Growing my startup? (I will not promote)

Hi all!

So I've been building a website for pickleball events for the last 13 months as a solo-founder, solo-developer (mostly) and solo-most everything else, and I'm hoping to grow a team to help scale this thing this year.

Here's what I've accomplished so far:
- The site averages about 1,000 weekly unique visitors. Its mostly focused on the outside-the-US market for now (admittedly I decided to forego placing ads on the site so there's no revenue so far... probably a mistake but its not too late to fix)

- I'm very confident I've found a solid product-market fit, having done tons of Lean-startup-type work on validating the ideas I've had before building
- We're launching the first paid features for the site this coming weekend and I already have several customers lined up ready to post their events on my site.

What I'm hoping to do this year is to bring on another developer to help with coding, someone to help with marketing/outreach to increase market share, and possibly look for a startup coach/mentor that I can meet with to discuss business things with. I want to stay on in a technical role, but maybe 70-30 split my time working the other aspects of the business I've been neglecting.

I'm not quite sure how to do this the right way and hoping to get some advice from the community. I've been self-funding the project the entire time (so far have spent several $1k on hiring freelancers from Upwork to help with some of the coding), and I'm trying to build this while also staying at my full-time day job (I know, may become unrealistic, but I'm trying...). The funding I had set aside for the project has run out and I feel like my only option is to offer equity.

At this stage is equity my best option? I'm hesitant to explore VC funding for a few reasons. Will that even be able to attract anyone to join up?

Have lots of other questions but I'll stop there for now. Thanks all