My funnel has become:
* Find communities talking about my problem and contribute value to those threads (not posting top-level). If I have an MVP for the conversation in that thread, I post a link to it, along with immediate advice on how I think about the problem. (This gets me, early users)
* I then take the language from the questions people are asking (and showing a positive reaction to) and use that for SEO. As I answer questions, I capture the questions people respond well to. I then use the language of those questions to update my site copy, and for the recurring ones, I write blog posts and add them to my site.
* Once I see traction from the early outreach messaging linking back to usage in my tool, I then use the same questions as conversation starters for cold outreach to my ICP. etc
This has been nice because I can actually see momentum building. Prior to having any system, it just felt like I was shooting in the dark with outreach messages or watching posts (that I worked on for days) get buried because they didn't resonate with the group/community I was posting to.
Overall, it's slow to start, but the steps build on each other. Prior to this, I had been booking calls to "learn" about people's day-to-day, but since I was technical, I didn't have a ton of background in what that actually looked like and where the edges might be, so a lot of conversations ended without going anywhere (which was also frustrating). I've seen people with a sales background absolutely kill these conversations with zero context, but I haven't hit that level yet in terms of the abstraction they must work off of.
Either way, if you do push on the start of that funnel and start searching for people organically surfacing the problem you are focused on, I open-sourced what I've been using to find those threads so others wouldn't need to reinvent the wheel: https://github.com/obris-dev/openmagpie
Also if you have links to any of the tools happy to provide feedback (even if I'm not the ICP)