Dave, I am an early adopter. I love technology, I love trying out new technology, new apps, and love when sites launch redesigns.

However, I was unable to use Path for any considerable length of time. I would open it up every day and say "Wow that's beautiful", play with the UI a bit, and that was it. I never really truly "engaged" with the app. It seemed the only reason I opened it up was to admire its beauty.

True, I don't have many friends on there (I think I had 4 or 5, of which only 1 used it regularly). But that hadn't stopped me from engaging with 4square for a while, or any of the other apps out there. What I'm saying is, although I don't use 4sq anymore, when I did use it, I really got into it for a certain period of time.

Now if Path can't attract someone like me (who should be the easiest demographic to attract) how do you plan to grow the service? Now, while it's true that you shouldn't optimize for users, but rather, optimize for the experience, how does this particular experience offer me something more that I can't already get from Facebook or Twitter or Instagram? What is it that I'm getting that would make me say "Hey I am going to spend x amount of my limited time in a day to use this app" (keeping in mind that I'm an early adopter and that I'm more inclined to spend more of my finite time per day on things like this)?

Now let's assume Path did offer me more value for something FB or Twitter or Instagram couldn't do as well. Sometimes "good-enough" trumps "the best", and this holds especially when all my friends are on the "good-enough" service, which actually makes it the best service for my needs (bear with me on the logic). Now again, although network effects are strong and you shouldn't be scared to fight them, this brings us back to the question of value-add. You mentioned elsewhere that 'families' and other close groups was a popular use-case, but this puts the burden of recruitment on the user doesn't it? Wouldn't the user have to see enough of a value add to justify the time and effort it would take to get their close groups on a service (and how does this type of behavior scale to a more casual or mainstream audience?).

I'm just unable to see the short term vision, and I'm certainly unable to see the long term vision. While this usually means you're doing something right, in this instance, you're competing in a completely saturated market dominated by network effects never seen before in the history of the world. All of this is even before we ask perhaps the most important questions of all; "How do we make money?". Which, I'm fully prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt for now, because I think the other ones are more pressing for the actual service (excluding the business part of it).

How do you plan to address these kinds of tough tough questions moving forward? I'm sure these are the things you think about each and every day, and I'm sure your team is working incredibly hard to answer them with every blood sweat and tear that they exude, but I'd like to know how you personally plan to address these questions and realities.

Now with full disclosure, I'm just a kid, still in school studying Computer Science, and have no where near the amount of experience you do with building services and companies around those services. I'm curious how someone with your experiences approaches these kinds of questions.