Why I built Poster in Palmerton, not Silicon Valley

I still work carpentry when the software revenue isn't paying the mortgage yet. Which is now, if I'm honest.

I live in Palmerton, Pennsylvania. Population about 5,300. It's an old zinc-mining town in the eastern part of the state, tucked into the Lehigh Valley. There is exactly one traffic light on the main drag. My neighbors don't know what "SaaS" stands for and they never will, and that is fine.

I get asked pretty regularly why I don't move to San Francisco or Austin or Miami to "be closer to the money." The people asking are usually founders who did move, or investors, or people who never left. I want to write down the reasons because it might be useful to another operator who's thinking about the same question.

Reason 1: The rent is not a tax on your ambition

The median home price in San Francisco is somewhere north of $1.5M. In Palmerton it's $190K. A one-bedroom apartment in the Mission is $3,500 a month. My mortgage is less than that in a year.

This matters not because I'm cheap — well, I am cheap, but that's separate — it matters because runway isn't measured in dollars, it's measured in months.

When your fixed costs are 5x higher, every month of building without paying customers is 5x more expensive. Which means the "wait, iterate, listen to users, don't ship features nobody wants" advice everyone gives you is unaffordable if you live somewhere that eats $10K a month before you buy groceries. So people rush. They take VC money to buy time. They build for the investor deck instead of the customer.

Meanwhile in Palmerton, I can burn 18 months of runway on savings and part-time carpentry and never touch outside capital. That means every product decision is optimized for users, not for the next round.

Reason 2: Nobody here cares about your growth metrics

In tech-heavy cities the conversation at every party is "what's your ARR." In Palmerton the conversation is "did you see the game." I say that as a compliment.

There's a specific kind of pressure that comes from being surrounded by other founders. It's mostly good — you learn faster, you get honest feedback, you find co-founders and hires. But there's also a kind that's bad. It's the pressure to look like you're winning even when you're not. To fabricate hockey-stick charts. To pretend "hyper-scale" is around the corner because that's what everyone at the coffee shop is talking about.

I'm insulated from all of that here. My reality check is my wife asking "did you get a customer this week." If the honest answer is no, I know exactly what I need to work on tomorrow. Nobody's here to convince me my "TAM" justifies another six months of building.

Reason 3: The users I want to serve don't live in tech capitals either

Poster's ideal customer is a solo operator running a real-world business — a contractor, a photographer, an antique dealer, a coffee shop owner. Somebody who needs to post consistently on TikTok and Instagram but does not have three hours a day to shoot and edit video.

Those people don't live in the Mission. They live in towns like mine. When I build for them I have the enormous advantage of being them, mostly. I know that the thing you actually need is not "AI-powered growth loops," it's "a way to post 3 times a week without hating my life."

You cannot design software for that audience if you've been in a bubble of VCs and other founders for five years. The vocabulary breaks. The assumptions break. The prices you set are wrong. I've watched a lot of software get built for the imaginary "SMB" that exists in a deck slide instead of the real one that exists in Palmerton or Bethlehem or Scranton.

Reason 4: I don't want to work for investors

I'll say the quiet part loud: outside capital is a job. You take money, you get a boss. Even the friendliest, most founder-aligned VC is going to expect returns on their fund's timeline, which is 7-10 years, which means you're either exiting or dying by year 10.

I don't want that job. I want the job of running a small durable software business that pays me and one or two other people well, forever. That business does not need to be a unicorn to be a good business. In fact, unicorn ambitions are what usually kills the small good business that could have existed.

Palmerton makes this easy because I'm not surrounded by people telling me the small durable business is a failure to have vision.

Reason 5: The internet doesn't care where you are

This is the obvious one but I want to state it plainly because people forget. Our customers come from search, TikTok, YouTube, and word of mouth. They don't know or care that our office is a converted mudroom in a 1920s farmhouse. The website loads the same speed from Manhattan or Manila. The Stripe payment clears the same way regardless of my area code.

The old myth that you have to be in a "tech hub" to build tech was true 20 years ago. It stopped being true around 2010. The people who still say it are usually protecting their real estate investment.

What it actually looks like

If you're curious: I write code in the mornings before I go to a job site. I take support tickets from my phone during breaks. I ship deploys from my truck on the way home. My wife tolerates this. The dog does not care.

I built Poster this way. I built Sites this way. I built Market this way. All of them serve real customers, all of them are profitable at the margin, none of them required moving to a city that would have eaten our savings.

That's the pitch. If it resonates with you and you're building something too — from a small town, from a spare bedroom, from wherever you actually live — I'd love to hear from you.

Written in Palmerton, PA. Not Silicon Valley. Not a growth-hacker Slack. We build the way carpenters build — measured twice, cut once.