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Comment by rosenjon | Hacker News Reader

Nice post. I'll take revenue and profitability over media hype and "it" status any day of the week. It's kind of shocking how many early stage companies have absolutely no plan for revenue/profit, and point to outliers like Facebook and Twitter as their playbook for success. There are meaningless debates about 10 millions users being the new 1 million (http://www.businessinsider.com/10-million-users-is-not-the-n...). To me, it is just indicative of a pervasive sickness in early stage tech. Remember, it doesn't matter how many users you have unless you can monetize them.

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"I'll take revenue and profitability over media hype and "it" status any day of the week."

All that is fine of course and true. But there are side benefits to "it" status. For one thing it can help you attract talent and get the type of attention that can lead to success.

Let me give you an example. I've helped both high profile people and people who are nobodies with advice. In general the nobodies are much more thankful for the advice (and have even sent me gifts as thank you's). The high profile people say "thank you".

"Name dropping". But the fact that I do the work for high profile people, well, I use that in my marketing to attract paid customers that actually put money in my pocket. And it works.

If name dropping high profile people is an important part of your businesses marketing strategy, then it seems reasonable to pursue that <i>if it leads to more revenue/profit</i>

I think OP's issue relates to the weird, self-referential culture of Silicon Valley, where success is measured in buzz and money raised. It goes something like:

Build free software product -> ? -> profit

where ? = Get lots of buzz/hype, grow userbase quickly, raise VC money

Or course, this is similar to another business plan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts

You would think I would take that too but apparently I'm an idiot and got caught up in useless crap. We make marketing software for big brands so all our "users" are monetized because well ummm that is our business model. Enterprise is great that way! No one gets the product for free!

"We make marketing software for big brands"

You might want to put that front and center in your home page message.

Also your "playapi" logo is totally unreadable in both Firefox as well as Safari (v-latest).

Well now that I've just managed to out myself to the entire world (well the world here, wasn't expecting that). We probably will!

No VC we've talked to has ever wanted to hear we make marketing software for brands. But if I'm not caring anymore then yeah how we speak to our clients will be how we speak to everyone now. How very liberating.

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