I really like the idea of doubling down on getting high-quality interactive 1:1 feedback like you suggested, and that is something I can easily do on a daily basis to build more signal about how to dial in PMF in an intentional way.

I heard a quote once (Justin Kan, I think) that went something like this: first time founders focus on product; second time founders focus on distribution.

I might just be the extreme version of that quote ;)

Your Resources:

* A partially complete web app, for patients with chronic conditions; helps them manage their problems & has some social network features.

* Feedback from your alpha testing.

* 45% equity in the company (with the ability to recover the extra 29%), which owns all of the IP.

* A limited amount of time before you must seek means to support yourself.

Your Goals:

* Develop your web app to a beta-worthy release.

* Get funds to develop to a point where you can charge, or maintain it long enough to exit.

Your Obstacles:

* Your user-interface isn't presentable enough to for your app to go public.

* Without a developer, you have no means to improve the front-end of your app, or implement new features.

* You have no funding left, very little personal money, and debt.

What I think your plan should be:

1) Ask yourself if you truly believe that your app can be satisfactorily profitable. Ask yourself if you're willing to work hard over the next 2 years (at least) to make it happen.

2) Reduce your expenses as much as possible. You said your monthly outgoing is $2,000. If I can live on $800/month in Boston, you can reduce your expenses to at least $1k to $1.5k. This pushes back your horizon for total cash failure.

3) Increase your income, even if it's just a short-term influx of cash. Whether it's through another loan, selling non-essential assets, or fully-booking half a month with temporary gigs.

4) Learn to code, and instead of continuing development, modify your user-interface to a level where you can release to users. Forget about advanced features. Basic functionality in a working interface, with the promise of advanced functionality, can get enough signups to take you to the next step.

5) Offset costs, and/or get to profitability. You haven't shared your business model; if it's offering the app as a white-label service to institutions, focus on getting your first customers once you have the basic functionality in a working interface. A modest amount of users, however dispersed, should be enough to at least demonstrate interest, and get them to license it from you on a trial basis.

If you're intending to monetize it through users directly, charging isn't feasible until you're offering advanced functionality, and advertising isn't feasible until you have a ton of users. But affiliate sales can generate income with even a modest number of users, and it's likely that the nature of their conditions makes them likely consumers for specialized products, possibly that are highly profitable.

6) Focus development on rapid iteration. Prioritize your feature list by simplicity and usefulness, and either split your attention between adding small, useful features one at a time while working on the larger improvements, or outsource development of the small stuff(one at a time, so you build relationships and can measure quality) and focus solely on the larger improvements.

7) After the three to six months the above should take you, take stock again and consider if you want to get another co-founder (if there are some really large improvements that need to be made that are out of your coding league completely), and/or seek more funding.

8) Let us know how it goes!

Yes I've launched over 100 products in 4 years many of which are international award winning - you can search Jarrod Robinson on the app stores to see that they are NOT throwaway products and represent hundreds of thousands of investment from me. I'm just blessed to be able to do what I love .

I make side-project apps all the time, but I'm aware that they are basically just scratching some itch I had. If you go into it expecting to make the big-bucks without doing market research and not having a marketing budget, you're going to have a bad time.

For the record, I've been in your shoes before. Started a mobile games company back in 2002, struggled for 3 years with almost no sales at all and had to shut down. Met a first-time founder in 2009 who had this idea of "opening a mobile gamung company" and advised him wholeheartedly about not going there. He's now hiring his 30th employee, making millions every month (and didn't even take VC money to start)...

TL;DR: it didn't work for you, but it CAN work for someone else...

In the heyday, a lot of people made money in apps, but that's just a rumour echoing through time now, and is no longer reality in the present day.

Second, your mistake was not conducting market and competitor research first. You wanted to jump in and start coding. Business doesn't work like that. Construction is the very last step, not the first step.

Third, yes it's unlikely to be worth continuing, due to the winner take all nature of networks (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, vs who?). The only antidote is to pivot to a space that that big (and therefore well funded) competitor isn't targeting.

I recently had a quiet period in my freelance work so spent the time learning React Native amongst other things. I applied this to an idea I have had rattling around in my head for a point tracking app for people on Slimming World. I spent 4 weeks developing this and then shipped it to iOS. In under 2 weeks it has grown to almost 10,000 registered users, is number 4 in the UK Lifestyle Free Apps chart (ahead of Slimming World's own app) and has made enough ad revenue to cover the only costs I have had (App Store membership costs). It is never going to bring in big money but the lessons I have learnt are priceless.

