[jpd750]

It seems like you are writing a book about me.

On the short: I hired some contractors through elance/odesk - this was NOT the right thing to do. They lack motivation in what you're doing.

My advice: build it yourself, no matter how long it takes.

[artharrison]

Yeah, that's been my approach in the past, but I'm definitely questioning that approach right now. Founding at this stage in life is definitely more difficult. In my early twenties, I dropped out of school, working 19hrs a day and was able to produce a prototype for what would become my full-time business for the subsequent 10 years in a matter of a few months ... But with my last startup, I worked every night from about 10pm-1:30am + "nap time" on weekends, and what should have been 1-2 months of work turned into 9 - with way more compromises than there should have been. Plus, the time spent tweaking the code actually limited the time I spent on some of the critical business / positioning decisions.

(A few times I actually rented a hotel in my city just to sequester myself and jump start the dev process)

In terms of elance/odesk, yes, I thought that would be a sketchy approach. I was actually more interested in production houses (like the kinds that build full-on apps) and contracting them. I've done similar in my day job, but in that case, they weren't so much building the business for us, but just building a marketing hook or an app extension to our core offering. I'm a little more skeptical about using them to build the whole thing...

The final approach I was considering was simply hiring my first employee as a work-from-home employee/cofounder. I'm wondering if anyone has ever been in this role, how they found it and if/where things went wrong with the "non-technical" cofounder? (I'm calling myself non-technical simply because I wouldn't be playing the role of developer -- I am in fact technical ...)