[artharrison]

Yeah, that's absolutely what I've done in the past / will do again if I head this route. (Truthfully speaking though, with the time limits, it was the ruthlessly stripped down version that took me 9 month). As I said, I'm a competent hacker, but even full-time, I'm nowhere near my dev friends and designer friends who breeze through some of the data structure design aspects I'd end up meddling with for a week ...

[seannaM]

Could you talk more about that project? I can imagine some projects that would take at least 9 months to make a beta happen (Space travel), but I can't really imagine a stripped-down-to-the-core software business that takes 9 months for a beta. (Was it financial?)

[fouc]

I have had a similar issue hitting bottlenecks in developing an app that would've benefited tremendously from a domain expert. I now think that a good approach would be to hire out that specific part on odesk.com or other freelancing site.