[revorad]

I don't understand why the OP is getting so much hate here. He is clearly talking about a specific kind of situation - a solo programmer with little money trying to build a web app - where design can be a costly overhead. It is also clear that he's talking about design in the sense of making things look beautiful, not in the sense of how things work.

Even more generally speaking, good visual design can be a powerful advantage but it's by no means necessary, especially on the web. See Bingo Card Creator, Visual Website Optimizer, Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Craigslist, etc.