If you don&#x27;t have an ironclad way to make money, you will not get funded in Austin.  No one in Austin cares about growth of users if those users are not actively contributing to the bottom line.  Relying on some sort of soft advertising or vague monetization hand waving for sometime in the future will get you absolutely nowhere.  It&#x27;s been like that since the first bubble burst and maybe a little bit before.<p>This attitude has some serious pitfalls, no doubt.  You don&#x27;t hear about many &#x27;grow users to the stratosphere and sell for obscene piles of cash before the first hint of profit&#x27; stories here.  Or &#x27;critical mass was achieved and now we can&#x27;t help but make rivers of cash&#x27; stories (which, to be fair, are fairly rare).<p>But you also don&#x27;t hear about the &#x27;we poured money into this unprofitable thing because of an impressive growth curve and it imploded because we couldn&#x27;t find a way to turn users into money&#x27; stories here either.<p>Fewer headline grabbing stories, no doubt.  But what you do end up with is a whole host of solid companies that either make money from almost the beginning or that go away quickly.  Investors here want to pour gas on a fire that&#x27;s already burning (doesn&#x27;t everybody?).  They shy away when there is no spark in sight.<p>But that doesn&#x27;t mean there&#x27;s not a lot of innovation happening.  There absolutely is, but just not in the &#x27;get the users and the rest will follow&#x27; realm of high-risk.<p>You&#x27;re going to have to get lucky with the right investor with an appetite for risk in a competitive area of social apps where even the most successful companies struggle to turn a profit or show how your current user base can be solidly monetized today.