What’s wrong with wanting to make money?

The main purpose of a business is making profit, online tech startups included, unless you are starting a non-profit organization. Going through startup advice available online, most of the advice borders on the line-forget about making money and instead concentrate on gathering yourself an army of users. How you can do that without the money to build a solid product, advertise, legal services, office space, internet and employee salaries; is still a puzzle to me.

While many argue that initial you may need to just concentrate on improve your product and gain some traction and try to raise some investment. To me it’s a valid point, but one that fails to put into perspective the business model. Unless you can get more funding your company faces a risk of suffering still-birth. Having a solid business plan from the beginning sounds logical to me, even if you get more funding, making your own money makes it easy to project when you can stand own and how much you need from the investors and more still whether it’s a sustainable business model or not , early on.

Unless you are rich already, you live in Silicon Valley and have raised a boatload of cash; I don’t how one is supposed to earn a living doing what you love. Without money to pay the bills, I don’t see how one can even concentrate on the idea; getting a job might be a good idea. Entrepreneurship is supposed to be a liberating, but how can you do that without the ability to make your own money?

Also ordinary users do not seem to mind at all, your monetization efforts. Almost the question that always comes up with most people, how do websites like Facebook make money? In Africa some people have never seen ads on Facebook and it puzzles them when they read about how it’s making its owners billionaires and millionaires. I overheard someone suggesting that every time you get on Facebook, the money you get charged by the internet provider, they also get a share. Obviously this sounds ridiculous but the fact of the matter even the users expect you have some form of a monetization plan. If the users do not mind, why not try it?

I maybe totally wrong to think that the main purpose of starting a business should be making profit, and before you can start thinking about anything else you should have a business model on how you are going to make money.  I would like to hear what you think and hopeful understand what I do not seem to be getting through.