Building the SaaS was easier than figuring out how to sell it without becoming a spammer

I recently launched a pretty niche AI SaaS for traders.
The product works. Payments work. SEO is set up. Demo is done. All the stuff I thought would be the hard part is basically finished.

Now I’m learning the actual hard part: distribution.
I can go on Reddit or X and literally find people publicly describing the exact problems we built the product to solve.

But there’s a weird line.

Reply too softly and nobody knows your product exists.
Pitch too hard and you’re the annoying SaaS guy dropping links everywhere.

DM people and now you have platform spam rules to worry about.

So I’m curious how other founders handled this in the beginning.

When you had zero audience but knew who your customer was, what actually got your first few paying users?Public conversations? DMs? Cold email? Founder communities? Something else?

Building the thing was honestly easier.