Everyone who doesn't have money for paid ads struggles with marketing in the beginning. When I used to build and sell websites a few years ago, I spent about 70% of my time on acquisition and cold calling.

Building something useful is easier than ever nowadays. Claude, Lovable, and similar tools enable people without specific technical skills to build software. Marketing has always been the bottleneck.

Even posting on subreddits isn't really possible anymore since most of them ban you for promotional content.

If you're self-employed or bootstrapping a business, I think the most realistic path to getting noticed is to put yourself out there by posting on social media and genuinely contributing until you and your product get noticed.

I tried to build a B2C AI resume generator back in 2022 while I was studying, and the most traction I got was from printing flyers and guerrilla marketing. In B2C, word of mouth is the most powerful free traffic source and the same holds true in B2B. A referral is always "free" and already comes with a warm lead.

That said, I generally agree with the point that being generous and providing free value first builds connection and trust. The question is how to engineer word of mouth early on when you have almost no users... that's the actual hard problem (and getting your first users/customers ofc but normally you know at least one potential user/customer through friends and family).

Not unique to software engineers, but a significant factor is that many technical founders are highly specialized. As a result, they use language from their field, draw on cultural context from their field.

Even in this article:

> The marketing playbook for technical founders is just open source logic applied to business.

It's a challenge for us to cross the chasm and meet others in _their_ context. I think that's critical for marketing to be effective.

You would see the same if you hired a medical doctor, or a geologist into a marketing role.