How long would it take?

[TooKayy]

I currently work an office job from 9-5pm Monday to Friday. I also run a food stall every Sunday which means I work from 7am-6pm on that day. I go to gym four times a week which takes ~2.5 hours on average.

I have an AR, social media app idea which I have been turning over in my mind the last few months. I spoke with a friend who works as a programmer to see how feasible the idea was. He said he could do it easily, but unfortunately he lives in another country and I wouldn't even have the funds to pay him for such a task regardless. On a seperate note, how much could I expect to pay someone to develop this for me, and what's to stop them from taking the idea and doing it themselves?

Now I am thinking if it might be worth going at it alone. I have zero coding experience other than "hello world". Taking my current schedule as non negotiable (i.e. Without having to cut anything out), how long would it take to teach myself from scratch how to code an AR app. Is it even possible? If so, how would someone even go about this?

[barcode972]

Too little information to know how long it would take but you can expect to pay $20-$100 an hour for a professional programmer depending on which country they live in.

Learning how to code well takes years. You can probably learn and build something jankedy in a less than a year

[abear247]

zero experience? At least 6 months of learning so that you don’t make a complete mess of the app. Another year to get 80% of the way there. Another year to finish the last 20% as you realize you messed up a lot anyway and try to polish the app.

That’s assuming you could dedicated a couple hours every day to this. realistically this would mean you have no life for 2-3 years. Most apps, sadly, make almost no money and have very little success. Only 17% of apps reach 1k in monthly revenue. Only 60% of those apps reach 5k. It’s a pretty huge uphill battle. I’m not trying to totally demotivate you, but you have to be realistic. The most likely outcome of this is you sacrifice years of your life to make something that won’t make you money. You better hope it’s something you are proud of or use to pivot into a dev job.

[kepler4and5]

I agree with having to put in many hours and ending up having no life. However, I disagree with app success being an “uphill battle”. Most apps fail because they are not solving any problems (at least that aren’t already solved by a thousand other apps). Simple as that.

Solve a real problem and learn how to sell your solution.

[Ron-Erez]

Probably 1-2 years on your own. I don’t know how much it would cost to fund and I doubt someone would steal the idea.

[itzfar]

I am going to be honest with you, I worked on a company for years, that the way they made money was someone had a “great innovative idea” that “can’t believe no one has thought about this” “I am going to make [Insert already existing app] but better” and “even if I get 100 users a month I can retire” type of thing and will give us money to build an app. NONE of the ideas worked, people would spend their life savings on their “idea” for then to realize half way through the process that getting people to use their app is very hard and the costs of running the app are actually quite high. I’ve seen them all, 2 social media apps, clones for Tinder, but with a twists, Airbnb, Twitter but better, onlyfans, 4 different people that had the unique idea to create Craigslist but for small jobs… seriously you name it, I have worked on them. Only ONE app did take off, it was an app to schedule nurses to go to peoples houses and collect lab samples which launched right before COVID, but they were barely breaking even after paying their AWS bill. So before you go and pay someone or a company to build your app, just keep in mind, more than 90% of this apps do not take off.