The only thing is, I have no inclination in any way of coding for a job. It's not what I want to do with my life, I just need to learn it to get things started. I don't just want to be another "ideas guy" who can't build his own MVP/Beta and then ask a technical co-founder to do everything for me.
In the future however, hopefully I will be able to hire good coders and not have to do as much myself, yet still be able to understand and help them. Coding for me at the moment is just a means to an end. Which is why I really don't want to waste any time with this and am looking to professionals for help.
Are you genuinely interested in learning how to code and just don't think it would be as fulfilling as operating the business needs?
If not, that might be your issue with getting started with programming. Being an "ideas guy" who is effective at both creating products that add value for their target audience and describing your vision to others so that they can share it is just as valuable as writing code. If you are more interested in strategic vision than writing code maybe you should focus on finding someone technical to share your vision.
I 100% agree with you. If I knew someone technical that I trusted I would be all over trying to convince them to work with me. Believe me when I say I've tried, but my current location is not a good place for people with technical skills.
It's actually been quite frustrating so my next step is try to build an MVP/prototype myself which I can then hopefully use to either get into an accelerator or to show investors who have the connections I need with good technical people. Other than that I am also trying to figure out how I can get myself to SF and actually be able to go to meetups/etc.
It's not like I hate the idea of coding, like I said I'm still a techy guy, it's just more like a chore to me at the moment. Not something I really want to do but it seems like I have to. I've read so much about lone non-tech founders struggling or not getting looked at, so until I can get a partner I'm sorta stuck without many options.
In 2009 I started learning to program for an art project I wanted to get off the ground. I had taken a few courses in programming several years previous, but outside of the context of projects I cared deeply about, it didn't stick. I copy-paste-modify-hacked my way through a really terrible initial php project. The code was godawful, but I eventually got it to work.
Once I had this out of the way, it was only about 9 months before I saw my first opportunity to apply programming to an academic project. Once I had the modicum of confidence from scraping together a shitty project, I knew I could scrape together another one, and I had a small but growing sense of the sorts of things I could accomplish with code (i.e., the growing ability to see ways to use code).
About 14 months after I'd started hacking together the first project, I realized that there was another personal project I wanted to build, and that I was at least interested in doing a computational project for my fine-arts thesis. So I took up programming for a small text MUD I had been playing for a decade. The language used to program the MUD isn't really used for much beyond developing MUDs, though it is a predecessor of Pike. I spent the next year programming intensively on the game in my spare time, before I started building my thesis project in Python.
I didn't already know any Python, but after having learned one language pretty well, it was pretty easy to pick up along the way. I wasn't really planning to be a programmer; I was just a student in the arts using programming in ways that interested me.
Learning to program to build a project is good; you have a strong motivation and well-defined goal. You're inevitably going to make choices now you won't agree with in some number of months, because you're growing. If your first project is a keeper, you're probably going to end up rewriting it (or having someone else do it, if it's commercially successful) just to fix the problems early projects tend to have. This is why it isn't essential that it be in the right language or framework. Four years after I built it, I rewrote my initial project (still in PHP) to fix a lot of those issues. What took me weeks of round-the-clock hacking to get together in the first place took me a couple days of spare time to rewrite.
In the future however, hopefully I will be able to hire good coders and not have to do as much myself, yet still be able to understand and help them. Coding for me at the moment is just a means to an end. Which is why I really don't want to waste any time with this and am looking to professionals for help.