What marketing channel worked for you before SEO kicked in?

Here are mine for the first set of customers:

IH : For multiple products
Reddit : For MicroSaaSIdea.com
Twitter: For Siteoly.com
BetaList: For Flezr.com
ProductHunt: For MicroSaaSHQ.com
Gumroad Discover(like Marketplace) : For ZeroToFounder.com

I took my previous SaaS to about $60k a month almost exclusively on LinkedIn.

At the time it was with DMs.

Now there's a better approach - posting and engaging on LinkedIn in the right way- and this is where I shamelessly plug Aware, the tool I'm building that many creators and social sellers are using to create massive awareness on that platform.

Reddit is becoming popular but it's a very tricky channel. You have to be really part of the community to be able to promote (kinda).

Twitter is in my opinion the best if you're starting out. Just Monitor certain terms and reply to as much tweets as possible.

Linked In worked well for https://firstpageresume.com by responding to a trending #opentowork post.

Twitter is working well for https://chatgptpluginslist.com

Pro Tip: The best way to get followers is to comment on trending tweets related to your app. Use the apps twitter account and ensure your profile has a link to your app.

Reddit, Discord, IndieHackers, ProductHunt, HackerNews

For launching products, the most success we've had is through PPC. It's the fastest way to get customers, testing customer behaviour, and even getting sales and pre-build payments. The hard part is making a profitable paid engine, ad costs squeeze profits, and you really have to be cautious about targeting keywords that bring in a lot of freebie users.

Alternatively, calling up businesses and asking can I speak to a manager, or someone in charge of a department, and approaching them that you can offer them a product that will make them more money seems to be a great way to get better insights into what type of product to build

For me, it has been just blending myself into the community and being helpful. I started on IndieHackers and then gradually build up my presence on Twitter.

The power of the community is so amazing. When I build in public, people are so supportive to give feedback and help share it.

That really kicked off a growth loop and then over time I use mini products for organic word of mouth!

This is a wonderful question! Thanks for asking

Definitely testing out a lot of the channels that have been mentioned, but I've definitely seen Gumroad Discover being solid for capturing emails. It's efficient because you can duplicate template-style products in a matter of minutes, once you have your core product design down. Have been able to get +700 emails from 14 free products I've launched on Gumroad, and probably just scratching the surface. The tricky part is then converting these freebie downloaders into paying customers.

Writing on Medium has worked for me when I did content about X vs. Y product and included mine as a third (got over 100 signups in a day from a post before it died off).

Curious to see what others lean on and to learn from it!

Twitter is working fine for https://ehsaasprogram.net.pk/ehsaas-tracking/

I'll leave you with two pieces that I wrote on this topic, Salil.

25 content channels

[First 100 users]
(https://geeksandexperts.com/article/the-first-100-users)

Hey guys, what subreddit do you get the most traction on?

My efforts are primarily directed at Twitter for the time being for Kanuu.io - but I plan on exploring LinkedIn too as their algorithm can be great for getting content out there

For us, posting our SaaS on a lot of startup directories like Futurepedia, g2, capterra etc., worked pretty well. The traffic increased a lot, and also the leads.

It's not the best way, but overall, it worked for us pretty well.

AppSumo worked for ViSPR.net to gain 450+ LTD users. Made +65K USD in 12 months. Be aware that AppSumo has a marketplace to self-list your products. Ensure that LTDs are O.K. for this product and that you do not need to sustain yourself or the development or upkeep of your product when you list on AppSumo. A definite issue is the refunds and the bad mouth of the reviewers. Sumolings nowadays are super greedy and expect perfect solutions basically for peanuts. So make sure only to develop a no-code or Weekend product and have it sit there to monetize over time all by itself. Don´t promote this product; it only grows the AppSumo platform and not your sales. Rinse and repeat often, and LTD platforms will work for you.

Other recommended LTD Platforms are Pitchground, Dealify, and Dealmirror.

With this approach, you can also contact Facebook Group admins that are other LTD platform affiliates to help promote your tool to their audience. Note that listing a marketplace product on AppSumo gets no access to affiliates, so listing on the marketplace will block you from using this approach with AppSumo.

For me building an extension drove a lot of the original traffic to my URL Shortener T.LY. Building extensions or apps help to bring awareness by leveraging the stores to help promote and drive traffic to your site.

Twitter worked great for colddm.me
But it could be because it was twitter based product

When I launched uxhack.co around 5 years back. The initial traction I got was from:
Betapage, Launching next

From social sites, Quora and LinkedIn also helped quite a bit.

And one growth hack which I wanted to try was online hackathon. This worked wonders for us. Infact now we have done so many that we now offer this as a B2B offering.

P.S: the last point is quite contextual and depends a lot on what you are building. I think this works well when you have marketplace, or supply and demand type of use case.
Also if one type of users you Target are young folks (<25 yrs), then you don't really have to dole out cash prizes. Amazon vouchers works great as well!

Reddit and IH. also getting featured in newsletters like explodingideas.co and beehiiv.com