Recently built and founded EnglishForums.com - World's largest EFL network - 2M questions, 60M uniques per year. Done with $0 ad spend.
Bit of truth: Software development is costly and laborious. There are many ideas for apps out there, the most important part is implementation (rarely the idea itself).
That said:
- I would suggest you first decide on a budget, expect to go over what you initially plan on.
- Write down what the application should do in detail (if you can't do this, expect costs to be 3x what they should be).
- Begin hunting for developers on sites like upwork and freelancer.
It's a long process, but doable - you'll need determination and capital.
"I am starting my own website." - This suggests this may be your first attempt?
If so, and everyone starts somewhere, then the answer would be 'yes'.
UX (the user experience) is naturally extremely important. We recently did an overhaul of our sites with a simplified and more mature UX experience. The results were outstanding, nearly doubling interaction with our visitors.
There are MANY factors to consider, in order of importance (at the stage I am guessing you are at) - also I'll assume you are in it for the long-ish term?
1 - Value to your visitors (whatever that may be). Keep it real if you want success. There are many fake and spammy websites out there, or projects that are transparently about money and nothing else.
2 - UX: Put some thought into what your users will be doing on your site, check with sites like https://www.usertesting.com/ to see if you've made it easy for them to get around, and can direct them where needed.
3 - Stick with it, it takes time. Implement things like Google Tag Manager / Universal Analytics from day one, keep an eye on what people are doing / how long they are staying.
Hope this helps.
It has worked, sites like 'webmasterworld' have done these things in the past.
If you have a niche audience, that's loyal - you can segment the site and charge a membership fee.
It's a tricky line to walk, you'll need something of value to offer the 'premium' users without upsetting the free users be excluding them too much.
The best method would be to segment one particular subject first, see how that goes - and move on from there.