Would love to see the "inbox" feature of reddit, so I can see when one of my comments has been replied to.

Or simply an email or RSS notification... you wanted to spark the discussion, right? So give me a way of knowing if I've sparked anything!

Also, it'd be nice to see on the list pages something along the lines of "N comments (most recent M |minutes|hours|days ago)"

Another important thing to realise venture capital is only appropriate at a certain lifestage of a company where the founders are keen to grow at extrodinary rates in a short time. Not having expectations of growing a startup to Facebook, Google or Bebo size you are going to be wasting a VC's time. This is no mean feat - you have to be mentally prepared to grow and scale a company like mad and similarly your startup must have proved its case for being able to scale.

Whats the best way to know if your startup is ready? build a prototype, get some traction, look at the numbers, measure, experiment then measure again. If you truly are going to scale (and you are growing at 1% a day) and you've experimented enough that you've found a suitable path you'll end up needing money of the VC scale.

It doesn't cost much to sit around and build something. Go and test it - figure out what people want first - change your assumptions and above all PROVE that if you scaled your site it'd be worth it for investors. You don't need VC yet to start something and test it out - If it comes to that point well thats something to think about.

I'm reminded of the story Michael Birch of Bebo tells - they built something, put it out there off the traffic of birthday alarm and experimented with features. Every time a feature added to the growth of the site and got a noticeable increase in users they kept it and tried something else which also contributed to the growth. By experimenting, measuring and then iterating for things which correlated for growth they ended up on the right path. When they had 5 million users and were growing month on month they had the numbers to prove themselves. They took $15m from Benchmark capital. The bottom line - you'll know when you are ready: just go prove the numbers.

Search - and it needs to have the reddit feature where if you search for an URL, you get the submit page when nothing was found. That's how I submit all my links in reddit. This site doesn't have that, so I wonder if I'm wasting my time when thinking up or typing in a title for a submission - since it may already have been submitted.

Also, I need the "save link" feature.

Good site so far.

You should be able to vote down bad stories. I thought this wouldn't be needed but we're starting to get off-topic submissions, so we need to be able to bury them.

8.3% of what they did in 2005: wow.

It doesn't even really have to be AJAX. You could solve the problem just by setting up an #anchor so that when the screen reloads after voting, it just the user back to where they left off.

Trusted human editors.

sure

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

Tags.

It's one of the features of Slashdot that I like. The flip side of tags is that they make search a lot easier to implement.