Technical debt pain points are great areas for startups to tackle IMHO.
I'm working on a large upgrade project for custom messaging workflow, developed ad hoc during the past six years, without tests and specs.
If a startup offered developer tools to help with this, we'd pay many thousands of dollars.
Here are areas where I'd pay money right now-- because right now I'm essentially writing simple tooling for my team, and it would be better, cheaper, and faster to buy professionally-developed tools:
* Replatform from one MVC framework to another. For example from TurboGears to Rails.
* Refactor unchecked exceptions to explicit error handling of return codes, for example from Java to Go.
* Some kind of visualization that highlights the business value of various code paths, for example to discover the code paths that my highest-value users are taking.
Perhaps these kinds of tools exist already-- if you know of them, I'd be very happy to know more.
