Are you very young (< 35)? If so, then I recommend talking to older people around you and hearing about their life experiences. I've found that the "fear of missing out" as a youth is assuaged when talking to folks whose most amazing life experiences occurred when they were easily twice my current age (puts a lot of things in perspective).
Also try this experiment: on one occasion, actively pursue an opportunity "overheard with friends" - when that activity is complete, recount the entire experience and decide if there was truly something you could have lived without. On another occasion, actively turn down such an opportunity and pursue something in the meantime. If you can do this once, do it again, and you'll start to learn to balance the pursuit of such opportunities and likewise a restraint. As motivation: If you don't turn down an opportunity then you are missing out on this experiment!
You should leave now and not look back. Chances are there will be even more delays forthcoming and since the dev team has shown a willingness to work nights/weekends that trend will continue, but with more earnest once paying customer are on board.
A great comment (which I'd upvote more than once if able). There are many underpinning problems that lead to business inefficiencies - none of which are solved by choosing to hire remote vs. local (or by "using the right tool", which is another decision folks make to try and put out management fires). If you have "human problems" you need to solve them the hard way; or as was said: there is no silver bullet.
SpiderOak is currently developing "Semaphor"; an end-to-end, zero-knowledge collaboration platform with native clients on mobile and desktop: https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor
on this - the best thing you can do with your time is talking to your customers and writing down what they say about your product. Then, use those exact words in your content; in essence have your customers write your content for you. If you are really pressed for time, just pay a copywriter to write your content but definitely give them a copy of your customer's words.
Willing To Relocate: No, but depending on the length/scope of the project I am absolutely open to traveling anywhere in the U.S. to meet with you periodically throughout our engagement.
Looking For: Web application development/redevelopment, growth hacking, custom development targeting specific business problems
After working for a small consultancy for some time now, and providing significant contributions to large projects for highly recognizable national brands, I'm seeking more flexibility and am launching out on my own. I'm good at what I do - developing web applications from the ground up and redesigning existing applications to increase revenue - but as I'm making this new move I'm looking for a client who can go out on a limb and trust in my experience even though I don't yet have client work under my own name to showcase.
Obviously, I would absolutely be interested in working for you at a significant discount if you'd be willing to allow me to use our collaboration as a public case-study that I'd be able to reference with my future clients.
I am not interested in building an application for the sake of building an application or coding in XYZ technologies for the sake of coding in XYZ technologies.
I am interested in having a conversation about you, your customers, and what particular business problems you are trying to solve.
I wouldn't say that this project of mine is "big" in the canonical sense, and it is only meagerly "profitable" by a loose interpretation of the word; but this has been a huge side project from my personal point of view. Essentially, I started this when I was teaching high school full-time and needed a better website for my calculus class. The "big" impact of this project is that it opened a door to a new career for me: I'm now a full-time software engineer and thus measure its profits on the order of my current salary, which is hugely significant to me.
the current task: refactoring my code to incorporate new things I've learned, namely: TDD and knockoutjs + json API. After 2 years of self learning python, I'm looking to transition from teaching into development and am hoping to use this project to showcase what I've learned!
My first big web application has absolutely no unit tests. None. Why? Well, when I first learned to code I was taking the Udacity cs253 course, in which there was no instruction on unittesting in Python, so several of my projects shortly thereafter contained no unittesting. I was actually quite proud of these projects until my brother asked if I had any tests ... "what is a test?" ... his face was priceless.
Thanks - I had not even considered the bit on finding a company I'd like to work for and start contributing to their open source stuff... makes perfect sense.
Also "Rule of thumb, you are never ready. Just go for it" is basically the best advice I've heard for essentially any new task; it's nice to have that reinforced.
Actually both of these approaches make sense to me - I had read something on HN in the past asserting that deadlines dramatically increased the productivity of a particular startup compared to feature goals (as in: "We're launching version 2 on Jan 1. with whatever we can get done before then" vs. "we're going to incorporate XYZ in version 2, and we'll launch it when we do")- so up to this point I've been considering June as a hard deadline. "I need to get as much as I can get done by June" as opposed to "I need to go and collect XYZ skills". Probably the correct approach is being aware of XYZ skills and collect those first, but always having a looming job-jump deadline. Thanks to both of you for your advice!
Also try this experiment: on one occasion, actively pursue an opportunity "overheard with friends" - when that activity is complete, recount the entire experience and decide if there was truly something you could have lived without. On another occasion, actively turn down such an opportunity and pursue something in the meantime. If you can do this once, do it again, and you'll start to learn to balance the pursuit of such opportunities and likewise a restraint. As motivation: If you don't turn down an opportunity then you are missing out on this experiment!