[john_moscow]

You need to clearly understand the difference between making money from selling software licenses to your customers vs. having the investors as your primary customers.

In the current market you will hardly find a private player looking for a return on their investment through profits/dividends; they will be more likely trying to cash out when you create enough buzz to get acquired or IPOed. That's a completely different game from the naive "sell licenses - make profit" option, but that's the game private equity plays in 2018. And no, desktop applications are not buzzwordy enough for that game, sorry.

That said, there's plenty of money to be made selling desktop products to businesses. You just need to approach it differently, get the actual product/market fit, grow your presence organically, listen to your customers, learn from your mistakes and so on. Don't get discouraged by bootstrapping - you don't need a fully functional product to see if there is a market for the problem you are solving. Create a minimal prototype, write a few articles showing it off and tune in on the feedback. Once you start hearing from real people trying to solve real problems with your prototype, it will be very easy to find which next features will make your product more usable and will inevitably bring more revenue.

[marcus_holmes]

This, so much. The assumption that startup == investors is faulty, and in fact dangerous - investors don't share your priorities.

Build the thing, and sell it (not necessarily for shareware, either). There are new channels for software now (like Setapp[0]) that you can look at, too, depending on who the customer and platform is.

Then you can make decisions based on actual sales, demand, market size, etc, and if investors are needed at that stage, then you have a waaaaay better proposition for them.

[0]: https://setapp.com/