Ask HN: How important is UI design for your first app?

Me and buddy always have constant arguments on how important the UI is for an application. As a normal user (of any application), UI is fairly important for me to trust and start using it. But my friend thinks that if we can't have a great UI design then going with minimal or no UI is better. I personally hate to show my app to my users (even beta) with just text and links. What do you guys think?