You may raise some funds from your friends & family and then hire some experienced programmers locally to build a prototype or jump in to learn the programming languages you prefer to use in your project...
instead of doing that, he can also share his idea here and if it's really good then someone might be able to work on it. or as an alternative, he can learn about it on his own.
Starting a business with no surety of profits and that too in debts taken from family or friends is not at all a good idea. Learning on his own is the good suggestion here. Nothing in this world is impossible and on proper coaching, any individual can develop a full working social network site. The only matter here would be with the time. OP really needs to invest 3-4 months of his time into learning proper skills to be able to develop the entire platform himself.
Today's markets are getting high and it really gets much costlier for any individual to hire a bunch of programmers to develop a platform which would work perfectly. Also the programming work is not that easy as it looks. Even minor mistakes can lead in failure of compiling the code.