You can hire business and marketing and PR people the same way he can hire programmers, administrators and so forth. The difference is, even if you don't hire those people you can still have a viable product with lots of users. He can't have anything without paying for it and keeping fingers crossed.
In any case, I hope you guys work something mutually beneficial out.
Sure, that's sometimes true. But it's definitely not universally true. Even for a high tech "internet company."
Craigslist didn't succeed because Craig was such a good developer. Any clown with a PHP book could have coded the first version of that site. (In fact, I think it was written for free by volunteers)
Craig was a developer. Whether he was good or not is irrelevant, but he knew enough to write a prototype. He had (and arguably still has) little business skills. If he hadn't been a developer, there would be no Craigslist.
The same applies to Markus Frind, the google boys, and the majority of famous tech startups. Hell, even in Sun's case, Vinod (MBA) approached Andy (PhD) wanting to grow an existing, already-profitable business.
> Only on HN would people argue that it's more important for a small business owner to know how to write code than to know business.
If the small business is a bootstrapping internet startup, then yes we'd rather know how to code.
How exactly would you have a viable product with lots of users without marketing?
I have seen bad products become phenomenally successful with good marketing, but I can't think of any app, no matter how good it is, succeed without marketing.
Or do you think your marketing plan consisting of "word of mouth" will work?
Seriously, usually I love the hacker mindset on HN, but comments like this make me cringe.
What I meant is that learning how to email bloggers, use adwords, optimize for SEO and create funnels, or the B&M version of the above, is about 500x easier than being technically competent.
I have a tech background. I've built sites that achieved rapid growth. No, it didn't happen magically on its own. Yes, I eventually learned about A/B testing and conversion. But if life was an RPG, I'd load my character up on the technical mastery, knowing how much harder that is to build up relative to business skills.
No disrespect, but I think the nuances/details of marketing successfully are far more difficult to master than learning a programming language. Not to mention that there's a lot more competent programmers than competent marketers.