What do you have against TODO-lists? IMHO the world needs more varieties of task management tools.
Actually, the example apps don't really do the platform justice. We (at deployd) use it in consulting projects for building big APIs with complex roles and business requirements. The design of deployd is driven more from lessons learned designing those APIs than from our experiments in TODO-lists.
(I work at deployd) Yes, it's perfect for prototyping. We use it extensively for prototyping on projects where the ultimate API has to be supported in another stack. Saves tons of time compared to developing the API as you go in Java or the like.
(I work at deployd) Yes, the cycle is funny. We don't usually focus on the GUI when talking about deployd; someone outside the company posted with this headline.
Open source was a no-brainer for us. There are some other key concepts that make it a compelling tool, particularly how easily extensible the platform is.
Not an untypical predicament you're in. Best advice is to minimize features and release something to someone asap. That takes a lot of discipline to do, but starting simple and iterating has lots of benefits. Just a few:
1. Instant feedback, so you can validate your assumptions about the product. (see: Lean Startup, Eric Ries)
2. It's easier to keep releasing once you've already released.
3. With a simple, limited feature set, your product is easier to understand to your early adopters.
There are some nice new tools emerging to solve this problem, but don't force front end devs into an entirely new platform. One of my projects is an open source server (https://github.com/deployd/deployd) that's totally un-opinionated on the front end, but makes it really easy to add robust backends to client apps.
Is it open source? If so, I'd love to check it out. We've been working on an open source server for JavaScript developers, that has some of the modularity of Wordpress: https://github.com/deployd/deployd