[incomethax]

In my experience a designer isn't as much useful for simple designs or "look and feel" so much as the design process helps you along product-market fit. When my co-founder and I started building our company, we made sure we followed the process of user-centric design and took wireframes and mockups and photoshop files to our customers well before we even started coding.

We would have completely missed our market if we had just jumped into coding before going after design. In that sense, I think if you don't have the designer chops, hiring a designer to get the good looking wireframes/mockups/etc to start doing customer validation is crucial - probably even more so than the code.

[jk8]

I love your answer... Couple of questions. 1. When did you hire a designer for your iOS app? 2. Was the designer involved in creating wireframes? 3. Are you self funded? If not, then I think, hiring a designer would have been easy.

[incomethax]

We are self funded, we didn't hire a designer for our iOS app, rather for a web-app that just went into public beta this past week.

Thus far we've funded ourselves out of client projects and a small grant we received about a year and a half ago.

[jk8]

Thanks and good luck :)