[drewcrawford]

I'm going through much the same thought process with my startup. The real question is--when do you need to start making money?

Obviously the easy answer is "as soon as possible", but most startups have a burn time. Our founders have pretty much decided that we can burn until we get popular, and until then we're going to focus on building a great product and pay our expenses out-of-pocket.

The "third option" can be awesome, but finding it depends on what your company does. I can't speak to Mint's revenues, but I do know that I switched banks because Mint found me a better deal. If you can provide value (or money) to your customers, that is pretty much ideal.

Alternatively, the third option could suck. We've bounced around a "third model" internally for some time, and we're not sure if it will actually be valuable or not. We'll probably code it up as we get closer to running out of funding and see if it works. If it doesn't--we'll go a more traditional route.