Why I Chose $2 Subscriptions Over $5M in VC Money I turned down venture capital. Not because I'm principled (though I'd like to think I am), but because the math actually worked differently when I looked at who I wanted to serve. Let me walk you through what that decision actually means, because it's messier and more liberating than you'd think. ## The Numbers That Made Me Reconsider Everything When you're chasing VC funding, the pitch deck demands hockey stick growth. You need to hit 1 million users by year three. That means spending aggressively on customer acquisition—maybe $20-30 per user. It means building features for enterprise customers willing to pay $500/month. It means geographic focus on wealthy markets first. A developer in Lagos, Nigeria? A freelancer in Bangalore making $15,000 annually? They weren't in the target market. The math didn't work. But what if the math *did* work differently? What if instead of 1 million users at $50/month, you had 100,000 users at $2/month? That's the same revenue, but suddenly you're building for humans instead of spreadsheets. A $2 price point sounds absurd until you realize: that's what a coffee costs in most of the world. It's not a cost decision—it's a accessibility decision. ## The Real Freedom Part (And the Real Constraints) Here's what I don't have to do: - Spend $500K on sales team hiring - Optimize for enterprise features nobody actually wants - Maintain a 90-day cohort retention benchmark - Explain why the product pivot happened to a board - Raise Series A before my runway disappears Here's what I *actually* have to do instead: - Make the product genuinely good, because word-of-mouth is my only marketing - Understand my user deeply—they're paying with money they actually count - Build features that solve real problems, not features that sell better - Maintain profitability month to month (it's terrifying and clarifying) The freedom feels real until you hit the growth ceiling. At 15,000 users, a single bad deployment costs money that doesn't come back. You can't absorb a 20% churn spike. You can't experiment wildly. But you also can't ignore user feedback. One person canceling means you notice. ## What Actually Gets Built Differently I've noticed my decision-making is just... different. When a user from Pakistan requests a feature, I think about whether it works offline-first (because their connection isn't guaranteed). When someone from Kenya encounters a bug, I remember they might not have another $2 to spare that month. The product becomes reflective of that reality. I'm not optimizing for "stickiness metrics" or "daily active users." I'm optimizing for: *does this person still think it's worth two dollars?* That produces different design decisions. Fewer dark patterns. No aggressive notification strategies. No arbitrary paywalls mid-task. Is it slower? Sometimes. You can't fake good products when your margin is $1.20 per user. ## The Honest Reality Check I'm not going to pretend this is a flex. I don't have 50 engineers. I can't move fast on infrastructure. I can't spend six months building a feature and hope it lands—the user base doesn't afford failed bets. But I also haven't lost sleep over disappointing investors. I haven't pivoted into something I didn't believe in. I haven't hired aggressively and then laid people off. I'm building something sustainable for a market everyone else considers "too small." That's either visionary or delusional. Probably both. The tradeoff isn't between freedom and constraints. Both paths have both. It's between different kinds of constraints—and which ones you can live with. --- I'm building an affordable AI assistant ($2/month) with 50% of revenue going to animal rescue. [simplylouie.com](https://simplylouie.com)