Growing a business organically was never easy, and never will be.
However, there are things you can do to short circuit it in good ways.
My wife went to business school with a woman who started a breakfast kolaches business. Her first two weeks open, she made mini kolaches, and they were all free.
In the college town, word-of-mouth about free food spread fast, and at the end of two weeks, though she had lost gobs of money, she had gobs of repeat customers because her kolaches were awesome.
If you make it, they will come if you make it free for the start. There are probably other things you can do too.
word-of-mouth is still advertising it's just not the traditional way. What will happen is businesses will just pay people to run around talking about how awesome their business is.
That's true, but the word-of-mouth I am talking about is different. I'm talking about word-of-mouth where actual customers of the business decide of their own free will to tell people how good it is.
I don't think that's advertising in the sense that we understand it.
I mean if I'm a business I will just give free stuff to someone with more clout and then they'll give me all sorts of praise. Exactly the same as social media influencers.
On the surface your idea seems good but it'll easily get corrupted.
Growing a business organically was never easy, and never will be.
However, there are things you can do to short circuit it in good ways.
My wife went to business school with a woman who started a breakfast kolaches business. Her first two weeks open, she made mini kolaches, and they were all free.
In the college town, word-of-mouth about free food spread fast, and at the end of two weeks, though she had lost gobs of money, she had gobs of repeat customers because her kolaches were awesome.
If you make it, they will come if you make it free for the start. There are probably other things you can do too.