Ask YC: Startup crisis. Out of money and tech co-founder has bailed.

I see your point, and I think that I'm probably one of the few people that have seen it from both sides - allow me to explain:

The startup I talked about above was some years ago, and I had no idea how to program anything. It worked out because we were extremely persistent, and simply didn't take no for an answer. A year ago I thought that it might be a good idea to actually learn to hack, and so I set about learning it. Now I'm doing a web-based startup and I have to admit that programming it yourself, and knowing what the heck you're talking about gives a number of advantages:

1) your dependance on external partners is minimised

2) you can see what features are trivial to do, which are hard, and which are just impossible.

3) your product becomes better because it is what you want, not someone elses interpretation of what you want.

4) you don't need a lot of capital, just a lot of time.

"You have developed most of the idea, and now you just need to round the corners, this is a perfect job for someone that just wants a pay check."

I'm not sure this is the case. It sounds like the "it's nearly done" is based on the developer's word, and there isn't actually anything demoable right now. If that's true, and given that it's taken her 12 months to finish a Django website, I think it's a good bet that all her existing code is unusable and will have to be thrown out. If you understand Django, it should not take you a year to finish a website; more likely, the dev doesn't understand Django and doesn't really have anything working.

It was either that or "the developer that took a royal salary and equity, then extorted more equity, then quit leaving our hero high and dry, broke, with an incomplete alpha, after taking one year to not finish developing a proof of concept." I was trying to be nice.

Okay. Let's take stock. From what I understand...

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!

For people that do try to outsource, the crucial question to ask yourself is "What do I bring to the table that a hacker might need?" I chose to partner with a non-technical friend (who ended up quitting, but at least he gave me full ownership of the startup), because this friend was adept at dealing with people and had connections to several possible angel investors. These are aspects of the startup experience that terrify me, and so I was more than happy to let him deal with them.

For your experience, persistence and not taking no are both really important to startups and very difficult for many technical people. So you added some value that a hacker couldn't get by just going off and doing the same thing on his own.

In the startup I mentioned above, the founders were all technical people and didn't really add anything of business value besides that. They were outsourcing because it was cheap and out of a misguided assumption that they needed a big team (and probably because they were spending Other People's Money). They would've been far better off writing the product themselves.

I don't know enough about drinko to know what s/he brings to the table, but unless it's a lot of sales connections to potential customers, it'll be hard for a good programmer to justify spending time on her project vs. all the other projects out there.