If you have to live off your own revenues, it means you don’t do any premature scaling… You have to focus on the needs of your customers to reach the next level. VC backed companies have to reach the VC exit goals which means they are forced to scale immediately even if things are broken.
Your business idea could work really well if you were given a few extra months or years to work on it, but with the VC fuse burning you can’t wait.
VC’s generally don’t care about your passion, they care about maximizing returns over the shortest time period possible. If you don’t do it their way, you will be forced to leave. I have been a member of a tech Vistage group and have seen over half of the VC backed CEO’s forced out by their investors. It’s really sad.