I spent $0 on marketing and got 1,200 website visitors - Here's my exact playbook
Three months ago, I launched my SaaS with zero followers and a $0 marketing budget. I had no choice but to get creative.
I tried everything the gurus recommended. Twitter threads? Posted for weeks to my 34 followers.
LinkedIn thought leadership? Crickets.
I was ready to give up.
Then I stopped trying to "build an audience" and started going where my users already were. That shift changed everything.
In 6 weeks, I drove 1,200 targeted visitors to my site without spending a single dollar. Here's what actually worked:
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Reddit comments (not posts): I spent 20 minutes daily answering real questions in 8 specific subreddits. Never pitched my product. Just helped people genuinely. This alone brought 680 visitors.
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SEO content that solved problems: I wrote 5 blog posts answering the exact questions my users Googled.
No fluff, just tactical solutions. Each post took 3 hours to write but brought consistent traffic.
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Community engagement: I showed up in Slack communities and Discord servers where founders hung out. Contributed value first, mentioned my tool second. Result: 290 visitors and actual conversations.
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What failed hard: Cold DMs on LinkedIn (2% response rate), generic Twitter threads (8 likes total), and posting in Facebook groups (got banned).
The biggest lesson? You don't need an audience. You need to be useful in the right places.
My question for you: If you've grown a startup with zero budget, what channel surprised you the most?
if you want to connect here is my Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naik-pratham/
Did you focus narrowly or spread yourself across multiple platforms?
Really interesting, I’m in the same stage right now, mostly trying to get early traction by commenting on Reddit threads. It’s been pretty quiet so far, so your post actually gives me hope that it’s not all for nothing.
Curious how you managed to get users from Reddit without mentioning your product directly? I’m finding a lot of my comments get removed even when I’m just trying to add value, not promote anything. The moderation there can be wild 😅
If you didn't advertise your product on Reddit, how did Reddit users find out about it? And what exactly are we talking about? I would say that there are no universal strategies. It's quite possible that it worked in your specific case with your product, but it won't work in another.