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> they can’t turn a profit, and for any hope to turn profit they need this continual growth at a loss, and at some point the investors dump the bag on the public getting a return in a bubble they created and let the public fund the losses.

Could you provide some data to show that companies which, at IPO, have any cumulative loss or a very large cumulative loss (as a percentage of valuation or offering size), perform worse as investments or as going concerns?

From your other comments, it seems like the foundation of your proposed change is that going public with significant losses is an attempt to get less-sophisticated investors to compensate more-sophisticated investors.

While there are many arguments against your proposed change, the first step seems to be establishing that the problem you’re trying to solve actually exists. I’m not convinced that it does (but don’t have data either way - that’s just anecdotal), and in fact many - maybe most - institutional investors in private companies continue to hold post-IPO shares long after the lockup (and gradually sell over 1-3 years simply to diversify).

As you investigate this, it might be worth reading about the “CAC payback period” and how it can lead to significant upfront losses: https://baremetrics.com/academy/cac-payback-period, https://kellblog.com/2016/03/17/cac-payback-period-the-most-misunderstood-saas-metric/

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Baremetrics is a business analytics & insights company. We provide the tools and data businesses need to make solid business decisions.

Founded in 2013, we're working hard to help businesses spend less time crunching numbers and looking at spreadsheets and instead give them instant access to metrics and business insights that they need to run their businesses.

We're not some flash-in-the-pan startup...we're five years old, profitable, doing over $1M in revenue and growing. Nearly 1,000 business from all over the world trust us to help them grow their businesses.

We're looking for folks who like to solve problems and build a business and product that people genuinely love to interact with.

Read about working at Baremetrics: https://baremetrics.com/about

Benefits

* Work from anywhere (we're 100% remote)

* Minimum vacation policy

* Competitive salary

* Bonus structure

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Here's an example: https://jsreport.net/

It may seem like a complicated product, and I'm sure the guys behind it put in a lot of work to polish it, but the guts of the product are 3-4 well-established open-source libraries wrapped together with duct tape.

Here's a shameless plug to something I built, as another example: https://smsinbox.net

patio11 was kind enough to give me some feedback about that when I was getting started. I successfully charge businesses $75+ per month to use it, and although I'm proud of the programming work involved to build it, it is not substantially more complicated than BCC.

EDIT: I noticed your comment on Indie Hackers about not feeling as qualified for B2B since you don't have a lot of experience working for companies. One way to tackle this is to build a product that participates inside a bigger ecosystem (Wordpress plugins are an example, or Shopify plugins or something like https://baremetrics.com/ in the Stripe ecosystem or my thing in the Twilio ecosystem). The awesome side effect of this approach is that it often simplifies distribution, since there are already communities established around those platforms.

SaaS Inspiration

@DHH Startup School Talk (2008)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

This is the most inspiring SaaS talk, I still listen to it once a month or so for inspiration.

You'll have to find the right idea, one that is interesting to you and still solves a B2B pain point that you'll enjoy solving.

Do you have any experience working with businesses where you can build a SaaS to make something easier for them?

Basically you're looking to build something for a business that provides them value that they would sign up for and willing to pay you money to use.

You can see what others are having success with here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses
https://baremetrics.com/open

I always recommend listening to StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com.

You don't need to aim for $1k/mo, almost any niche can grow to $10k/mo or even $100k/mo. So don't limit your dream.

There is also https://nugget.one/ that will send you an idea per day and has a community support/discussion to help you execute on the one you choose to pursue.

Good luck, let us know how it goes.

Per episode with the size audience mentioned, you're looking in the hundreds. Start out with one advertisement to test the waters. I ran one advertisement that had good results (5-10x return). Like an idiot, I assumed I milked the cow dry and should look for other podcasts or advertising mediums in general. That was dumb. I booked a couple of episodes again with Release Notes that produced the same ROI.

If you're having success with an advertisement, don't be afraid to double down and spend thousands. Ideally, you should get a bulk discount from the show.

I don't have conversion rates based on % listener or cost per listener. Would love to see podcast advertising evolve to this point in the future, but it certainly hasn't yet.

The folks at Baremetrics (https://baremetrics.io/) run an awesome service for monthly recurring Saas companies that use Stripe. If you know what your lifetime customer value is, you really have more faith in your advertising dollars.

Is there anything from your freelance development projects that jumps out as potentially worthwhile? Many of the best bootstrapped SAAS businesses I've seen have come from problems people encountered while freelancing or working on other things:

Tyler Tringas created StoreMapper based upon freelance work he was doing: http://tylertringas.com/storemapper-store-locator-bootstrapped-to-50k/

Andrew Culver created ChurnBuster after repeatedly running into credit card renewal problems for clients: https://www.churnbuster.com

I built ExpeditedSSL - https://www.expeditedssl.com - after getting fed up with adding SSL to client sites.

Josh Pigford built BareMetrics - https://baremetrics.com after getting frustrated with trying to understand his metrics from other SAAS projects.

In general freelancing is a great spot to be in to observe what pains businesses have that are sufficiently difficult that they'll shell out actual amounts of money to deal with.