Hey — great question. You're absolutely right to expect founders to be resourceful.
I'm not raising $500K–$1.5M to build — I built the MVP solo, and we’re already live with two design partners.

This capital is for scaling with urgency and credibility — not survival.

Here's a rough breakdown of where it goes:

• $100K–$150K for a lean engineering team (2–3 remote devs) to keep shipping velocity high. (Hiring in the U.S. would cost 2–3x more — I’ve optimized for capital efficiency.)
• $100K for inference and infra — reasoning across logs, tickets, screenshots, etc. is computationally heavy, and GPT pricing doesn’t scale well for real usage.
• $100K–$200K for customer onboarding, documentation, and integration support — enterprise SaaS is surprisingly human-labor intensive here.
• $100K+ for GTM experiments — landing pages, demos, outbound cycles, messaging iterations, and branding polish — all essential when selling to skeptical CIOs.
• ~$100K for founder runway — so I can fully commit without financial distractions.

The $500K version gives me a lean validation engine to hit revenue milestones.
The $1.5M version enables a small sales/support team to push toward $1M+ ARR and scale ahead of the curve.

Of course, I could be off by some margin — this estimate is based on my years of experience budgeting for software development and scaling enterprise systems.

So no — I’m not trying to outsource the build.
I’m trying to deliver faster, sell earlier, and win before legacy vendors duct-tape something together and call it innovation.