[pg]

To make a successful web startup you have to deal with problems much harder than pedestrian ones like inventory and shipping.

Creating a successful dating site "doesn't require anything other than building a web-app" in roughly the same way that being a successful novelist doesn't require anything other than writing a novel.

[ivankirigin]

But good people can have insight into these problems. Most people probably don't have any intuition for how to partner with a manufacturing firm in China.

I agree that product design is non-trivial regardless of context - but some problems are a superset of the problems faced by web companies.