I realize this won't sound encouraging, but it seems to me that you were doomed from the start. Whoever writes the code in a web startup has to be a full cofounder-- which means a friend, not just a stranger you recruited for this project. You've inadvertantly shown why this custom exists. Trying to outsource the development would just be repeating the same mistake. Your best bets would be either to learn to hack, or find a cofounder who can among your friends.

I'm not sure I can give any advice to help your situation specifically but I can say some stuff that might help other non-technically people in the future.

Make sure you have milestones setup in your development process. If she said it would take 6 months then make sure at 4 months your developer is at a reasonable place, hell make sure at 2 months that they are, if they aren't then it's time to reconsider the contract.

If they estimated it would take 6 months to do then by 4 months 90% of the site should be done, the other 90% is the smaller fixes, tweaks etc that always take a long time but a good developer will have learned to account for these in their estimate, but you should have a functioning(although not totally) site that far in.

I'm not one for micromanaging or the non-technical boss watching over the hackers shoulder every 2 minutes getting in the way, but it really shouldn't have been allowed to drag on for 12 months without a product. After missing the first estimate without a full application(even if it was a buggy one) you are going to have serious problems and should be looking for someone else because they are either too inexperienced to estimate their own work, too inexperienced to break their estimates down, or not doing their work.

Okay. Let's take stock. From what I understand...

Your Resources:

* A partially complete web app, for patients with chronic conditions; helps them manage their problems & has some social network features.

* Feedback from your alpha testing.

* 45% equity in the company (with the ability to recover the extra 29%), which owns all of the IP.

* A limited amount of time before you must seek means to support yourself.

Your Goals:

* Develop your web app to a beta-worthy release.

* Get funds to develop to a point where you can charge, or maintain it long enough to exit.

Your Obstacles:

* Your user-interface isn't presentable enough to for your app to go public.

* Without a developer, you have no means to improve the front-end of your app, or implement new features.

* You have no funding left, very little personal money, and debt.

What I think your plan should be:

1) Ask yourself if you truly believe that your app can be satisfactorily profitable. Ask yourself if you're willing to work hard over the next 2 years (at least) to make it happen.

2) Reduce your expenses as much as possible. You said your monthly outgoing is $2,000. If I can live on $800/month in Boston, you can reduce your expenses to at least $1k to $1.5k. This pushes back your horizon for total cash failure.

3) Increase your income, even if it's just a short-term influx of cash. Whether it's through another loan, selling non-essential assets, or fully-booking half a month with temporary gigs.

4) Learn to code, and instead of continuing development, modify your user-interface to a level where you can release to users. Forget about advanced features. Basic functionality in a working interface, with the promise of advanced functionality, can get enough signups to take you to the next step.

5) Offset costs, and/or get to profitability. You haven't shared your business model; if it's offering the app as a white-label service to institutions, focus on getting your first customers once you have the basic functionality in a working interface. A modest amount of users, however dispersed, should be enough to at least demonstrate interest, and get them to license it from you on a trial basis.

If you're intending to monetize it through users directly, charging isn't feasible until you're offering advanced functionality, and advertising isn't feasible until you have a ton of users. But affiliate sales can generate income with even a modest number of users, and it's likely that the nature of their conditions makes them likely consumers for specialized products, possibly that are highly profitable.

6) Focus development on rapid iteration. Prioritize your feature list by simplicity and usefulness, and either split your attention between adding small, useful features one at a time while working on the larger improvements, or outsource development of the small stuff(one at a time, so you build relationships and can measure quality) and focus solely on the larger improvements.

7) After the three to six months the above should take you, take stock again and consider if you want to get another co-founder (if there are some really large improvements that need to be made that are out of your coding league completely), and/or seek more funding.

8) Let us know how it goes!

Don't believe the hype.

Right now everyone is talking about facebook, social software, and what have you. But most of these sites aren't making any money, and they never will. It's basically a really crowded market with no clear income model unless you're really big.

Find a niche that hasn't been exploited and create software that solves a problem in that niche. B2B is probably the best place to look - if you can come up with a piece of siftware that can either save a company money or make them money they will be happy to pay.

