I didn't buy links because they weren't SEO-legal, and because, to be honest, most people wanted an affiliate-style program to share the link. I tried to work t

I didn't buy links because they weren't SEO-legal, and because, to be honest, most people wanted an affiliate-style program to share the link. I tried to work that out with someone and they went dark and tried to launch a clone of our service (which failed after about a month) instead. After that, I didn't spend much more time manually requesting links back. Whenever I did, I was always met with either no response at all or requests for money. Note that I was not really "link building" in the conventional SEO sense of emailing 1000 webmasters each week and getting 5 of them to add me back. I was just propositioning sites that I thought would have interested readers, under the naive assumption that they mostly wanted to be a useful resource to their readers. I could've bought links in one of the various ways that's done: an SEO firm, a blackhat forum, etc., but I was naive and wanted to believe that word of mouth + social media + high-quality offerings and content would take us the rest of the way without making us a dirty "link buyer" who would surely get caught and destroyed by Google. The competitor showed up and quickly demonstrated that none of that mattered (they actually didn't have any content at all, and ranked with about 4 pages total on their site). With a professional spam operation, you can rocket to the top pretty easily.