How would you approach growth for this product?

Hello all, hope you're doing well. My name is Carlos and I am leading the build of Shelf.

Shelf is an asset tagging and tracking infrastructure. (Physical assets - AKA: things).

How did we get here? We know of 2 completely unrelated companies (one in the cleaning business, another in the ship building business ) that asked us to build a similar system. We convinced them to rather get a subscription on Shelf as we build it - instead of investing and running the whole system themselves.

That worked and we are building the MVP - we also - picked to go Open Source for the code as we love the idea of organisations running their own Shelf installations on their own premises (some organisations/companies assets are quite sensitive and I can totally understand they dont want them running on shared servers).

Now, here is the question.

We convinced two companies to hop on Shelf ecosystem, they approved the scope of the MVP and are launching customers.

However, how would you go around getting more interest for the tool? Contacting other companies in the same niche? Without a case study?

Should we run ads to those niches to get them to see demos and ideally sign intention - to - use - the - tool agreements?

Or would you run broad, benefit driven traffic ads to a landing page to see what sort of interest there is for the tool?

Not sure if it is worth 'niching' down at this moment. As we do not even know which niche to pick.

As you can already read, confusion is all around us for now. We will end up finding a good angle, but I am interested in the perspectives of the Indie hacker community!