You don't need a co-founder. You need a working product by Friday. Marcus does the engineering so you can stay in the part of the job no-one else can do — talking to your first hundred customers.
Most ideas don't deserve six months of engineering. Marcus gives you the cheapest version of an honest experiment: a real product that real strangers can really use, paid for or abandoned, in days.
Wire up Stripe in a sentence, a waitlist in two, send the link to fifty people. The data will tell you what to do next.
The thing nobody can outsource is the conversation with the first hundred people who give you money. Marcus does the rest of the work so you don't have to choose between coding and selling.
When a user emails you a complaint, you reply with a fix the same hour. That's the loop that built every company you envy.
The first three engineers you hire should be solving problems Marcus can't — your unique data model, your latency target, the integration nobody else has wired up. Don't burn them on landing pages and onboarding emails.
Most of what gets built in the first year of a company is plumbing. Let Marcus do the plumbing.
A typical first week
One paragraph. The hero, the price, the promise. Marcus turns it into a working landing with checkout wired up.
Twenty open it, eight read past the fold, two click checkout, one pays. That one paying customer changes the question you're asking.
If anyone paid: keep going. If nobody did: change the headline, change the price, change the audience. Marcus rewrites all of it from one reply.
“The first version of every company I've started got a paying customer before it had a logo. Marcus is for that.”— Internal note from the team building Marcus.