Understood. I guess the point I was trying to make was that if you do your key differentiator well, then the web-design, marketing, and billing will be much easier to do. It's much easier to sell a game breaker than just another thing.
OTOH, there's not much need for billing if you don't have something fantastic to sell.
My experience is that when you really focus on the one big thing all the small things get even smaller once you get around to them. Hope that helps.
EDIT: It just occured to me that pg describes this concept (What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?) much more eloquently here:
I would gently disagree, if he is running a subscription site he needs to get billing working to determine what folks will actually pay for. Having a billing system communicates a serious intent to your prospective customers that you want to provide value and are in it for the long haul.
Good point. My problem is that I find it hard to delegate (or am too stingy to spend money on services). So I've wasted endless hours on fiddling with CSS. Since I'm a very good programmer but a very bad designer, that was probably not efficient. Law of comparative advantage and all that.
You might be able to outsource more than you think. I've had to learn the hard (read: expensive) way that putting my sweat into a site is only worthwhile when the piece that I'm building is unique to the internet. Everything else has been done before, done better and is available for cheap or free.
Are you building a storefront? Shopify.com might take care of 99% of your work.
Managing invoices? Use BlinkSale.com.
Getting stuck on unending CSS issues? Use an open-source CSS framework.
I'm sure this isn't news to you but I thought you could use the reminder - I know I need it frequently. We who can do anything often try to do everything.
