Issues when trying to launch provider-hosted app from Azure

Hello, I'm trying to publish a SP provider-hosted add-in to Azure. It seems to work in that when I publish from Visual Studio to Azure, I have no issues but when I click on the link (....azurewebsites.net) that Azure provides for the web app I get app cannot be displayed because an internal server error occurred. Should I be able to launch my MVC app from Azure without issue or do I have to package it and then upload the .app file to SP to get this to work? I have gone thru the .appregnew process on SP Online and supplied the clientID and secret when prompted during the deploy to Azure from VS process. Most of the examples I've seen include additional steps to upload the application to SP and I don't understand why since I don't want SP to host my app but I'd like to run it from Azure.