Clever take on the situation. However, unlike a straight up B2B play, you do still have a huge chunk of your company doing B2C work, and the more good you do in the latter, the easier the former gets.

Ask the engineers at Google and Facebook whether they feel like they're unimportant even though they're not directly bringing in the money for their company.

"You have to make your product better not through superior technology, but often through superior PR, sales operations, or other non-geek issues"

Better sales/PR does not make what is being sold better. It is business development, not product development.

But if it sells better, that's better business.

Product * Business = Profit.

Better make sure Business > 0, preferably > 1. You can worry about product perfection once you've solved The Money Problem.

He didn't say "make your business better". If he had replaced "product" with "business" I wouldn't have replied.

What makes a product 'better' is more than just the qualities intrinsic to it. A product is 'better' if it is more useful to the consumer, and in tech, more widespread apps are preferred.

For example, take Oracle. Its not that much better than most of its competition, (DB2 SQL Server, etcetera) but nearly every enterprise DB app works with it. (I know, I worked on an enterprise app at IBM, and we made it work with Oracle before DB2.) This is because Oracle has the greater market share, and the greater market share leads to a better product ecosystem, which in turn leads to better market share. In many situations, being on top is all it takes to make your product 'better' in the eyes of the customer, and to do that, marketing and sales are very helpful. (Especially with B2B)

Some services have huge network effects that make the product better through higher distribution.

Imagine if there were no "digg this" buttons. There would be worse content and fewer Digg users - making all of Digg worse.

Fewer Digg users might result in a higher quality digg, because the community is more tightly-knit.

Digg as a community isn't worth much. Digg is valuable because of the huge set of eyeballs for Ads on Digg itself and Dugg stories. It has nothing to do with community.

Digg has different value to different demographics. For the advertisers and business persons, it is valuable in proportion to the size of the community. To those within the community, it is valuable inversly proportional to the size of the community - unless you're in part of the community that likes videos of small children hitting grown men in the genitals with baseball bats.

The problem isn't that the community is valueless - it's that it is very difficult to monetize other people's contributions.

I think Andrew's making a good point here -- if you can offer some sort of value-add to your customers, it'll help diversify your business. Virtual goods (have to be scarce and desirable!), extra services, special privileges all qualify.

But you don't need a gigantic avalanche of hits to make an ad-supported site work, if your goal is to make a business that adds some cash to your pocket or might be picked up by a large organization.

The days when every startup dreamed of IPO and sky-high revenues are over. Most of us, I dare say, aren't shooting for that at all.

Yes, plentyoffish (god's favorite example) does make millions per year from ads. Like $9 million. I don't need $9 million. $2 million would be fine. Selling the business for $9 million would be even better.