Integrate automated user growth tools

After 6 months of grinding with user feedback and controlled trials, my product is finally at a point where people who know about it keep coming back. But that's just a handful of people I manually found on Facebook groups, Next-door posts etc. The effort was worth it, as they were quite vocal in feedback, and helped shaped the features and cut things that didn't matter. I am happy. Now, I want to scale from 50-> 1000 users, and boy oh boy, its so fucking hard. Obviously my manual effort so far isn't scalable and its exhausting and I need to find ways to grow exponentially, to reach 1000 users. My product is for US consumers in local neighborhoods, so growth has to be somewhat geographically focused. **Things I've tried:** \- Meta ads, easiest to target but its own time to perfect the funnel, the creatives, and the spend justification. \- Reddit posts - heavily moderated, hard to get anything by. \- Tiktok/Reels - requires its own 'creative' effort and time investment to even reach scale. \- Creator partnerships - hard to predict audience relevance. Honestly just want to rant and also a realization - I should have built my community and distribution along with my product. Other founders who've gone through this stage: What actually worked for you to get from 50 -> 1000? I will not promote.