Just to validate what some others are saying here - it is very unlikely to find the right type of talent and attract them to build your application out for just equity - or if you did, they would require so much of the equity pool that it would become prohibitive to you as a shareholder. But let's say you can find that person (I'd classify it as unlikely but possible), then the issue becomes how you roll the application out with no money to back or market it. Programmers know better than most, that applications are not a "field of dreams" (if you build it, users will come). So selling them on the idea of working with no salary becomes even harder given that you dont have the story arch to show them how you will be capitalizing the growth of the application once it has gone live.

My best advice is to either ask immediate friends and family to see if they know a student looking to cut their teeth on some work and see how that goes, or scrounge around enough to pay a freelancer to built out your MVP (at which point, recruiting a technical co-founder becomes at least a little more plausible).