How do you promote your product outside of Reddit, HN, PH, and IH?
Context: I have built a free web game that has a small, yet stable group of users that plays it daily. This was mostly through word-of-mouth. I posted on Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers but those didn't really yield a significant change in traffic or users.
Is the only remaining option for growth to spend money on ads?
I never tried, but I read/heard FB, Xitter and YT also could help spread the word. But it implies you to be active in the community, by posting updates, fixes, news et al about your game constantly, and keeping people updated.
Get a few streamers that have an audience to play it.
I do a lot of content:
YouTube, TikTok, Udemy, which all have their own algos and search functionality.
...and Blogs ( which is picked up via Google Search)
Another way someone told me is to promote things in the forum comments, like this website I hosted using esp32. I am posting here: https://esp.khalsalabs.com
For few days I will test commenting method (until this goes down due to traffic flood)