answer:Find a business partner you trust who knows these things. Then hire a good accountant and a good lawyer for the business. If you don’t know these things yourself, you have no way to evaluate the competence of someone you hire. And since there are nine or ten incompetent “web developers” out there for every competent one, without that knowledge, you’re signing up for a 9/10 chance of your business failing because of incompetent employees even before you enter the market. The solution is to find someone who has a stake in the success of the business—thus, a partner—who can accurately evaluate the competence of the employees. The other option is to have clear contracts that specify performance requirements when you contract with the developers—but again, without someone with a stake in the business who can evaluate the developers’ work, you’re setting yourself up for failure. (I worked for a startup a couple years back that was five people in your shoes—they knew a lot about business, but nothing about web or software development. They wasted about $5 million before going down in flames; a competent technical person in the partnership probably could have gotten them profitable for about $2 million.)