Reading around the history of Facebook, there were advertising sales quite early, a lot earlier than people realise. They used to do local campus deals, student

Reading around the history of Facebook, there were advertising sales quite early, a lot earlier than people realise. They used to do local campus deals, student credit card deals etc. Echoing dasht's point above, no startup should plan to "monetize later". Plan for 'profitability later' but without some kind of test (like a sale) it's going to be harder to test and iterate on ideas (lean startup etc.)