I built the finance app I always wanted — turns out building was the easy part. How do you reach people without an ads budget?

Solo dev here. For the past couple of years I've been building FinMan — a family finance app shaped entirely by my own household's needs: shared family budgets, AI bank-statement import (file-based, any bank, no Plaid dependency), logging expenses by texting a Telegram/WhatsApp bot or sending a receipt photo, utility meter readings from photos, car cost per km, multi-currency. My family uses it daily. Everything is built around one principle: minimum manual input — because manual entry is what made me quit every other finance app.

The building part I could handle. Distribution is humbling me:

• Last week I tried "do things that don't scale": found 10 people on Reddit/HN who publicly described the exact problems my app solves and wrote to each one personally. Result: a few genuinely good conversations, one feature shipped from a stranger's feedback within a day (his public reply: "nice turnaround"), a niche post with 2K+ views… and about one signup.

• Big finance subreddits remove any product mention — learned that the hard way.

• And the few people who do sign up land on an empty dashboard and bounce. I'm fixing onboarding now, so I'm not asking anyone to sign up — I'm asking how you'd distribute this.

People who've been through this stage: what actually moved the needle for a consumer-ish product with zero ad budget? Content/SEO? Directories? Short videos? Partnerships with adjacent tools? Or is paid acquisition the only honest answer for finance apps?

I'd rather hear an uncomfortable truth than keep guessing. App for context: finman.vhworx.com (free).