[devrandomguy]

Might be worth checking out the various issue-bounty setups, like Bountysource. Focus on documenting the design of your MVP in a public Git repo, then file issues with a bounty on them to get tasks done. As soon as you have something working, you can "Show HN" for a blast of dev publicity. If you are looking for small scale funding, without getting into a VC situation, then you could encourage supporters / users to contribute on issues that they personally care about.

This sort of requires you to open-source your project, but maybe you can isolate the secret sauce in one tiny little backend service? Or, maybe the true value of your startup isn't in the source code, but rather in relationships with / between users, in which case you don't really need to worry about someone scooping your work with a simple `git clone`.