I know I must get with the times or whatever, but man this is sad. Essentially every consumer social app creator is just working for the ad industry, or for free.
If you want to make money with what you're doing you need to be either really good/marketing-savvy/popular or pick something that most people consider 'boring'.
Please tell that to my boss/company owner. He sees news articles about how such-and-such social startup created an app in X days and wonders why we can't do the same just as quickly.
Sure, if you want me to write a Twitter clone I can do that in an afternoon. If you want me to write an app for a very specific enterprise sector filled with regulations, while making sure it integrates with our existing desktop software (that was originally written without internet connectivity in mind at all), that'll take an order of magnitude more days.
i think there should be a lot more innovation in viable business models rather than concept of the product itself, but that doesn't seem to be a popular sentiment.
What really happens is these founders are focused on the product and don't really think much about the business model. This is understandable and actually much better than MBA types who spend months planning for stuff without even building, but the problem is there isn't really a good business model for these types of companies.
The only viable option is ads, and even this has been monopolized by big techcos so it's not easy.
Most founders don't even get to worrying about this point because their companies never take off. But the ones that do, come to a point where they need to make a decision whether to sell out or to find a viable business model.
Like I said, finding a viable business model is increasingly becoming difficult for consumer apps that rely on ads, so these companies tend to cash out.
From outside it may look like a bunch of "tech bros" hoping to strike it big with minimal effort but that's mostly not the case if you look inside. If you're curious, look up what this TBH company went through before having this "overnight success".