"Cheap, Fast, Good. Choose two" is a pretty true statement. I did Rails contracting for several years for various startups and the biggest mistake I've seen ov

"Cheap, Fast, Good. Choose two" is a pretty true statement. I did Rails contracting for several years for various startups and the biggest mistake I've seen over and over is startups relying on contractors solely for development. A contractor has no emotional investment in your product. Your huge downtime emergency is just another task to deal with for them. The bug that has your customers pissed off is just another task for them. And if you don't have any developer experience yourself you have no idea when they are lying to you or giving you the run around. Or how to even evaluate whether their rate of work is reasonable. You don't want to put the livelihood of your company in someone's hands who the company succeeding or failing makes little difference too. There are always more contracts in the sea for them. And as div suggested picking up RoR or Django yourself is probably a good route to go. It will take longer than outsourcing it but you'll end up in a much more stable place. The other route I would suggest would be a technical founder. But that's a hard thing to find. Also a great bonus if you go the learn it yourself route and the startup ends up failing, you've learned a very valuable life skill (programming). And a job skill (RoR) that pays quite well.