Developing the app - Episode 2 - Looking for help

Shopping for an iPhone / iPad developer doesn't sound that hard at first. It's just a question of finding the right person and pay the right price.
But it isn't that easy: the iPhone and iPad markets are just booming and there are not that many developers in Paris. I could try hiring someone in the US or elsewhere in the world but I am too old fashioned: I like to see the person who is supposed to translate my requirements into a business app. I have been doing enough user testing in my consulting life to know that working with some distant developers can drive you insane.
So I turned to Google search and start collecting names of developers in the area and found myself a small web agency specialized in the area: I met 2 typical Apple geeks which got interested in my project and signed in to provide me with:
- a user interface
- a working app
I signed a fixed fee contract with a variable fee tied to the revenues.
A few weeks later we produced the business requirements and a glimpse at the look & feel. I got the user interface later on and with a few changes it seemed to me that I was on the right track.
I also found out the name : "takenotes", "meeting minutes" and so on until I found "iTakeNotes" which I tested with a few friends and the name had a good feedback. I opened a page on Facebook, created the company (which is in France always a headache) and waited for a first release.

iTakeNotes first user interface

The first release arrived. But to my disappointment there were a LOT of bugs with very little features. So I did all the necessary user testing, posted the bugs and waited.

And waited... Nothing seemed to happen, responses were taking longer and I finally got a response stating that they were having financial issues and that we needed to double the budget to finish up the product.
We weren't talking about millions but still, there was something wrong. The 2 guys I had hired were fine in designing user interface and setting up a look and feel but truth is they weren't coding. And the coding expertise was somewhere else.

So what is their added value? I figured I'd do better on my own and recover my interface and my product as it was and look myself to get help elsewhere. I could have sued them but that wouldn't have got my product done, they were not able to produce it.

Lesson learned: if the external help you are getting isn't able to code in Objective C, look somewhere else.

Ultimate test of motivation

At that point of the project, I had my code and my user interface but nothing else. The Appstore seemed really far away. I was desperate. I was close to give up. Fortunately for me, there was an episode 3.