[bcrawl]

I am in a situation similar to yours. This is how I am doing it, I dont know if it will help you or not. I hired a developer to build the prototype. Me and the developer discussed the technologies and framework which will be used. Upon getting the info, I did some background research on every thing. From which OS to run, which database/webserver to choose, which language/framework to choose,which version control to use, where to develop, where to host, details such as those. Just to get used to the above stuff took me a while. Now that I am comfortable with the set up of the prototype, I believe it will be a more focussed learning if I wanted to start writing code. I dont really want to start coding yet because I believe it will take up a lot of my time. I plan to use this to sell my product. Like you, I do know basics of coding. I do plan to fire up Eclipse and start debugging code in the future, but only when I have found a business model/customer :)

[evac]

Thanks, it's definitely helpful as a comparison to my own activities the past month. Though in my case, I talked to an acquaintance about what I wanted to do and got his advices on what would be needed to build my idea, such as the languages, database, hosting, etc., so that I had an overall idea of how everything should work. Afterward, did a lot of background research too.

As for coding, part of the reason I'm not hiring a developer is because I don't have the money, so I'm making it up with having a lot of time and effort to spend.

[bcrawl]

Can you tell us more about what kind of market this app is going to be? B2B/social etc? And what stage your product is in? Such as, have you designed/developed mockups/prototype etc? Since they take up a lot of time aswell if you are not familiar. And its not even coding. Just curious.

[evac]

Sure, it's a consumer app intended to help people with productivity and goal-achieving by directly influencing their behaviors through a psychological/behavior economical approach. Too many apps focused on technological efficiency (ie. a better way to list your goals, how to track your time, etc) and not much on the psychological aspect (ie. maintaining long-term motivation, getting started on chores you hate, etc).

In terms of stage, I'm pre-mockup at the moment since the last 2.5 months were spent on researching and designing the psychological framework before I could get started on the technological parts. It took up a lot of time but necessary since there was no previous framework for guidance.

I don't have a visual mockup yet, which I plan to start working on next week, but I do have a very fleshed out textual description of what was needed for the prototype to work.