My advice would be to make use of pre-launch platforms such as https://microlaunch.net or product hunt and other organic ways to gain traffic. Meanwhile, make sure your funnels converts, then think about Ads later on.

There is no solution that fits all. Depends of your target audience and where they operate.

Audience is on Twitter/X ? Build in public and post regularly about your work. Audience is on facebook ? Targeted Ads may work for you Audience is a set of professionals ? Target forum or places they go

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in marketing either :)

Reddit is a really great way right now, due to the boost to Reddits rankings on Google you can find old Reddit threads that still allow comments in the top 5 on Google with very high traffic keywords.

Read Alex Hormozi's "$100m Leads"

Invest in SEO.

Maybe too abstract, so here is a piece of actionable advice:

99% of SEO is to publish interesting content for your target audience.

It depends on what your software does. What it does?

Newsletters and directories like https://microstartups.co/

The best thing you can do is simply mention it on here - www.convertcsv.io - Data Transformation APIs.

Billboard in SF just like the rest

Talk to users.

Talking to potential customers one at a time is the simplest thing that might work. And it will be work. Hard work. If you don't want that hard work, don't have customers.

Talking to customers one at a time is hard to scale and it is easy to scale zero customers. This mostly makes solutions that scale attractive when starting out. Scaling when you have many customers is hard work. Harder work than talking to customers one at a time.

Good luck.

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