This is the route that I am taking, except I am capable of coding to an extent, I am designing the prototype and getting some help (paid from an offshore very-part-time programmer to design some classes, mostly only to speed up the process) and I think I am ready to launch soon, however I am lost about how I would find a co-founder (who's interested enough and that I can offer enough to stay and lead the company in the right direction)
Peak hours would be 100 queries a second minimum. Static content is served by 2 different servers (1 img, 1 html). I did not know of the slow query log parameters (but will enable it now).
When starting we were pulling too many rows, but we quickly realized that and lowered scripts that display too much content that is not needed, we are also using proper indexes.