Methods to grow mailing list?

Hey this is a wonderful question! My favorite no-nonsense (free) tactics are 1) starting a Substack newsletter and 2) posting freebies on Gumroad. 1) allows you to have a place for people to put their emails if they're interested in your space and want to stay up to date about what you're building. You don't even need to create newsletter content, you can just treat it as a waitlist to assess demand until you've racked up a sizeable list. Here's an example of one: https://kahana.substack.com/ 2) You can potentially get a couple hundred (potentially +1000 or so) emails just by posting freebies on Gumroad - I recommend doing hubs of materials that are related to your space and future product (e.g. guides and resources that will help them in the short term and also become better product users when it's ready). I've gotten over 700+ emails using Gumroad! It's pretty speedy to set up a product page and smash duplicate. Here's my store for reference: https://kahana.gumroad.com/ If you or anyone is curious, here's a video about what went into my gumroad research / strategy: If you go the paid ads route, you can definitely get a lot of emails, but that is probably best once you have at least 100 emails of really validated potential customers to create a look-alike audience! Hope this helps! I'm also looking for new ways to build the email list so hoping some more answers / ideas come through :D