>It also kills me that when talking about ways one makes money he mentions Stripe, Boku, and Kickstarter in the same breath with ad networks. Those are not busi

>It also kills me that when talking about ways one makes money he mentions Stripe, Boku, and Kickstarter in the same breath with ad networks. Those are not business models. They are just ways that money travels. It's like saying one's business model is accepting checks. I came here to post this. Kickstarter's intent is to assist with bootstrapping a product. It's not monetization. It's a way to get the capital to produce something. They answer the question "It's going to cost $100,000 to make a batch of our widgets/books/etc. Is there enough of a market to actually sell that number?" Stripe, Amazon Payments, Google Checkout, etc. are payment processors. Again, they're not monetization. They're there to get money from customers hands into your hands. They're the answer to "We want to sell this, how can we get our customer's money?" But even if you're using those methods to provide answers to those questions, the fundamental question still remains: "What are you selling, and how do you sell it?" THAT is where the business model comes in. If you cannot answer that question, I seriously question your entire startup.