Great comment. My frustration primarily comes from being a consumer of these startups. I understand why co-founders choose this approach. But it's taken me a while to realize that in this "system", I am not a consumer but I am the product. These companies think very differently than what I am used to as they measured by number of "active users" as the big companies of day like Google, Facebook, Dropbox use these metrics for acquisition. Google would rather buy a company with 1m free users than a company with 10k paid users paying 100usd each.
> Google would rather buy a company with 1m free users than a company with 10k paid users paying 100usd each.
Absolutely. This is why you have companies who have not proven to have a profitable business model, yet they are valued far higher than your small, bootstrapped startup. This is one more angle to look at it. I can happily claim that my tiny little bootstrapped startup is actually more profitable than Twitter :)
