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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".

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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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