Ask HN: Should we hire a designer or try ourselves?

Hi fellows. We're on the early stages of our startup, right now with a limited amount of resources that should be spent wisely. We think that the the look and feel of a website (or everything else, for that matter) has a great impact on the user's experience and designing it is one of the most important tasks we currently have. One of us has some experience in HTML and CSS and can get more proficient in it if needed, but he is a software developer and not a designer... So we ask ourselves, if any of you ever been in that situation before, what did you do? did you try designing yourself with some templates/from scratch or hired a pro to do the work?

Thanks!