question for experienced self published authors

I am a new self published author still in the early stages of my journey and I have a genuine question for those who have been through this before.

When you were just starting out -- how did you actually get your first real visibility?

I have also been wondering about email lists. Do you genuinely believe building an email list makes a real difference especially in the early stages? If so how did you actually start building yours from scratch when you had zero readers?

And if email lists did not work for you - what other promotion methods actually gave you real results without spending a lot of money?