WARNING: operating on strings alone will only work with ASCII and will count wrong when input is a non-ASCII UTF-8 encoded character, and will probably even corrupt characters since it cuts multibyte chars mid-sequence.

Here's a UTF-8-aware version:

// NOTE: this isn't multi-Unicode-codepoint aware, like specifying skintone or
//       gender of an emoji: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-modifiers.html
func substr(input string, start int, length int) string {
    asRunes := []rune(input)
    
    if start >= len(asRunes) {
        return ""
    }
    
    if start+length > len(asRunes) {
        length = len(asRunes) - start
    }
    
    return string(asRunes[start : start+length])
}

Regardless of the solution you should benchmark it. You may think that a solution is fast or slow but the reality is that until you measure its pretty much the fastest and the slowest at the same time.