Discussion in adding a 4th partner

A lot of really good stuff here, and I agree with a lot of it.

As per core competencies of the company this is how I vision it:
Unique, simple to use website (Jon to build this)
Customer engagement via multiple platforms such as email, social (void, but not essential today)
Sales model with merchants that provides quality products (I dont care how good 1 & 2 are, sales is very important)

Not core competencies:
Finance, Accounting, Law

We could model out every bit of how much it would cost to outsource the entire project, none of us are needed, and each of the core skills can be replaced at the expense of money. However, we can't outsource a team that is completely connected, and driven towards one goal.  Totally agree that there needs to be a pool set aside for investments, future employee awards ect. But the pool doesnt need to be all that large. And we can think about voting rights on the board as 100%.  Think about this, say in 3-4 months we're on track to hit $100k in revenue in a year, I would say it's not unlikely to be able to raise cash that would give us a $2M valuation (20x revenue), and if we could show we're still growing even more. Then giving away options becomes very interesting. You offer someone options worth $50k pending the company reaches a $4M valuation and you're giving a pretty nice reward for only 1.25% of the company's equity, if the company doesnt double it costs us nothing.

Let's make sure we view the forest and not the trees here. We don't have a product, just an idea. Let's not let some possible future value of the company blind us to executing something we think has potential. I want to make sure we're as initially successful as possible, but I want to make sure everything is fair. I need some help understanding how labor demanding email marketing is other than designing a pretty email and then changing the products every day. I would assume John also has skills in taking that database of emails and slicing it different ways, find anomalies and arbitrages in the data that will help us with converting sales .