As I start building a social sharing startup I know we might be crazy telling users, from day one, how we are making money on Referly (shared commissions on purchases they generate when they share product links - and matching social disincentives for spamming your friends and having a crappy signal to noise ratio of clicks to purchases) but I just don't see how companies doing the "bait and switch" of adding a business model later is going to keep working. People are getting smarter about this, and more aware that they are becoming the product when they use these services that are eventually ad-funded.

I'm not trying to say we are some genius with Referly, because the money from day one part does turn off some people and might be slowing our adoption a bit. But the upside is that we have to deliver a degree of utility that makes it worth it to the user to know we are making money (and they are making money too in our model).

Is this too much capitalist utopia - or could this really be a model for future businesses besides ours?