A decade+ of acquisition as the default "exit" (and the idea that you have to be driving for an "exit" in the first place) made people straight up forget how companies normally work, apparently.
Seriously, why not just do something well and make a living from it? I've seen the word enshittifcation plenty lately, and it strikes me that the focus on exits and payouts is a big part of the problem.
I feel old and you goddamn kids better be off my lawn by the time I get back with the shotgun.
Well, for a long time, you would just get an MVP up and then collect as many users as possible by offering free accounts, and if you were somewhat aligned with something Facebook or Google was vaguely interested in, you'd get acquired for $100m. Getting $100m for two years of work is a lot more lucrative than working hard for a decade to build a self-sufficient company, so I can't really blame people for doing it.
Plus, in the case where you'd choose to build a real business, now you'd have to meet user expectations of everything being free because that's what they get everywhere else.
This is a factor you need to take into account, but in my experience, people overstate it. It's not actually that hard to get people to pay for things online.
The way you do it is the way it's always been done historically: offer a value proposition that justifies the money. And don't offer it for free at the beginning. People rightfully get very angry if you change the deal after they've come to rely on your product or service.
I don't know, my experience is that there is a group of people who don't mind paying for things online. I can generally group them in "people who own a mac, an iphone or an ipad"
I still am clueless as to how to generate a network effect without giving things away for free. And as you said, once it's free, it's expected to remain free
The cynical me says that some people are able to generate a network effect because of fame or because of an existing network to which they belong (i.e. being chosen at YC or published in a newspaper). For example, FB was promoted to death in all US campuses for free during the 2000s. I wonder how that happened (honest question)
We're just talking about a situation where some existing large interests have a lucrative business peddling some pretty addictive stuff, and they want to make sure nobody else encroaches on their turf. To that end, they're willing to spend a lot of money to "make the problem go away". Sometimes that means bringing the upstarts into the fold!
