Non-programmer founders: learn code first, find tech co-founder(s) after?
I've been thinking for a while on the best way to bring a web start-up idea to life (or at least to prototype stage) and, being a non-programmer myself, I spent the past couple weeks reading up on a lot of articles, blogs and discussions about finding tech cofounders.

Through these, I noticed that most of the non-programming/business/MBA types seem to have the lowest success rate as original founders (unless they already had tech friends/acquaintances) simply because they depend so much on finding a tech cofounder to build it first, and that's assuming they can persuade prospective tech cofounders to drop their own ideas to join theirs.

Another common method I heard of was to pay a team of developers to build the idea, but I haven't heard much success stories from these kinds either. There's networking events to match people up as well, but I might be limited to networking events at my university since I'm still a student with little formal experiences; and since it's winter break for us now, I'll have to wait until spring semester for the networking events anyway.

Overall, it seems that finding a good tech cofounder can take a good while, if at all. Therefore, I decided to learn coding first to at least build a rough prototype, which I could hopefully use to pitch to prospective cofounders along the way. One reason is so that I could at least be learning and working on something in case I don't find someone until six months later. The second reason is because, since I come from a business and psychology background, I felt that it'd be useful to better understand tech business from the programmers' perspective. And lastly, in some ways, it's also about the credibility of how seriously I want to pursue my idea, because it seems like most of the business types with just ideas but no technical understanding are taken the least seriously.

I'm aware that it seems like I'm going the long way (though I actually think I'm taking the short route), but I'm pretty patient when it comes to long-term benefits, I have a strong habit of self-learning things, and I'm pretty confident I have time because I doubt many, if any, competitors could work on this idea since it draws heavily on a field-specific knowledge (psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, etc). Or perhaps most of all, I just plain don't want to let the idea die without it ever being given a chance just because I don't have a tech cofounder yet. (And admittedly, I want to do it because if I start putting time and efforts into it, I have less of a reason to drop it later down the road if I get frustrated.)

So what I want to ask is, how successful do you think this route could be for non-programming people? And by success, I’m referring to at least getting the first prototype out and attracting a good tech cofounder.

Who else have gone this route and how did turn out for them?

(Sorry for the wall of text!)

*Correction: maybe it's not right to call myself a complete newbie to programming since I took AP Computer Science (basic Java programming) back in high school and learned some rudimentary HTML and CSS in middle school. So the fact that I have some idea of what to expect probably helps.