What about in my case, where I run a free service that currently has served over 9.3 million requests in the last month? (That service is http://jsonip.com)

Its a utility service that a lot of people are finding useful and has a lot of traction, but no way that I can see to monetize it. Not even sure I have a desire to try and monetize it, since it costs me almost nothing to run.

I would love to be able to build that resource into something more, but I'm not even sure where to start. It has a lot of usage and growth, but its not something I would remotely call a startup.

I made a short post a few hours ago about the current state: http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=4556711