Hello HN. I've got an interesting idea for a side project, but I'm a front end guy with zero programming knowledge. I see neat side projects frequently on HN, and of course they're almost always fully self coded from the ground up and created with something like App Engine or Heroku.
I could easily start my idea out on something like Tumblr or Wordpress.com, but my question is: Is it possible to still be taken legitimately as a site/service if my idea was to use one of those? Or would I be laughed off of the internet/HN for appearing amateur? At some point when I'm able to pay a freelancer, I'd want to have the site built from scratch and self hosted - but I don't have that option at the current time.
I've heard that Groupon started out on Wordpress, but I'm sure they still had large amounts of custom plugin development. Are there any other startups that started this way?