[danielrhodes]

There's a lot of nuance to getting partnerships and getting distribution on your product. It's a different mindset that needs to be learned. In most cases, early-stage web startups should have at least one person who is capable of getting in the door (at minimum, an engineering person who can also do biz dev). It is rarely the case that you just make something and let the orders stream in. People don't know about the product yet and there's a lot of work involved in convincing them that you are capable of actually producing the device at scale or even at all. Just off the top of my head, if you see things like Twitter using bit.ly instead of tinyurl like what happened earlier this year, that wasn't a technical decision, that was done through business development and leverage.

It really depends on what it is you are producing, but in this particular case of the JooJoo/Crunchpad/whatever marketing and sales is probably part of the fundamental strategy. If a lot of time and money has been invested in something, it would be a major oversight to not have somebody who can specialize in distribution/marketing.