Split your early-stage startup into three teams:

Strategy

Development

Administration

The strategy team sets out the vision and owns the product. The idea is theirs. Then, they hand off to the development team, which is functionally subservient, and is simply responsible for building out the strategy team's vision. It's possible they're outsourced to a development firm. Meanwhile, the administration team takes care of the bills and payroll.

It doesn't work. Why not?

At first glance you'd be semi-forgiven for thinking that it should, because it more closely mirrors the structure found in larger organizations. But there are a couple of reasons why this kind of setup is almost always going to fail.

The product is the most important part of a startup.

By which I mean, the whole product: design, implementation, use and feedback, in its full context. Unless you're the mythical version of Steve Jobs, which nobody is or ever has been, and unless the sole customer of the product is you and just you, you're not going to come up with a fully-formed, perfect product idea with your own brain alone. If you're smart, you're going to know what you don't know, and seek feedback from your users and potential users.

How does that feedback loop work? It's part of the product itself. Which means that the people building the product need to be in on it. And conversely, you need to be part of the team building the product, in a very deep, real way. Maybe, as a business-orientated founder, you don't know how to code, but you'd better be prepared to get very technical, very quickly. Not having technical chops is a disadvantage, and it's not something you can outsource. If you can't script, you can probably help with wireframing and workflows, and if you can't do that ... you might want to consider a job working for a management services firm. Accenture is waiting.

The technical members of the team need to be equal stakeholders in the strategy, and the "strategy" members of your team need to be stakeholders in product development. (After all, you hired the smartest, most creative people you could find, right?) No, this isn't going to work when you've got 5,000 employees, but when there are five of you, it's the only efficient way to build a product.

So what about those administrative employees?

A startup is a scrappier kind of business, but it is a business. Everyone needs to be tied to the numbers, and just as everyone needs to be prepared to get involved in product, they need to be able to understand exactly how much money is left, where it's going to, and how their actions and technical decisions affect the bottom line. Of course, that buck ultimately stops with you - but if it's your startup, every buck ultimately stops with you. There's nothing to be gained from hiding details, or trying to protect your employees. And extra administrative staff will simply add to the burn rate. You should be doing the payroll yourself, until you get big enough to justify something else.

In other words: keep it small, keep it simple, and make your organization as flat as you possibly can. You'll need to add more structure later on, but for now, your only goals are to survive and grow. Abstraction will not help you do that.