It's pretty clear that if you want to shorten time to market, you leverage existing assets - when it's people using React or FLOSS databases, no one bats an eye, but farming out tasks here and there that aren't worth your burn rate (pay someone cheaper who can do it faster), how is that different?
When the government hires contractors they're not considered part of the government workforce (ie, civil servants).
Reminds me of people that call themselves “retired early” when they are effectively entrepreneurs with their own businesses and side hustles.
Kudos to the original poster though for making a business that they own by themselves I assume. However, taking all the credit for themselves despite using contractors to build their company is disingenuous.
The reason that "one-person company" is emphasized in the title is because people will expect to find a list of technologies that make developing and maintaining all of the tech required to run a company do-able for a single person.
Advice about which cloud services to use is exactly what I would expect to find on such a list. Hiring external developers is exactly the opposite of what I would expect to see, and kind of undermines the premise.
UI design is for an artist, not a developer. I can build whatever someone wants with the same stack that the OP is using (Django, Postgres, Lucene-ish search db, etc), but I will freely admit to people that I suck at website design in the way that they think of website design (what it looks like). Bootstrap was made for dolts like me who don't know what buttons and forms are supposed to look like.
Is it cheating to hire an artist to design the front facing site components?
I think of it this way: if I'm solo and I hire a CPA to do my taxes or a bookkeeper to balance the books, does that make me a two-person company? That doesn't feel like an accurate description from my perspective.
I ran my company as a single founder with nine contractors working from a few hours a month to maybe 15 hours a week. All little task-based projects like loading up new content from a repo or answer support emails. Technically, letter of the law, we were 10 people. But from a cost/profit perspective (which I would posit is the most important aspect) it was very much a one-person company.