First and foremost you need to look at all ways to fund your start-up not just outside investment. How far can you bootstrap your start-up and self fund? Are their ways to get your first clients to fund development for in return for free life-time use etc. If this is not possible then you move...
There is a difference between your product being open source versus the tech stack you use to build it being open source. You use email to conduct your business, and that's based on an open standard! Whoever told you it's "absolutely imperative" that you use Rails instead of an "open" language l...
I would suggest you search for and read out blogs. I can't think of any entrepreneurs who aren't also blogging. I have two blogs: brightideas.co and http://groovedigitalmarketing.com