My "PHP friend" has already done several profitable projects with the least amount of perfection. He knows how to do it right, has already the traction to bring already paying users over to his other new projects. Unfortunately he lives ~500km away.

When I ask my developer colleagues about feedback for my "crappy alpha", I'm just getting totaly bullshit responses like "you need javascript input validation before the user sends his form" despite the real problem I try to resolve.

So I asked serveral of my ~100 developer contacts on different projects, unfortunately feedback was kind of the same.

But only few of them managed to release something in their spare time. So they probably have the same problem as I have.

It's hard to get in contact with people that made it, some of them just tell you "I was lucky" which is cool, but not really helpful - It's easy to say that when you've made it :)