Long-time reader, first-time poster.
Thanks to HN and several other forums on the web, I've cobbled together a business that makes me about $5k-7/month. I'm not seeing a whole lot of growth in demand for my product, but one of my sales tools (a twist on a common tool that I faked together in PHP despite having no engineering background) always gets a very positive response and closes me a lot of sales at prices way above typical for products like mine.
The space I'm in is a sexy, popular space. Can't say what it is, but lots of people want to work in it.
Recently I heard about a prestigious grant contest for businesses in my space and applied. To my pleasant surprise, I've recently learned I'm being awarded $100k specifically to further develop the sales tool I cooked up (sorry for the intentionally vague language) so I can offer it to other businesses in my space who sell products like the one I've been selling.
This seems like a pretty good idea. To use an obvious allusion, I've been mining gold with middling success, but while doing so, I unwittingly invented a really kickass shovel. Eventually I learned that my shovels were in fact awesome and now I've got some capital to develop and sell these shovels to other miners at scale so they can make a better go of it.
Here's my problem. To really capitalize on this windfall I need someone who can actually hack. I don't know the first thing about creating a web app that scales. Unfortunately, I live in a remote area and there aren't a lot of programmers around here. Furthermore, I've never hired a developer before so I suspect any job posting I put up would be a big turn-off to the sort of person I'd want to work with. I read all the posts on here making fun of bad job listings and they make me really paranoid.
Suggestions on how to proceed?
Edit: If anyone wants to reach out to me, you can get me at rexfaraday at gmail dot com
Since you've managed to cobble yourself together a prototype in PHP that people will actually pay for there's a good chance you can take it to the next level, albeit slowly, with a couple books in your lap and a few long days. I suggest you challenge yourself to figure out what is the next step you need help with and figure it out yourself. Unless you are looking at some very unique problem solving chances are you can do this.
Funny story: when I started coding my web app that supports myself and my family I had never created a database or re-usable objects. I ended up with huge pages of procedural PHP code and a primitive denormalized database, because I didn't really know any better. I've managed to scale this old code across two servers, and while it's pretty horrid, making changes and troubleshooting is a breeze because it's all mine.