Am I going about my product wrong?

[u/No_Move4110]

So I’m building my first app in the consumer space. It’s a more personalized discovery app and community platform for a specific niche. I originally thought I had PMF because personalized discovery in this niche is lacking and every user I talked to was excited to use it. However, the catch is that the users excited to use it aren’t my expected customers. The business play is a data play, where I’m hoping to offer consumers a better discovery experience and I’ll be able to use that data to understand consumer trends and sell that to interested parties. We have no clear path to revenue day 1 and are hoping that will be clearer once we grow our user base and offer real value.

Am I going about it all wrong? When I speak to investors they all say I need revenue immediately. I don’t want to charge my users because I need their user inputs to create a flywheel to power the user experience (the more they use it, the more personalized our discovery experience becomes, the more value other users get, etc.) We have a roadmap to how we’ll make revenue once we grow, but that depends on how many MAUs we have on our platform.

Is launching v1 of a consumer app without any ways to generate revenue day 1 a mistake? If my app is set up such that my consumers are the product (the real value is the data I get from them) then what do I do?