[twunde]

I disagree. Many companies I know started out by outsourcing development to some sort of agency and then brought some development in-house after the product is finished. Many agencies will give you a much stronger initial product, since they're used to making good v1 products.

Usually to be successful, the non-technical team must have complementary strengths, such as great domain knowledge and industry contacts, good sales ability etc. Purely technical startups are rarely successes outside of Silicon Valley, usually the tech needs to be married to a strong non-technical team that sets up sales, distribution networks, operations, etc