It depends how serious you are about this venture.

I think it's pretty important to at least have a technical co-founder if you want to start a startup. Otherwise, you're starting a business in a field where you have no domain knowledge.

If technology won't be your competitive advantage, what will it be?

Thanks for your response.

This venture is my life until it fails which hopefully won't be the case. However, I know the statistics of success are not on my side especially if I don't launch with the right ingredients.

The idea is a tried one, but there is no one successful platform that has done it right in my opinion. It is a "stuff to do" in a particular location type of thing but with a niche market and a different slant taken on. It won't be messy, and it will basically bring the characteristics and culture of certain areas to virtual life. Listed businesses will pay.

I must update the site daily (having a CMS built for me to edit), but it will be expanding to other areas at a rapid rate. This is the reason I feel the need to bring on a programmer and give that person stock in the company. I just don't know exactly what I am looking for in that person.

If you're truly passionate I think you could devote say 2-3 weeks completely to learning as much as you can about the technology that you'd potentially use.

You do not have to be technical in the sense of writing code. But knowing what those programmers are doing is invaluable.

Tons of great start up founders completely suck at coding, but they know what their people are doing, they can tell them what to do, what to fix, how to fix it. Think an army general. He might not be a good soldier, but he knows what soldiers need to do.

The only other route is to have a technical co-founder that you ABSOLUTELY trust. Otherwise you're in for a risky ride. Not very different from any industry to be honest.

I have a great deal of admiration for the coders and designers I have already worked with and many of the people on this site, simply because I don't get exposure to that level of intelligence and passion on an everyday basis where I live currently.

I would like to take your advice, and devote the next month to learning as much as possible. Can you point me in a direction to get started? I have done a good bit of sponge learning by reading HN daily, but I want to get into the details. What resources do you recommend?

It's so hard to answer really. All people have such differing levels on knowledge and most of the time it's a crazy mix.

If you know nothing about coding you might want to at least learn how to read most basic code, just look up introductions to some programming languages, you'll quickly figure out how it all works on an intuitive level.

Then you could actually go straight ahead and start thinking about your start-up. Based on features you'll have identify technologies you'll need to use and then try to find out how to achieve that functionality using those technologies. You'll need to be really comfortable with Google. Always look everything up. If getting through one tutorial requires you to open 20 others - so be it.

Too many people are looking for complete introductory texts that will take you through the whole process step by step. It just doesn't work that way. Books are very tempting for that reason. You can just pick it up and read the whole thing, but well, it feels easy for a reason.

I'm not sure how you expect anyone here to answer that question... We know nothing about you or your idea but you want us to tell you how likely it is you'll have the next big thing???

I will say that if you don't know anything about the technology behind your product (providing technology is your main product and not in a supporting role) you're at a HUGE disadvantage.

Hackers for hire are (generally) much more hit-or-miss as far as capability (dedication really) goes. This is kind of a worse-case, but just think of all the government websites out there that are nearly unusable. It's because the coders have no stake and just put in their 8 hours. Stake in the outcome is what makes a person create something great. For example, I'm typing this at my day job instead of working on my projects, but over the weekend I worked like a machine for about 12 hours without a break on my current venture. And that's because I had other obligations and couldn't afford to put in more time.

I recommend bringing in a tech guy and giving him something to own.

Very good point, thanks