A flipside effect to this is advertising and PPC which has trended up so high overtime, especially in education. Strategies viable in 2019 are largely useless

A flipside effect to this is advertising and PPC which has trended up so high overtime, especially in education. Strategies viable in 2019 are largely useless to bootstrapped businesses in 2023: the costs of ads even to acquire customers with low spending power is two to three times what it was (e.g. students) As someone working on a NLP product for education, the pricing and subscriptions are also dropping rapidly, lead by the funded companies entering this niche (the founders almost entirely are non technical recently). The combination of the two is like a jaw - it's unclear what to do when your technology becomes a trend, other than grab and deploy your own funding and use marketing strategies and technical efficiencies to outlast your competition.