It's a Sunday noon in Helsinki — I'm in a café off Aleksanterinkatu, second espresso, laptop open because I just got off a call with a founder asking: "I have $5,000. What marketing should I run?" The honest answer made him uncomfortable: for the first 90 days, you don't have a marketing budget problem — you have a distribution-instinct problem. Spending $5K before you know which channel is your channel is the easiest way to convert "saved runway" into "rounded numbers in your bank account that bought nothing learnable." I've built two SaaS products with effectively $0 ad spend. AFFiNE, the open-source Notion alternative I co-founded, hit 60,000+ GitHub stars in 18 months. Analook , the competitor-analysis tool I'm bootstrapping right now, has 39 registered users 4 weeks after launch — 0 paid acquisition, 0 ads, 0 dollars spent on growth. Here's exactly what worked.…