No. 7Marketing with no money13 min read

Marketing with no money

15 June 2026

Every free channel is available to you, which is the problem. This is the map — each channel with what it actually costs in hours, how long before it returns anything, and the specific type of product it works for — plus the rule for choosing that stops you from doing all of them badly.

The short version

→Free channels cost founder-hours, the scarcest input you have. 'Free' means 'you pay in the only currency you can't raise more of'.
→Split channels into compounding (SEO, content, integrations, community presence) and one-shot (launches, press, a viral post). You need one of each, in that order of priority.
→Pick two. Not five. A channel worked seriously for six months beats five worked casually for one, and the reason is that every channel has a threshold below which it returns nothing at all.
→Integration and marketplace listings are the most underrated free channel in B2B — you inherit someone else's distribution and their intent.
→Build-in-public works if you are genuinely interesting and are honest about the fact that it mostly reaches other founders, who are usually not your customers.

Subscription

The Library

Everything running a software business asks of you and none of it is code: onboarding that activates, churn you can actually see coming, marketing with no budget, SEO that finds buyers, and the AI-plus-Ahrefs workflow for writing the blog that feeds it. One new playbook a week, plus the whole archive from day one.

$9/ month · cancel any time

✓A new playbook every week — onboarding, churn, growth, SEO, content
✓The full back catalogue the moment you join, not drip-fed
✓Vendor explainers: Stripe, Supabase, Resend, Vercel, the AI APIs
✓The research shelf — real papers, decoded, on learning and on LLMs
✓One email when a new one lands, off by default in one click
✓Cancel any time; you keep reading to the end of the month

first — it takes ten seconds.

No card is asked for yet — the subscription is recorded and really opens your account. See all plans →