I would have thought that the idea of a side-project is to create a MVP and if it takes off then you have a viable business. If not, then it was an interesting experiment.

In its current form, your app is a charitable act, you are helping others out of the goodness of your heart. Nothing wrong with that, if that is what you want to do.

1) There is an extraordinarily lucrative market opportunity in iDevice contracting right now, which they allude to but mentioned that they avoided doing to keep momentum. Giving that living on a couch is presumably not momentum-enhancing, a two week consulting engagement would buy them another 6~24 months of runway at their imputed burn rates.

2) A platform/language/etc is not a death-til-us-part commitment. You can follow the money. Independent developers are not best served by the App Store, unless they get ridiculously fortunate with regard to its kingmaking economics. If you only have one chance to develop an application, you would be better served by developing for a platform where the median case pays the rent.

3) Don't develop video games. You're competing for the business of toxic people who hate paying money against the union of well-funded corporations (which have high production values and effective, ruthless monetization) and amateur hobbyist artistes (who have "that vision thing" and are willing to starve to deliver it for free). Try making something for more lucrative markets like, oh, businesses.

4) You may have deep psychological issues with comfort about charging people money. They seem to be fairly common in our community, which is unfortunate, and we seem to actively promote them, which is unfortunate++. You should first recognize that you are creating something with value for people (if not, stop) and then come to the immediate realization that, as a business, people trade value for money. (If you desire to do charity work, do it for more deserving people than gamers with iPhones and entitlement issues... and you should probably do it after having secured your ability to deliver on obligations to your family.)

5) If you've got a budget of 100 awesomeness points or focus points or whatever, spending 90 on your software and 10 on your business will have much worse results than spending 10 on your software and 90 on your business. Having people who can concentrate 100% on building software is a wonderful thing. They're called "employees" and they cost about $10k to $20k a month; you can pay for them after you've got a business. If you desire to work 100% on software, you desire to be an employee.

6) Burying the buy button three screens behind Settings: probably not ideal for conversion rate maximization.

7) Maximum customer LTV of $2.99: also not ideal. Consider anything you can do to increase this, for example, offering upsells on top of the base offering, cross-selling them to other things in your portfolio or things from others' portfolio for a percentage, or developing a permission marketing asset such as an email list. Some of these are very not viable on the App Store but I think I already gave you the advice for that.

8) If you sell X, look at the tactics used by successful sellers of X. If these tactics strike you as morally outrageous, don't sell X.

I understand that it is a side-project and you may have different motivations.

But I guess it is even more reasonable for you to try implementing a business model. There is not much to lose (given you don't end up putting desperate adverts all over the app... Duh!) As an example, the 'karma-as-commodity' model might just work.

Point here being that I don't see something as valuable to a potential employer as a person who can write amazing apps and make some solid money out of it.

I don't wanna sound like a disgruntled developer (I really am not), but it's important to know that most likely your expectations on this app are heavily biased - especially when you lack developer skills. when you decide to enter the app business, you have to be aware that you are competing in what is probably one of the most competitive markets in the world, with very smart people from all over the world trying to monetize their apps. if this doesn't curb your enthusiasm then have a go at it - godspeed!

I'm not even sure it is a viable business itself. Aside from advertising, it has very few options as it stands. You would need to modify the platform in order to introduce other profit channels. But you already said you don't want any more of it.

I do have a ton of the app built. I'd actually be done if I hadn't made a silly mistake a while back while migrating computers and having to redo a bunch of work.

As a side project though, the amount of work I accomplish in 4 months is something that is entirely unique to my situation. And in this cas I'm terrible at marketing copy, design, etc. So I'm proud of what I've accomplished.

Thanks for your feedback!

Either case, you seem to have an opportunity here. You should start with a business plan! Do not worry about the bugs right now.

An idea for business plan is that you can let people get a kickback for each purchase they referrer. You can start with the ones giving you feedback.

After some sense of market and estimated budget you should hire a freelancer. Not trying to offend you here, but you have been working on this for six month, a freelancer would probable be able to fix the bugs in six hours for $15 an hour or less.

If I was in the phone app business I would probably rip off your idea and have an app out by tomorrow :P