Seven ways to get seen without followers
Seven channels that work before anyone follows you, from Melvin Luu’s essay. I read the essay and its 27 sources and gave each play a page.
You can own your buyers’ attention, borrow it or buy it.
Own Build an audience. That takes 12+ months of content, so the essay says skip it for now.
Borrow Attention someone else already gathered. Plays 1 to 5.
Buy / rent An audience someone else built. Plays 6 and 7.
The seven plays
1MCP servers as a sales channelyour product inside Claude, ChatGPT and Cursorfast
2Get cited by AI answersbe the source ChatGPT and Perplexity quotecompounds
3Free tools that sell for youa grader or calculator one step before the purchasefast
4Programmatic SEOone template and real data, thousands of small keywordscompounds
5Things users want to show offrecaps and share grids that make users look goodfast
6Buy a newsletterreaders on day onefast
7Affiliatesrent a hundred small audiences, pay only for resultscompounds
Pair a fast play with one that compounds
The essay’s one named mistake is “picking two slow plays and wondering why nothing happens for six months.” Pick two plays to check the pairing: