7 Growth Hacks for Startups with Almost No Marketing Budget

You’ve built a great product. You’ve probably spent months, maybe years, obsessing over every feature, pixel, and line of code. You know it solves a real problem. But now you’re facing a new, terrifying one: nobody knows your product exists.

You look at your bank account, and the line item for “Marketing Budget” is either a rounding error or completely blank. Every VC you talk to asks about traction, but how do you get traction without the budget to acquire users?

This is the classic pre-seed and Series A founder’s dilemma. The good news is, you don’t need a massive budget. You need to be resourceful. The most successful early-stage growth stories aren’t built on Super Bowl ads; they’re built on clever, scalable, and often unsexy systems that compound over time. Forget “hacks” that promise overnight success. We’re talking about real, sustainable growth engines you can build with your most valuable assets: your brain, your time, and your engineering skills.

Here are seven battle-tested strategies to get your first 1,000 users and build a foundation for scalable growth.

1. Write What You Know: The Content Moat

Stop thinking about “content marketing” as a fluffy, creative endeavor. For a technical founder, it’s about documenting your expertise. You’ve solved incredibly hard problems to build your product. The byproduct of that work is a treasure trove of knowledge that other people—your potential customers—are searching for.

This isn’t about writing generic “Top 10 Tips” posts. It’s about answering the highly specific, long-tail questions your ideal customer is typing into Google. Think of it as building a library of answers that establishes you as the default expert in your niche.

How to Execute This

1. Identify Your “Pain Point” Keywords: Don't start with broad terms like “project management software.” Start with the problems your software solves. Instead of “CRM,” think “how to track sales leads in a spreadsheet without errors” or “best way to automate follow-up emails for a small team.” Use free tools like Google’s “People Also Ask” section, AnswerThePublic, or just type seed keywords into Google and see what auto-suggests.

2. The Brain Dump: Pick one of those long-tail keywords. Open a document. Write down everything you know about it. Don't worry about structure or grammar yet. Just pour out your raw, authentic knowledge. How did you solve this problem before building your tool? What are the common mistakes people make? What’s the step-by-step process to do it right?

3. Structure and Publish: Now, organize that brain dump into a logical post with clear headings (like this one). Add screenshots, code snippets, or diagrams. Be ruthlessly helpful. Your goal is for someone to read your post and think, “Wow, this person really gets my problem.” Publish it on your blog.

Example: If your SaaS helps developers manage API keys, don’t write “Why API Security is Important.” Write a deeply technical tutorial titled “A Step-by-Step Guide to Securely Storing and Rotating API Keys in a Node.js Application.” You’ll attract a fraction of the traffic but 100% of the right people.

2. Programmatic SEO: Turn Data into a Traffic Machine

This is where your technical background gives you an unfair advantage. Programmatic SEO (pSEO) is the practice of using a large dataset to generate hundreds or thousands of unique, targeted landing pages at scale. It’s how companies like Zapier, Nomad List, and G2 dominate search results for millions of keywords.

For a B2B SaaS, this is gold. You can create pages for every integration, alternative, or use case imaginable.

How to Execute This

1. Find Your Dataset: What data can you leverage? It could be a list of all the software you integrate with, a list of your competitors, a list of job titles you serve, or a list of cities where your customers are. The key is to find a dataset with at least 50-100 entries.

2. Define Your Page Template: Create a template for a landing page. This isn't just a boring, repetitive page. It should be genuinely useful. For an “alternative to” page, you could have sections for: Feature Comparison, Pricing Comparison, Customer Review Comparison, and “Why [Your Product] is a Great [Competitor] Alternative.”

3. Build and Deploy: Combine your dataset with your template to generate the pages. For each item in your dataset (e.g., each competitor), a new page is created, populating the template with that item's specific information. You can do this with a bit of custom code, a headless CMS, or even no-code tools like Webflow's CMS. For founders who want a more hands-on approach to building these kinds of marketing assets without starting from zero, our self-service platform provides the templates and infrastructure to get started quickly.

Example: A project management tool could create pSEO pages for:

• Plaintext

  Copy

  [Your Tool] vs. Asana

• Plaintext

  Copy

  [Your Tool] vs. Trello

• Plaintext

  Copy

  Best Project Management Tool for Marketing Agencies

• Plaintext

  Copy

  Best Project Management Tool for Engineering Teams

Each page would be 80% templatized but have 20% unique, valuable content for that specific query. This is how you scale your search footprint without writing 500 individual blog posts.

3. Engineering as Marketing: Build Free Tools

You’re a builder. Use that to your advantage. Instead of writing another blog post, build a simple, free tool that solves a small but painful problem for your target audience. This is one of the most powerful, moat-building growth strategies out there.

HubSpot did this with their Website Grader. Buffer did it with their Social Media Image Resizer. These tools generate millions of visitors and qualified leads every year. They are assets that work for you 24/7.

How to Execute This

1. Find a “Micro-Problem”: Look at the workflow of your ideal customer. What’s a tiny, annoying task they have to do that’s related to the bigger problem your main product solves? Can you build a free tool that does that one thing perfectly?

2. Build the MVP Tool: This shouldn’t take you more than a weekend or a single engineering sprint. It needs to be simple, fast, and deliver value instantly. Don't ask for a signup upfront. Let them use the tool, get the value, and then present a subtle CTA to check out your main product.

3. Launch It: Launch your free tool on Product Hunt, Hacker News, Reddit, and other communities. The framing is key: “I built a free tool to help you [solve micro-problem].” People love free, useful things. It’s a much easier way to get attention than trying to launch your main paid product.

Example: If you have a SaaS for financial modeling, build a free “Startup Burn Rate Calculator.” It attracts exactly the right people, provides instant value, and naturally leads them to your more powerful, core product.

4. Leverage Niche Communities (The Right Way)

Your first 100 users are not searching for you on Google. They are hanging out in niche online communities, complaining about the exact problems you solve. You need to go there.

But this is not about spamming your link. That will get you banned and destroy your reputation. It’s about becoming a valuable member of the community first.

How to Execute This

1. Find Your Ponds: Where do your customers live online? Is it a specific subreddit like r/sysadmin or r/sales? A Slack community for product managers? The Indie Hackers forum? Make a list of 3-5 of these “ponds.”

2. The 90/10 Rule: Spend 90% of your time providing value with no expectation of return. Answer questions. Share your expertise. Upvote good content. Comment thoughtfully on other people's posts. Become a recognized, helpful username.

3. The 10% Ask: Only after you’ve built up social capital can you use the other 10% of your time to talk about what you’re building. You can do this by:

   • Asking for feedback: “Hey everyone, I’ve been active here for a while. I’m building a tool to solve [problem we discuss here all the time]. Could a few of you take a look and give me some brutally honest feedback?”

   • Sharing a milestone: “Wrote my first line of code 6 months ago, and today we finally launched [product] to solve [problem]. It's been a grind. Happy to answer any questions about the journey.”

   • Solving a problem with your tool: When someone asks a question, you can answer it thoroughly and then say, “P.S. I actually built a tool to automate this, you can check it out here if you’re interested.”

This method is slow, but it builds a die-hard user base that will become your biggest advocates.

5. Strategic Guest Posting on Steroids

Guest posting is an old tactic, but most founders do it wrong. They write a generic article for any blog with a high Domain Authority just to get a backlink. That’s a waste of time.

Strategic guest posting is about borrowing someone else’s audience. The goal isn’t just a link; it’s to get in front of a large, highly relevant group of people and drive them back to your site.

How to Execute This

1. Find Audience Overlap: Make a list of blogs and newsletters that your ideal customer already reads. These are not your direct competitors, but companies in your shoulder niche.

2. Pitch with Value: Don't send a generic “I’d like to write for you” email. Study their blog. Find a content gap. Pitch them 2-3 specific, compelling headlines that you know their audience would love. For example: “I noticed you have a lot of content on sales prospecting, but nothing on how to write follow-up sequences that convert. I’d like to write a data-backed guide on that for your audience.”

3. Write Your Best Stuff: Do not treat this as a secondary piece of content. Write an absolute banger of an article—your best work. Make the editor look like a genius for publishing you. The only thing you ask for in return is a short, 2-sentence bio with a link back to a relevant page on your site.

4. Drive to a Specific Action: Don’t link back to your homepage. That’s lazy. Link to a dedicated landing page, a free tool you built (see Hack #3), or a hyper-relevant blog post. Give that borrowed audience a clear next step to take.

6. The “Side-Project” Product Hunt Launch

Product Hunt can feel like a lottery. Launching your main, complex B2B SaaS product can be tough because voters often favor simple, consumer-facing apps they can understand in 5 seconds. So, don’t launch your main product. Launch a side project.

This is a hybrid of “Engineering as Marketing” and leveraging a launch platform. You create a smaller, self-contained, and often free product that is related to your core business and launch that instead.

How to Execute This

1. Brainstorm a “Snackable” Product: What's a small, easy-to-understand product you can build? It could be a curated list packaged as a simple site (e.g., “The Top 100 Tools for Remote Teams”), a useful Notion or Airtable template, or a simple Chrome extension.

2. Brand it Simply, but Link it Subtly: Give the side project its own simple name and landing page. In the footer or on the about page, have a “Brought to you by the team at [Your Core Product]” link. The focus of the launch is the side project, not your main company.

3. Launch and Engage: Prepare your Product Hunt launch carefully. Get a good hunter. Prepare your visuals and your first comment. Spend the entire day engaging with the community, answering questions, and thanking people for their support. The goal is to get attention for the side project. The halo effect will drive curious people to discover your main company.

Example: A company that builds a complex data analytics platform could create and launch “Growth Stash,” a curated directory of the best marketing articles, and link it back to their main site. It’s easier to understand, share, and upvote, but still attracts the right audience.

7. Cold Outreach That Doesn’t Suck

I know, I know. Cold outreach has a terrible reputation. But that’s because 99% of it is lazy, automated spam. For an early-stage founder, manually doing hyper-personalized outreach is one of the highest ROI activities you can do.

This isn't about volume; it's about precision and value.

How to Execute This

1. Build a Hyper-Targeted List: Don’t buy a list. Build one. Manually. Identify 25-50 companies that are a perfect fit for your product. Find the right person at that company (e.g., the Head of Engineering, not the CEO).

2. Do Your Homework (The 10-Minute Rule): Before you email anyone, spend 10 minutes researching them. Look at their LinkedIn profile, their Twitter, a recent blog post they wrote, or a podcast they were on. Find something specific and genuine to mention.

3. Write a 1-to-1 Email: Your email should be short, personalized, and focused on them, not you. Follow this structure:

   • Sentence 1 (The Personalized Hook): “Hey [Name], just saw your post on LinkedIn about the challenges of scaling your data infrastructure. Loved your point about [specific insight].”

   • Sentence 2 (The Problem + Context): “I talk to a lot of engineering leaders who are dealing with that, especially when it comes to [specific problem your product solves].”

   • Sentence 3 (The Soft Pitch/Value Prop): “We built a tool that helps teams like yours do [specific benefit] by [how your product works]. It’s like [analogy they’ll understand].”

   • Sentence 4 (The No-Pressure Ask): “No worries if it’s not a fit, but would you be open to a quick 15-minute chat next week to see if it might be useful?”

This is hard work. You might only be able to send 5-10 of these a day. But the reply rate will be 10x higher than any generic blast, and the conversations will be infinitely more valuable.

All of these tactics work, but they take founder time, which is your most valuable asset. If you're hitting a scaling wall and need an expert team to run this playbook for you, a done-for-you service like AgentWeb can take over your marketing engine so you can focus on product.

Growth in the early days is not about having all the resources. It’s about being more resourceful than everyone else. Pick one of these strategies, execute it with intensity for 90 days, and measure the results. Then pick the next one. This is how you build a real company.

Ready to put your marketing on autopilot? Book a call with Harsha to walk through your current marketing workflow and see how AgentWeb can help you scale.