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Comment by st0neage | Hacker News Reader

I think what you're missing is that there are very different kinds of startup. There is the high stakes "next facebook or bust" kind, where it makes a lot of sense to first grow a userbase, get a lot of investors to pay you and take it from there. And then there's the "we are starting a business" kind of startup you seem to be talking about. And a lot in between.

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Any examples?

I don't think examples are needed here, since this is just common sense. Also if you could reply to the actual content of my post, that would be great.

I'm trying to respond to the content of your post. If it's such common sense then it should be easy to come up with examples. I'd argue that there isn't much in between. Either you're building a company that has to sell a product or you're building a high growth monetize later company. This post is addressing the former option.

For the high stakes kind youtube or twitter are good examples. For the business kind every old little business around the corner is an example. Why do I need to spell this out to you? For in between - can't really be bothered to research this, so I'll just give you that.

Instagram and Snapchat come to mind as companies who don't monetize their huge userbase. Instagram was in business to get bought out. We'll see what Snapchat does.

Zenefits is a licensed insurance broker it's free for users, they collect a referral fee from insurance companies. Since it's online they're sustainable from broker fees alone and don't charge users. I think some travel startups also work on a commission model for hotels + flights. Hipmunk etc...

Though referral/affiliate models are uncommon they challenge the statement about "Two kinds of companies".

Yea that's a good point...though one could argue that they're still selling a product, the insurance. But yea this model may require a different approach.

I guess it's a little semantic at this point.

Though, there's services like pricegeek that crawl Ebay graphing the better deals. They piggyback of Ebay's existing affiliate model. They never solicit anything from the customer, nor does backlinking alter the price of the item. I guess the utility is of an 'aggregator', that makes decently priced items for more accessible.

My main point was that 'Your Product is Going to Fail if you Don’t Ask Users to Pay' seemed a little overtly broad.

It was definitely broad and sure doesn't cover the entire spectrum of companies. I do believe that it include a whole lot of startups today though, and I hope that this helps them think about how to better set themselves up to succeed.

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