I'm a developer at heart and have been bootstrapping our business for the past year.

Just from seo, we (team of 5 including me) have managed to get initial traction. However, when it comes to scaling from here - I'm kinda lost.

When I speak with other founders, I've seen almost everybody has raised millions of dollars spending on ads, pairing up with influencers, hired extensive sales teams and setup long processes. Other engineering products focused on either developers, operations, etc have tons of funding.

We are bootstraped. And it seems difficult to scale without money these days.

It just costs a lot lot more to market than I initially anticipated. We did a show HN to show this community our simple product but didn't see any interest.

Nothing is free and that's fine but nothing is really affordable either.

Things we tried - sponsoring GitHub contributors, ads (Google ads and developer based ethical ads), seo, social (not so much)

At this time, our strength is building good software but continuing to improve and build more doesn't translate into growth in revenue per se.

Money would help and raising is an option. No other way from here??

For reference - I built https://Spike.sh - a simple incident management platform (think pagerduty)