I've noticed that there are a lot of startup ideas that fall into the general category of "if we can get businesses to adopt us and get users to adopt us then .

I've noticed that there are a lot of startup ideas that fall into the general category of "if we can get businesses to adopt us and get users to adopt us then ... profit." I worked for a company called DoTheGood way back in 2001 that had a similar issue, although our problem was even worse since we really needed 3 parties to adopt us (businesses, nonprofits, and users). I think these sorts of ventures are just incredibly difficult to make work without a massive amount of money to throw into advertising and sales. There's a huge chicken and egg problem where, in the FlowTab case, users want bars to adopt it and bars want users. You can't just hope that your technology is nice enough because no matter how nice it is, without enough bars and users the tech is worthless. If you have millions (or tens of millions) to push into advertising (to acquire users) and sales (to acquire businesses) then maybe it could work, but it just makes things that much harder. Of course, we can identify some startups that did make it despite the chicken and egg problem, like AirBNB and eBay, to name a few.