Receiving Tutoring on a For-Profit Project

[bmare]

I'm working on a small SaaS site, both as an earnest attempt to create some income for myself and as an attempt to teach myself programming. At it's core it involves scraping data from various places on the web, combining it, cleaning it, and laying it out in a useful way. I have made progress on my own, but I know I would make more progress if I had someone with experience helping me out. I don't have the capital to hire someone to do it, nor do I want to just hire someone. The point is that even if this business doesn't succeed, I will come away with a lot more knowledge on web development, site administration, and scraping and cleaning data. As an alternative to hiring someone to build the site, I'm wondering about hiring a tutor to help me move forward faster. It seems to me that there would be ethical and business problems that arise from this. Wouldn't my tutor in a way be an employee? How could I protect the business idea while getting help from the tutor? I suppose one alternative would be signing a non-disclosure agreement and offering a certain amount of equity or revenue sharing. I am not out here to exploit someone else's work and pass it off as my own. I want to build the service, run it, and maintain it, but I know that I would benefit from having more experienced eyes guiding me in my work. I'm hoping someone on here could offer some advice, ideas, or alternatives.