How to innovate products for the general public?

[Jake]

Some of the really big successes like Facebook and Youtube operated unprofitably for years from investor capitol while they build a user base of their services, advertisement free. Membership sites are hard to pull off, particularly some social site.

I hope you haven't operated completely in a vacuum, you can't be sure how much of the public shares your appraisal of the value of your site, certainly alpha and beta testing before investing a huge amount makes sense, perhaps first hiring social engineering and survey administrators to gauge user response, after that some advertising PR person who knows how to write press releases and generate buzz.