How a Three-Legged Rescue Dog Made Me Rethink Everything About Building a Business I found her on a monsoon morning in Manila, limping through traffic with two legs missing. No collar, no one claiming her. I almost walked past. Three years later, I'm building an AI company because of that decision not to walk past. ## The Moment Everything Changed When you're bootstrapping a startup, you obsess over margins. You optimize every dollar. You read the business books that say "focus on your users, that's it." And they're not wrong—but they're also incomplete. That rescue dog taught me something those books missed: the choices you make when building something stick with you. They become your company's DNA. I spent the first six months of her recovery nursing her back to health—vet bills I couldn't afford, antibiotics, physical therapy. My friends thought I was insane. "Why are you sinking money into this when you're trying to launch a startup?" But watching her relearn how to walk changed something in my brain. Here was a being with everything stacked against her—lost limbs, trauma, zero safety net—just... trying. No business plan. No growth metrics. Just pure, uncomplicated determination to live. And I realized I'd been building my company for the wrong reasons. ## Building for $2/Month Markets I was targeting developers in Pakistan, Philippines, Nigeria, India—places where cloud costs can swallow your entire freelance budget. A $10/month AI tool feels like a luxury you can't afford when you're earning $500-800 a month as a contractor. That's when it hit me: why am I trying to extract maximum profit from people with minimum resources? My rescue dog couldn't pay for her recovery. But someone paid. Someone chose her survival over their money. I wanted to build something that worked the same way—where the business model itself was built on mutual care, not extraction. So I designed it differently than every competitor was telling me to. Instead of making the business profitable first and donating scraps later, I built the donations straight into the revenue model. Not as an afterthought. As the core. ## What This Actually Means Here's the part that sounds idealistic but is actually practical: When you're not chasing maximum profit margins, you make different engineering decisions. You don't need 47 pricing tiers. You don't need dark patterns in your onboarding. You don't need to nickel-and-dime users who are already making difficult choices about what they can afford. A developer in Nairobi spending $2/month on a tool is real money to her. Treating that transaction with respect—making sure the tool actually works, actually saves her time, actually doesn't disappear in six months when funding runs out—becomes non-negotiable. And the rescue angle? It's not marketing. I literally spend half of revenue on animal shelters in the countries where my users live. Because that $2/month user in Karachi is probably closer to a stray dog's struggle than she is to venture capital. ## Why This Isn't Naive I get the skeptics. "You can't run a business on altruism." Right. You can't run it on *just* altruism. But you can run it on sustainable, lean operations + aligned values. No venture capital means no pressure to 10x quarterly returns. No pressure to 10x returns means I can actually keep unit economics reasonable. My rescue dog survived not because of charity alone, but because of practical, consistent care. That's what I'm trying to build: a business that survives because it's designed to serve real people, with real constraints, in real countries. The margins are smaller. The growth is slower. The impact is measurable in actual lives—both human and animal. Turns out that's a better business model than I learned in any startup playbook. --- *I'm building an affordable AI assistant ($2/month) with 50% of revenue going to animal rescue. [simplylouie.com](https://simplylouie.com)*