I've seen this pattern across hundreds of founder interviews I've analyzed. [1] First, they start building some kind of "media brand". Here, the OP started blogging on Medium & guest blogged for a ROR startup blog. He got to ~30k views/month across all of his articles (probably 99% of the came through them ranking in search). He then used that audience, linked to his new e-learning platform on some of them, and easily got to 1000 new signups.

This reminds me of Ghost.org (they're currently making $250k+/mo [2]) and how John O'Nolan (the founder) got started:

"My blog had a few thousand subscribers who were the first to be notified when I wrote the original idea post. That post had an email signup form which generated about 30k subscribers interested in finding out if it would ever become a reality, and those 30k people were the first to find out when the Kickstarter campaign launched." source: [2]

Many devs who want to eventually start their own SaaS/mobile app overlook this. Build an audience via blogging/tweeting/writing and then use that audience to launch/test your "startup". This way you won't have to go and "beg" people to cover you (via emailing/spamming publications, journalists, other influencers and so on.) The other reason that this seems to work is because information can be (in many cases) easier to promote/get coverage for than some black-box, software-based tool you've made (the exception here is the so-called "engineering as marketing", where people make a small/useful/straightforward tool that people get an immediate value from.)

[1] https://firstpayingusers.com [2] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-john-onolan-grew-...