If you have ever seen SAP's implementations of ERP systems you will know that the B2B software out there is totally crap, and that it should be possible to come up with something better. And there are real companies willing to pay real money for your software.

There are plenty of people and companies and people that want and will pay for useful software, you just don't read about them on digg or reddit because they aren't sexy and cool.

Holy crap - you're paying her $83K, plus gave her equity, in TULSA?!?!? That's not exactly a high cost area. If you have $190K and you've paid close to $100K to her (14 months) just to get a proof of concept, I'd say you're in trouble. If she's drawing a handsome salary, won't put any of her own money in, and won't take a pay cut, she can't be that confident in the value of the equity. Sounds like you got milked.

I wish you luck but I think you've got some serious structural problems, both in your company and your relationship with this Django girl.

I can counter that with a real world example. I've done a startup that succeeded and got a pretty neat product out (which btw. included FPGA programming, hardware, mobile technology, and web technology - not exactly easy stuff..) and we had contractors do everything. No hackers aboard. And it worked.

So it can be done.

I'd pick an idea that doesn't rely on ad revenue. It takes time to build enough traffic to generate a good amount of money.

Learning Django isn't difficult at all. If anything, learning Django will be a huge benefit even if you do find a Django coder. Not only will you be able to convey your ideas more efficiently by having an understanding of code, but I'm sure your coder won't feel as much of a slave. Learn Python first: http://openbookproject.net//thinkCSpy/ and for Django: http://www.djangobook.com/

If you're really dedicated to continue with the startup idea, and want to complete your first beta, I'm not sure waiting to learn Django, getting your feet wet, and developing proficient skills to actually continue the project would be the best idea, as it would hinder you from launching quickly, if that's your desire. So, although you may decide to do it on your own, you should be actively looking for coders.

If you're really out of cash, and you have no family/other sources to borrow or raise money from, and you need money, then maybe a part time job to start generating some sort of revenue may serve well.

Also, go to your local Django camps, check out djangogigs.com, get on listservs, find the Django Google group and post there. Not using Django should be an option as well, if you happen to come across that gem of a coder who's willing to take the load and doesn't code in Djnago. Also, applying to YC could be an option. If you do have some sort of prototype to show, and are willing to learn to program, you could be paired up with a group, of course that's all speculation.

Just don't get stuck in a rut of depression. Be rational, and exercise some damage control, because down the road, you'll probably find yourself in a more unforgiving storm.

People are making millions with innovative business software. Stuff that keeps hospital records, does simulations for the DoD, coordinates sales representatives, facilitates B2B, or CRM, or whatever.

The stuff making real money just has relatively very low visibility from the web. Most of these companies are small, private, and almost entirely owned by, like, three people. The founders come from industry and have zero interest in keeping a blog or writing articles relating their business experiences. Often they have legitimate industrial espionage concerns and prefer to keep a low profile except with regard to their handful of customers.

People who think really hard about facebook are living in an alternate reality that's distorted by spending so much time on the web.

Does anyone else think that a salary of $6,900 is too much? I even think that $3,000 is too much... Of course my situation in South Africa might be a lot cheaper. I got away with $1,250 per month, and even then I was able to live pretty comfortably.

I get the feeling that there's an exception to almost every startup rule.

In my personal experience, I've never seen outsourcing work well, or really work at all. The first startup I worked at spent $300k to setup an office in China, paying their developers about $10-15k/year. It would've been a great deal, except that the China office produced nothing and sucked up the complete time of both the CTO and chief scientist so they couldn't get anything done stateside. They would've been far better off writing the code themselves.

Yep. It'll probably happen in conjunction with The Year Of The Linux Desktop.

Just to let you know, if you're wondering who is downvoting you, it's me. This comment and the one before were both stupid and unnecessary.

If you really gave half a shit about the original poster and the situation she's in, you wouldn't be going through picking on every damn comment and responding with idiocy, and starting branches of discussion that aren't relevant to the subject at hand and do nothing more than make finding useful information here more cumbersome.