1. Sell at discounted prices to grow quickly, capture market share and public image 2. Raise prices to profitability once you have an advantageous position in the market and consumers either love your brand or they have no options to switch to once your prices go up. Alternately for startups, you can sell the business once you have an established position and let someone else worry about profitability, or sell to another big company that wants to kill their competition.

The key in the plan is step 2. However, for MoviePass, there was no way they were going to get to step 2. There was every reason for the theaters to compete with MoviePass instead of making deals with them. Most people only visit one brand of theater (whichever meets the cleanliness/price ratio near their house), and each chain could make their own subscription plan cheaper without cutting a deal with MoviePass. So MoviePass was never going to get to step 2 where they had an advantageous market position, because their one key feature- being able to be used at multiple chains- wasn't compelling. So they cut their subscription to $10/month, which consumers loved, but everyone knew that it wouldn't fix the problem with the business model, and they were basically just giving free movie tickets to consumers with investors money.