Each channel works in exactly one shape, and using it in another shape does not underperform — it fails and costs standing.
Developer communities work when the post is worth reading even if the product did not exist. They reward artifacts and punish promotion, and they can tell the difference instantly. The good news is that the artifact usually already exists as a byproduct of the work: an honest writeup of something painful you just finished is genuinely useful and doubles as the advertisement, with one link at the bottom.
Answering questions where they are already being asked — forums, community chats, issue trackers on adjacent projects — is the underrated one. It earns authority rather than borrowing it, it does not expire, and it compounds. It is also the only channel here with no prerequisite, so it starts immediately.
Hand-picked direct outreach works with a specific artifact as the hook and not a pitch. Fifty good ones beat five hundred.
The professional network is out, and this is the one we had to argue about. Our users do not adopt developer tools there. It is a real channel for hiring and for investors — both explicitly not this quarter's goal — and it exerts a pull toward category-defining thought-leadership prose, which reads well and converts nobody.