I'm doing a startup as well, and we do a fair bit of testing.
One of the keys to making that work for us is a short feedback loop. We automatically release on every commit, which means every couple of hours. Speculative features get minimally implemented; if they look good then we beef them up more. Our goal is to avoid not just the unneeded tests, but the unneeded feature code too.
I'm personally pretty happy with the testing in that we don't have to spend much time on debugging or manual testing. It's very nice to make a major change, poke at it a little bit, and then ship it with a fair bit of confidence that it will work.
One of the keys to making that work for us is a short feedback loop. We automatically release on every commit, which means every couple of hours. Speculative features get minimally implemented; if they look good then we beef them up more. Our goal is to avoid not just the unneeded tests, but the unneeded feature code too.
I'm personally pretty happy with the testing in that we don't have to spend much time on debugging or manual testing. It's very nice to make a major change, poke at it a little bit, and then ship it with a fair bit of confidence that it will work.