3 genius marketing strategies you can copy
by Jason LeeWelcome back to Breadcrumb.
Here's something I wish someone told me sooner. You don't need a big ad budget or dance on Tiktok to get your first customers.
Paid ads work, sure.
But there are free ways where you can start pulling in customers on day one, with nothing but your time and a bit of patience.
Today I want to show you three founders who did the opposite of what most people do and made $17K/mo all the way to $2M a year.
Let's get into it.
1. Reddit Stories
- WHO
- Romàn Czerny
- WHAT
- Gojiberry
- FOUNDED
- 2025
- REVENUE
- About $2 million a year
Romàn had built and sold a software company before, so he knew the hardest part isn't building the product. It's getting people to find out it exists.
So when he started his new company, Gojiberry, he went all-in on one channel that most founders are scared of. Reddit.
He grew it from nothing to $20K a month in sales from Reddit alone. That early traction is what got the whole thing rolling, and the company now pulls in around $2 million a year.
Here's the part you can copy.
Romàn didn't make promotional posts, but he shared stories about his SaaS journey.
One of his best posts was about paying $1,250 for five LinkedIn influencer promotions and showing exactly what that money got him. It pulled in 160,000 views and sent 2,000 people to his site.
Another one was about getting rejected by Y Combinator. That got him 179,000 views and more than a dozen paying customers.
Notice what's happening here.
He's sharing something real that other founders are curious about, and his app comes up naturally.
A few things made it work. He always included proof, like screenshots and real dashboards, so nobody could call him a liar. He replied to every single comment. And he never made the post solely about his product.
He made it about the story, and let people find his product on their own.
2. Free Tools
- WHAT
- SiteGPT
- FOUNDED
- 2023
- REVENUE
- About $13,000 a month
Bhanu says it plainly. "I'm a builder, I'm not a marketer."
So instead of forcing himself to do marketing he hated, he leaned on the one thing he's good at. Building stuff.
Here's how he did it. He built about 50 small tools and made them all FREE.
Things like a PDF-to-Markdown converter, a chatbot name generator, and a sitemap checker. Each one solves a tiny problem and is easy to find on Google.
Someone searches for a free tool, lands on Bhanu's version, uses it, and then sees a friendly note pointing them to his paid product, SiteGPT.
SiteGPT makes about $13,000 a month and has earned around half a million dollars total, all from the traffic his tiny free tools generated.
Zero spend on ads.
But the clever bit is how he picks which tools to build.
He looks for search terms that lots of people use but few other sites have covered well, then builds the simplest possible tool to match.
And with AI helping him code, he can spin up a brand new free tool in under five minutes by copying the pattern of an old one.
3. Tech Support Videos
- WHAT
- Bulk Mockup
- REVENUE
- About $12,000 a month
Vikash found his app idea by accident.
He was doing freelance work on Upwork and got a job that needed 1,800 mockups made. It was supposed to take three or four days.
He taught himself a little bit of vibe coding, automated the whole thing, and finished in 30 minutes. The client paid him $300 just for the automation.
That's when the lightbulb went off.
Today his plugin makes about $12,000 a month, and the way he gets customers is so simple it almost sounds too easy.
He turns customer complaints into YouTube videos.
Every time a customer is confused or stuck on something, Vikash records a short video showing how to fix it. He's made over 1,500 of these little tutorials, and most of them come straight from support questions and onboarding chats.
Yes, you heard that right. Not even polished YouTube videos.
Here's the surprising part.
These videos don't go viral, and they don't need to.
One video with only 370 views brought him three paying customers, which works out to around $345 a month coming in.
And if you noticed, some of his popular videos gained 50K - 70K views.
He also writes his titles and descriptions around the words people actually type into Google, so the videos keep getting found long after he posts them.
About a fifth of his views come from Google search.
💡 Key takeaways
Start on free platforms. Reddit, YouTube, and free tools are all free to start. Pick one and go deep.
Stop selling, start helping. All three of these guys won by being useful first. Romàn told honest stories, Vikash answered support questions on video, and Bhanu gave away free tools. The sale came later, on its own.
I hope you enjoyed today's issue.
See you next week,
Jason Lee
Want ideas like this every Tuesday?
🥖 Fresh crumbs
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Ponytail hit GitHub to help AI coding agents write leaner code, claiming ~54% less code, ~20% lower cost, and ~27% faster builds on its benchmark.
Google rolled out Gemini Omni Flash so founders can generate and edit demo clips, ads, product videos, and social content with plain prompts.
NotebookLM added Short Video Overviews to turn docs, notes, and links into ~60-second vertical explainers.