I'm 30. I built an AI startup called @GojiberryAI doing over $4M ARR in one year. Got accepted into YC. No one wants to hear this, but there's no magic distribution channel. We got there by experimentmaxxing one channel at a time, based on our MRR level. $0 → $6k MRR: pure outbound. Cold email + LinkedIn, using our own early product on ourselves. No brand, no audience — just us reaching out to people showing intent and starting conversations. Ugly, manual, effective. $6k → $25k MRR: Reddit. Our first real acquisition breakthrough. We posted educational breakdowns in SaaS subreddits and pulled 10M+ organic views. Traffic quality wasn't amazing, but the volume flooded our trial funnel for months. Cost: basically zero. $25k → $75k MRR: content + free blueprints. All-in on LinkedIn content, YouTube, motion-design videos, and giving away our internal systems as free "blueprints." Content got the reach, blueprints earned the trust, and a chunk of readers converted. This is where founder-led content started compounding. $75k → $150k MRR: partnerships + X. We added Twitter, B2B influencers, sponsored newsletters, and a lifetime affiliate program that became a major lever. We also joined YC around here — the intensity went vertical. $150k+ MRR: paid + hiring. Meta ads, Google ads, influencer agencies, and our first serious hires: growth, sales, engineering, product. To get to $1M+/month, it’s mostly going to come down to hiring the right people and putting the right structure in place. Here's the part people miss: none of these stages replaced the last one. They stacked. Outbound never stopped. Content never stopped. We just added the next lever once the current one was clearly working. If you take one thing from this: don't chase five channels at once. Beat one until it works. Then add the next.