What I've said is based on my own experience.

Since you want stories, here is one: http://www.fastcompany.com/3032341/most-creative-people/this-startup-had-over-5-million-users-and-a-great-product-then-it-folde

"We built a heck of a product, but we didn't build the business."

You can have a great, world changing product, millions of users but at the end of the day what matters is the money to keep your startup going. Springpad has $7.3M in funding but still ended up in deadpool. This shows the importance of making your own money to keep your business going. They made money but not enough to sustain their business.

How you, your people and your investors are going to know what you are charging while your user don't know you?

If you don't even know what you are charging (for) or roughly how much, then you probably don't even know what you are doing, your target users and markets.

Also, users pay because of what you offered, your product, and not you... maybe few of them do like your friends and family members as a token of support. But if really they pay because of who you are then you must be as popular as Justin Bieber.

My whole point of argument is that you don't have to have a perfect business plan from Day 1 but you have to know your plan/model, how to charge for your product and how much roughly especially for SaaS products. Then start charging as soon as you ship a "chargeable" version and change the pricing/model base on user feedbacks/markets/competitors.

If what you are doing already existed in the market (99%), look at your competitors and if you are doing something revolutionary that has yet to exist (1%), then set a reasonable price based on the cost, etc... then go to your users and ask them.

It's positive to think that way, get inspired by those successful entrepreneurs but keep in mind that we are not one of them, at least not yet.

I'm talking about the 99% of us here. Lets say you and Richard Branson have the exact same idea, same pitch. Who will get investors invested in them?

Money (including investors) will not come without a clear business plan. Put it this way, how are people going to pay you when you don't even know how to charge them?

I don't see how identifying how to make money or making money early will kill any innovative ideas, in fact making money is the clearest indicator that your startup is making something people want. You have to know on Day 1 how you can make money. Down the line you might change how you monetize but like it or not you need to make money ASAP.

Why? Because 99% of the early stage startups out there are self funded. Don't be fooled by those well-funded startups out there that say things like "We want to focus growing our userbase first". They, the 1% are backed by millions of dollars of funding. You? Probably your own bank account.

Pinterest, Instagram and a few others are the few exceptional cases. But even they are not making any money, they from day one know how to make money.

It's never too early to make money but it might be too late to save your startup when you starting to run out of money. That IMHO is going to kill many innovative ideas.