The World may be flat, spiky, hot and crowded but I'm not talking about learning Spanish, Chinese or any other foreign language. I'm talking about learning a programming language. 

Over the course of the last year I can’t tell you how many people have DM’d or emailed me looking for a programmer who was willing to work for free or cheap. Let me save all of you the trouble right now: Unless your co-founder is a programmer, there are no programmers anywhere in the World willing to work for free to build your idea. They are either being paid good money to build other people’s ideas or have their own ideas they’re building. And let’s suppose there are one or two out there somewhere, there’s probably a reason they’re willing to work for free and you don’t want them anyway.

If you have a Web based business idea (and are there any ideas that don't have some Web based component to them anymore?) everything you need to get your business up off the ground is free. W3 Schools has free online tutorials for HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, XML and more. I'm sure there plenty of other resources out there but these will give you everything you need to get going. Again these are just a few resources out there but there are probably free tutorials out there on the Interwebs, for anything you want to learn. And of course I mean free as in paying time instead of money.

If you’re sitting around wondering what you’re going to with this great idea of yours that you can't get anyone to help you with, start programming. You don’t have to be a rocket surgeon to learn programming, they teach it some grade schools these days. Surely you're smarter than a 5th grader, right? 

Think it can’t be done? Check out Everlater, a TechStars company. The founders learned programming just to build the startup idea they had. Brad Feld from the Foundry Group has a great series of posts about how Everlater did this and a slew of resources to teach yourself how to program. Be sure to check out the comments for more resources.

With the rise of cloud computing, your hard costs, like storage, have never been cheaper. You don't need a super computer or your own server. Any old laptop and the cloud will do.

Even developing a proof of concept will go miles in gaining support from investors or that elusive programming help. People are more willing to invest time and money if they know you're serious and can see what your talking about beyond your back of the napkin doodles. 

Remember, you're an entrepreneur; stop whining and start doing.