While it is nice to see that the overwhelming feeling here is that you need to go for funding and you need to pay relatively high prices, the reality of the situation is that wecan't all get funding, or just dont have the option to invest a lot of money. It's called bootstrapping for a reason, you get inventive.
I choose to do the same: i don't want any external funding for my project (http://tribily.com) because I 'want to be the boss'. That means I'll have to 'suffer' the consequences of that: not being able to pay top dollar, not growing super fast. But that's okay. It's been a year now and we're break even, which I'm proud of but it is only possible because we did everything on a budget.
I found a great sysadmin in India who does very good work for me for relatively low prices. Why? Because I also give him consulting gigs through my other project which bring in more then enough money and he's thankful for working with me on my project.
I found a friend/ex-coworker of mine based in Holland willing to do graphic design/front end dev for 20EU/hr next to his day job. Why? Because he gets freedom to do what he wants that he doesn't get in his dayjob. I tell him I need a new frontpage, he'll go and figure it out. That allows him to play with graphic design and to do html5 and al kinds of cool things, while still seeing teh fruits of his labor in production.
I found another friend who studied communication but couldn't find a job who's doing stuff for me for free. Why? Because I told her she can put it on her resume and she gets real-world experience, which improves her chances for a job n this shitty economy. She just found a job for 32 hours with a good company, but she still wants to keep doing stuff for me as well
I found a C-developer in Malaysia, where I lived for 7 months last year (Kuala Lumpur IS the new Silicon Valley ;) ). Same story: low cost next to his dayjob, excellent quality. Why? Motivated by the technology and the fact that all our stuff is open sourced (http://github.com/tribily)
In short, giving good people in your personal network the freedom to do what they want (use google's 20% rule if you want) works well. It's not all roses though, I went through quite a few people to find this great team. It also doesn't move very fast, but that's okay with me. It allows me to keep building on a project I believe in, while doing something I love. And that's all that counts to me :)
Hope this helps :)
