i did both!
immediately after buying Notify we decided to rebuild it from scratch. for this i hired a dev agency and paid them every penny of each month's leftover revenue (after the finance payments). then to accelerate feature development i wrote code myself.
in this tweet you can see my total coding contribution during the 6 year life of Fomo, prior to our sale to Relay Commerce in June 2022.
it appears i wrote more code than anyone.