[metadata]

This is not necessarily true. Wrong monetization can be the killing blow. Market can change and your business model which used to work can suddenly fall apart. A recent example for business model change is Tailwind where traffic to their open-source docs plummeted and suddenly not enough people are upgrading to their commercial licenses.

Startups die for a variety of reasons, even if products are popular and loved.

[limagnolia]

Tailwind was (is?) also selling "lifetime" licenses, which means eventually their sales would collapse anyway, once they have sold a license to most interested customers. They were always going to need to pivot at some point. regardless of traffic to their docs.

[pooper]

To play the devil's advocate, more people are born every day and as long as there are more developers today than there were yesterday, lifetime licenses can bring in a trickle of money each month, especially if the marginal cost of each new customer is zero or near zero.

[dasil003]

True enough, though I think Tailwind suffered something of a black swan event of having lifetime pricing plus AI coding assistants hitting an inflection point that immediately and thoroughly decimated the value prop of their core monetized product.