Product, marketing and developer things.
Previous:
Head of Operations at JobBoard.io (acquired by @ZipRecruiter), a job board SaaS.
No matter what product you are selling, you need people to see it in order to buy it.
Building an audience by sharing content for free is one way of building a future customer base without spending on advertising. It's a long term game, as you say.
If you started selling your content today, you'd struggle to find a customer base without advertising. You'd need to find buyers elsewhere - on a marketplace (e.g Udemy) or by traditional book publishing.
Hope that helps - happy to discuss further!
Great question! This is a similar issue all enterprise-focused companies face, which I've experienced many times.
I'd recommend creating content that leverages your experience:
1. Create detailed case studies about each of your large projects, featuring the customers branding clearly. Seek permission before doing this,
2. Create white papers for each of your key learnings from the project. For example, I'd love to know how Russian law impacted your project - "Developing software that complies with Russian data protection law in 2019'
3. Create short blogs which summarise the white paper, ideally with a video. Offer the whitepaper as a download in exchange for an email.
4. Promote the blog posts on LinkedIn with paid advertising, aimed at your ideal customers.
Happy to jump on a call and discuss how I've successfully used to approach to win customers.