When and Why to Learn to Program

I taught myself the basics of rails in about 2 months using Lynda.com because after numerous failed attempts I realised I would struggle to get anything off the ground - mostly because it is extremely difficult to transfer passion to another party.

I tried what I believed was a good idea with my one and only developer friend, but he just didn't have the drive that I did, and months slipped by with little or no progress (I gave him 50% share of the company, I wasn't paying him - a mistake with hindsight).

The challenge was I couldn't outsource the build on Elance (etc) because I had no idea what to ask for - and mocked up screenshots simply don't portray a vision of where you see your product going, and I didn't have the technical nous to judge whether I would be getting good value for money.

After "learning" Rails my first creation is still going strong, it's a free site but one that has taught me so much and I'm super proud of it.

Moving forward my basic skills in Rails can mostly get me to MVP for testing my second project, and if it's successful I'll source a developer for short projects via Elance until I can afford a full time dev.

So in a nutshell, you either have to be completely cashed up, or you have to get your hands dirty to MVP status by cutting code, even if you consider yourself primarily a biz dev guy like I do. I prefer the latter solution - it's just too difficult for me to predict everything you need to build until you start building.