Word of mouth. Make things that work well, people want, and stand out - and they will spread by themselves. I block 100% of advertising on all platforms I use, yet somehow never have difficulty finding things when I want to find them. And that often includes stuff from very small providers. Search + reviews, and so on are a million times more useful than advertising. And getting a hundred or so early users/testers/etc to seed those reviews/etc is trivial in modern digital times.
The world itself would almost certainly be a much better place without large scale/centralized advertising. I think the argument about it providing product discovery for hidden gems is nonsense. In reality it's mostly just crap, artificial demand creation, and behemoths trying to maintain brand image.
But even reviews are fake now. 2 years ago I launched a service and added trust pilot to collect some reviews to help with SEO, then received many emails promising “verified” reviews for $x per review.
Same for Google reviews.
I’m a software engineer, and the way I find new tools is usually YouTube, GitHub, and HN. Even those channels are manipulated now with bots to inflate numbers to reach more
I'm retired now so I don't need to deal with this mess anymore. If I was starting something new I would probably target something I could market offline.
Yeah that will definitely be a growing problem, especially in the era of LLMs. Services where reviews can only be provided after purchase and it specifies if the product was returned (as Steam does) can help, but LLMs do seem set to make a complete mess of the digital world across many domains.
The world itself would almost certainly be a much better place without large scale/centralized advertising. I think the argument about it providing product discovery for hidden gems is nonsense. In reality it's mostly just crap, artificial demand creation, and behemoths trying to maintain brand image.