I decided it was worth asking money for before I laid a finger to the keyboard.

Getting first users was really tough. I "launched" on product hunt and that was a bomb. I posted around some forums and that got some attention, but it was a post on reddit that was seen by the owner of a niche forum for audio engineers that helped.

He allowed to me to post in their commercial thread and that got me going with a bunch of audio engineers who saw real value in the product.

That burst of interest and Q&A gave me a TON of feedback to improve things and add features.

Then things just VERY slowly started to snowball. and I do mean VERY SLOWLY.

I also get a lot of traffic from organic google searches as I rank number 1 in google for some very relevant search terms. Even outranking soundcloud. Have no idea how that happened.

As far as I'm concerned it was 2 years of refining the product. Only in the past 6 months have I seen consistent month on month growth, and it's still very early days.

Did you have difficulties finding places to self-promote? I'm finding that that is a tricky thing to do. I don't want to jump into a community and start selling my product since a lot of places don't like it and it is tacky as hell, so I have to find ways to engage actively and when the the appropriate time comes (i.e. the conversation would naturally allow it), bring up what I've made.