[czbond]

What is both his experience and yours in creating a software product? Are you adding new requirements/functionality each week? If so, stop and lock the 1,2 or 3 tops that need to be launched. Is your co-founder experienced in the areas he's developing in, or is he having to learn on the fly? Many newer dev's have a hard time setting tasks and priorities. However, it can also seem to you that he's doing nothing, when in actuality he's doing mountains of work - which may not be visible to you. Ask him to explain in "laymans terms, like I'm your grandmother" what he's doing each week, and the problems, and ask how it could be made more simple, and easier. Just my 2 cents.

[rocksockboybox]

He is a web-dev for a local technology company, and has been for the last 3 years. I've been on the business side of 2 startups, but have never been CEO and directly in charge of managing development and overall milestones.

As far as features and functionality go, we aren't adding new features each week. His main goal was to create a search function that pulled results from an API that we're using, and that's it. We haven't been able to plan any other features or weekly/monthly requirements because we can't seem to get past point A.

His excuses have been that he's truly researching the best possible way to do this, but I can't seem to shake the feeling that he is spending too much time on research instead of producing very minimal results.

[czbond]

He may be overthinking it. My suggestion would be how could he hack together a solution in 3 days total. Then use that and iterate. He's probably worried about scaling, and being featured on TechCrunch, etc. Which are common. But if he's the type to always make slow and methodical decisions, he might not be the best fit in a startup.