[marknutter]

Learn how to develop. There's no excuse in this age not to empower yourself to participate in one of the greatest entrepreneurial opportunities in the history of business. A developer with good business sense can prototype a product and go to market with little to no cost in a very short amount of time, something that was basically impossible for most people before the internet became popular.

If you look at most of the success stories for internet startups, especially YC funded startups, the cofounders are usually both hackers. You'll have a much harder time finding a co-founder if they're doing all the work and you're handling all the marketing/business/ideas stuff.

[ericseidelman]

I agree with you marknutter... to a point.

Although I don't know how long it takes to learn programming... I'd be willing to bet it's not a quick learn. So, would it be wiser for me to find someone to assist in developing a prototype and while that is happening I study and learn some basics.

Or, is it better to delay an idea for months or more while I learn and then struggle through doing it on my own.

Personally I think it makes more sense to find help and learn at the same time. But I completely agree - I do need to learn this stuff, somehow.

[marknutter]

I'm one of these self-taught guys so my advice is of course going to be to learn it on your own. It takes about 6 months to a year to become pretty proficient in one of the popular web frameworks out there, and along the way you will meet a lot of talented developers - perhaps even future co-founders, who are going to be a lot more willing to work with a hacker/business person rather than just a business person. It's not that you need to become a rockstar developer, you just need to know what it's all about and be able to contribute (and perhaps eventually become a rockstar one day).

[Travis]

Agreed with what marknutter says. You should start learning it yourself. Start attending other meetups. Your willingness to learn will pay dividends down the road for your startup:

1) it's signaling. Tells a developer that you're serious about what youre doing, and youre going to do it. 2) it's a start. your ideas will change and coalesce more as you code it. As well developed as you think you have it, once you write code you realize you didn't account for many things. 3) You might end up being good at it, and make progress faster than you think.

Seriously, the modern web languages are pretty straightforward. My non-technical cofounder who has become an intermediate level PHP coder finds that DNS and email is much much more confusing than writing code.

[ericseidelman]

Travis, you & mark make great points.

Any insight into where to begin. With so many different programming languages (php, java, ruby, c++ yada yada yada)... where does a newbie even start?

[marknutter]

I'm a Ruby on Rails guy, and the community is really excellent, so that'd be one place to start. Ruby has a very friendly syntax, so I think it's easier for a beginner to get into. Find out if there's a local Ruby users group, or PHP or Python for that matter, and start going to the meetings. Also, buy a beginners book like Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails. That's the book I started with and if you go through the whole thing you'll have pretty much all the tools you need to build a good web app.