Poll: What is the young, cashed strapped founder to do

A lot of the more technical people I know have some idea they are pushing towards complete prototype (often alone). Many people take time off traditional work to build these systems and are often strapped for cash. Assuming each of these prototypes is a seed, how can they be grown into great trees in the constructs of day to day life? How can they be protected?

Assume an individual has created a web application with nice scalability verified by reasonable tests, compelling evidence for the usefulness of the product, a decent UX and serious financial troubles, not even banking a year of expenses. What's this troubled fellow to do? His goal is to have his web application being used by thousands of people as quickly as possible, hopefully converting some of those users to paid customers.