I think you are over confident on the "public face" of your app, and not the "private side" of it. You are saying it would be great and people would talk about

I think you are over confident on the "public face" of your app, and not the "private side" of it. You are saying it would be great and people would talk about it because it is really cool. I am not saying that's not true - but that isn't enough to make it a product (or being bought out). Some of the most popular products out there aren't hard to do. The complicated part is how to scale them to be as fast with that many users and don't lose money. Twitter? It could be done in a few months (I am not saying it is a weekend project), but that doesn't mean you have Twitter. The hard part of Twitter is not tweet, publish, have followers, is doing in almost realm time with that amount of data. You could say almost the same for YouTube (Upload and play video? Easy. Do it for millions of video at the same time... oops!). Try to optimize your backend, so it doesn't cost much money. If not, you have just something that does something nice but it doens't do it well. Many people can do that. The secret of success is doing great things without consume many resources.