In 2019, I had $1,000 to my name and decided to compete against HubSpot, Mailchimp, and ActiveCampaign. No paid ads budget. No outbound team. No partnerships. We bootstrapped Encharge to $40K MRR, 300+ customers, DR 74, and sold successfully. The only channel? SEO. We actually tried paid ads. Hired a consultant. Got 0 customers. Never got a single demo booked. But I don't blame them. We failed because we didn't stick with it long enough. And that's the thing nobody talks about when they compare paid vs organic: Both take time to work. Generic TOFU ads to your homepage don't convert. You need to master the full advertising funnel: informational ads, retargeting, BOFU ads, value-first content. It takes months of testing to dial in. And if you're in a space like my previous startup, the CPC is ridiculous. SEO? It's not free, either. It requires patience and investment, too. But it compounds. Organic was always about the compound effect and the authority that comes naturally from helping people and sharing valuable content for free. And right now, Reddit is where a lot of that compounding is happening. Google is pulling Reddit threads into search results. LLMs are citing Reddit posts in their answers. A single helpful post on a subreddit can drive traffic for months - and get picked up by AI models recommending products to thousands of people who never even searched Google. I'll be talking about exactly this on the "Organic Vs. Paid" panel at B2B Growth Conf on May 8th in Sofia - the biggest B2B growth conference in Bulgaria. I'll share how Sensorhub customers use community SEO and Reddit to build authority, how AEO (answer engine optimization) is changing the game for SaaS, and what the new organic playbook looks like today, beyond the traditional "write more content, and win backlinks." Comment "Organic", and I'll send you a special discount code for the conference.… more