You don't have enough scale to drive a crypto currency.
One of the main properties of money is it be widely accepted so it is fungible for many types of products and services. Without that feature, it is not desirable to hold it, other than as a pump & dump speculation which is why you see most altcoins declining after an initial hump of pumping (often insiders buying from themselves to pump up the value causing fools to buy).
Your best bet is to find an altcoin that will reward your signups and usership some how feeding value back to you for that effort. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any altcoin design to do that yet. This was one of the aspects of my marketing plan for my planned altcoin (which was temporarily stalled because of some
rethinking I am going through about the idealism of crypto currency).
I think it would be best if you don't have to do anything other than some simple integration by your offshore programmer. And it would be best that you find a way to profit on a greater movement for an altcoin than to try to invent an altcoin and scale it yourself. You don't even have the slightest clue how much is required. You could not afford to do it correct, other than to clone an existing altcoin but that wouldn't be 1/100 of the work needed to accomplish a movement that will lead to a successful altcoin.
I think you should be talking to me if I decide to proceed on my altcoin and if I feel confident I can still do it. I am doing a lot of deep thinking right now.
I've had a lot of success in the past in developing and marketing to millions of users. The key is integrating into some existing need. For example, when I created CoolPage(.com) web page editor software in 1998, it incorporated 1-click instant publishing to free hosting sites Geocities, FortuneCity, etc.. This was before we had Friendster (the first FoF social network). That drove a million downloads (back when the internet was 1/10 the population) and 335,000 confirmed websites (altavista had a feature for counting these back then).
So you need to think this way of partnering with greater economies-of-scale than you can do by yourself. Otherwise you will surely fail.
Edit: this was assuming your goal is not just another pump and dump to speculators. I was assuming you want to earn money some how by monetizing your app, not by finding greater fool investors.
As far as #1 is concerned. We don't need another altcoin. New coins are met with disdain and distrust these days.
You may be better served partnering with an established altcoin. One that has talented developers and tech and, more importantly, credibility already existing. Good luck.
I don't want to be an innovator. I just need an out-of-the-box solution ideally. The value of our coin wouldn't be based on being some sort of unique coin, it would be based on its integration with our app.
If the app is a disaster, the coin is a disaster.
Invert that, since the coin will be a disaster than so will be the app.
If your financial incentive to continue developing, marketing, and improving your app rely on the success of you creating a copycoin, then your plan is already dead-on-arrival (DOA).
The copycoin era is dying (or at least until another massive run up in speculative fever for Bitcoin reignites if it does and who knows when that will be, probably not until fall 2016 at the earliest).