I'm sympathetic to this argument, but the "long term" could easily be quite long on the timescale of a startup's solvency. FogBugz, for example, might well not have survived without the initial user base provided by the readers of Joel on Software. Having that promotion channel could easily have meant a factor of ten in the initial customer base compared to a "normal" startup. And that factor of ten represents more than three years of growth even if you double your users each year. Of course, with growth like that presumably you could raise money to increase your runway, but that adds the complexity of dealing with investors and adds more time for things to go wrong.