The best entrepreneurs, from what I have seen, are the people that want to and must be involved in all core business responsibilities. The passion and persistence required to create something demands this.
However, I believe there are exceptions to this, such as design. If you have great product vision, technical ability, understand your users and you are infinitely passionate about the product you are building, I see no problem with outsourcing (at least initially) to 99designs or similar sites.
I have done some fairly extensive work building out a retargeting platform for the BI Engineering department that I currently work in. At times, it feels very sleazy to be tracking the user behavior without their knowledge in order to show them Ads which they are more likely to click.
I think the main question is, does the retargeting deliver any value to the user besides subliminally convincing them to go back to whence they came. I think it is possible to improve a user's experience with retargeting, especially if content is involved. Sometimes people get fixated on Advertising when discussing the concept of retargeting, but it is a concept that can be leveraged in many different ways.
For instance, if a given site knows that a user has been visiting the manufacturer websites for different types of laptops in the recent past, I believe it improves the user experience to personalize the content on your site automatically with articles on the best laptop manufacturers, the top 10 laptops on the market right now, etc. This can be done through the same retargeting that is used to decide which Ad to show to a user.
In the case of advertising, if a user is being retargeted, I also believe that it is helpful to that user if the Ad they are shown involves some type of discount or special offer. Yes, the end goal is to incentivize the user even further to move from the consideration phase to the purchasing phase by clicking on the Ad, but at least they will be saving some money when purchasing something they most likely were planning on purchasing at some point in time anyways.
In general, I think the question is around the added value to the user. If seeing a relevant Ad, possibly with an additional discount or coupon, helps the user make a decision, I don't see any problem with that.
I'm working on a startup with a friend and past colleague and the domain we want is (not surprisingly) already registered. It is not a parked domain, but it is simply a graphic for some technology group with an "All rights reserved" from 2000 and a mailto link.
We emailed the owner of the domain and asked if the person would entertain offers to buy the domain and received the simple response:
"The domain is not for sale"
I'm curious, has anyone ever encountered a stonewall on a domain like this and was anyone successful prying it away from the squatters with a generous offer?
If you are squatting on a domain for over 10 years without putting it to use, isn't there always some amount of money you would sell it for?