4 Ways to Avoid Hiring Your First Employee

Lots of awful ideas here.

Startups that hire consultants generally do so at their peril. Consultants write code fast, but rarely well. Their incentive is to do what they're told to do quickly, not to build reliable, scalable architecture.

You really don't want to leave core architectural decisions (which every technical hire will be making, at this early a stage) to mercenaries.

I agree that leaving the core technical decisions to folks that don't have skin in the game is dangerous. I really like the idea of bartering services. I've done that quite a bit in the past (not for coding but for marketing/graphics/other stuff) and it's an option I think most startups don't explore enough.