[Theodores]

It is an interesting way to go, most people on here would have the code "fully unit tested" with at least the latest in Twitter Bootstrap 3 for the frontend and good ideas on how to scale the thing before showing the product to potential customers/users.

A solid product kind of helps with the success of things and there is always the ever-present risk that a software project will take aeons longer than intended. A software product should be understandable to the target audience within seconds of seeing it. Not having at least a prototype to show (as above, without it being optimised for scaling up) is not really going to make that easy - there is a lot to explain that could be simple to just 'get' with the prototype up and running. So, from the programmer perspective you took a lot of risk!