Solo Founders Trapped With No Zero-Budget Traction Path — GTM Weakness Blocks Funding and Momentum

Summary

Solo and first-time founders who can build a product are stuck because their entire growth path collapses at go-to-market: they have weak GTM, no traction, no audience, and no budget, so they cannot raise pre-seed and cannot generate momentum on their own. Every existing answer ('launch on Product Hunt', 'talk to users', 'build in public', 'do cold outreach') assumes either an audience, a budget, or a channel they don't have — and none of them produce qualified early users for someone starting from zero. The unsolved core is a repeatable, affordable route to first traction that works without paid ads, without an existing following, and without cold outreach that gets ignored — most plausibly through borrowed-audience partnerships and warm introductions. This is severe because it blocks the entire business at once: no traction means no funding, no validation, and indefinite stalling, which is exactly why founders describe GTM as their fatal weakness rather than a task to tick off.