros and cons for each, I'd be happy to help out. You can reach me at ben -at- wistia -dot- com. I'm the VP of Engineering there.
For software products, I would recommend using Screenflow for the Mac. It is by far the easiest and most powerful of the screencasting tools. It allows you to record the screen, record the audio, and then edit the results.
All of the videos on our site (http://wistia.com) are produced using only Screenflow.
Clicktale does this ( http://www.clicktale.com/ ). They only capture a subset of the page views and are somewhat expensive. We tried it out for a month or two when we were very early on but we just weren't able to see the value at that point to justify the expense. We might try it again as we are much further along now.
We work with the Common Craft folks quite a bit. Knowing the amount of time they spend doing each video, I would advise doing a screencast rather than the live action cut-out style that they do.
For screencasts, nothing beats Screenflow. All of the videos on our site (http://wistia.com) were produced using Screenflow. It costs $99, but given that your video will be an integral part of you marketing, it is well worth it.
In terms of production, start by coming up with a script. This will possibly take longer than the actual recording and editing, but will make a major difference in terms of the quality of your video. Keep it short and punchy...people won't watch things they aren't interested in.
That being said, Disqus has been around since 2007 and after six years of building trust with businesses and the community they decided to make this change without notifying anyone.