"This guy had made hundreds of apps in less than two months, and was making 10 times what I was making from the software sales!"

If the only thing you wanted to change was to get a cut of your user's revenue, and you already had a product which worked, and which users found, why did you have to spend one year changing everything e.g. making it a web app, having to find new ways to find users, etc.?

Couldn't you have just altered your pricing model with the existing codebase? Just write an additional new server-side component to handle the billing, keep the existing client software, keep the existing methods to find new users?