You're welcome! :) Ah I see, then you're in much better shape than I thought. But still, one can never be that sure about a startup, you have to be really careful with that. Put some fake screenshots together and tell your potential customers your product is ready and ask them to buy it. If they reply "ok send me your bank account" you're good.
I say this because I've experienced it firsthand: you may find out that your assumptions are not that well-validated.
But that's just a quick tip, now back to the topic.
I don't think learning how to code is a must if you have a technical co-founder, someone that you can trust and will handle all the coding while you handle other business related issues. That usually works well.
That's what I would do in your place, since you're finding it too hard to code it yourself. In my opinion, why is it bad to "just hire" some programmers (instead of giving them/him equity and thus having a co-founder):
- Since you don't know how to code, you can't really tell if they're giving you what you paid for (is this shitty code or not?);
- Your runway will be a lot shorter since you have to spend money paying them. Also, if you're willing to invest your money in your startup, think about the fact that, for example, with $1000/month you can only hire a lesser programmer but you could pay for a badass server with huge bandwidth, etc;
- Startups are also about passion. Hired programmers wouldn't come close to the dedication needed at the early stages of a startup. Unless you were willing to spend a serious amount of cash and hire some seriously good hackers with +- $100k/year;
- And theoretically, there's nothing to stop them from "stealing" your idea;
There you go, my thoughts on the subject.