[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.