Thanks for linking that article Josh! I get what you mean now.
I guess it’s true that once a company’s product is really loved and habitually used, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be able to monetize well.
That being said, I’m still wondering: it seems like almost all of the popular social products/consumer networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, all operated with little revenue in the first few years. Do you know any exceptions to this? Is postponing monetization and relying on venture funding the only strategy to making it big with a social product/consumer network?
The reason I ask is my friends and I have started a social product of our own for students called HangTime (it’s at hangtimeapp.com). Although we’ve gotten some good traction, we’re quite puzzled about what our strategy for the future should be. Ideally our goal is to both make money out of this and help as many people as we can with our product, but those goals seem to be not doable together (i.e. if we want to help as many people as we can, then we might have to get venture funding and postpone monetization. But if we want to make money first, then we might try to monetize sooner rather than later, and grow our user base slowly without taking venture funding.)
What do you think about this problem our team has? I’d love to get your thoughts on it and on the first two questions I had above.
