Early stage startup, near zero SEO budget, where do links come from?

Add the free ones you already qualify for: your accelerator or investor portfolio page, the founders' university alumni news, local startup round-ups, and any event you've spoken at. Most of them will link if you just ask. And once you get press or podcast mentions, search your brand name every month. Lots of mentions come without a link, and a polite email asking them to add one works more often than cold outreach.

honestly at four months the best links we got came from things we'd have built anyway: - integration partners. if you connect to another tool, most of them have a partner or integrations directory, and those are real links from relevant sites - a small free tool or calculator related to your product. took us a week, still the most linked page we have - answering journalist requests. low hit rate but each win is worth a lot - one piece of original data, even a survey of your own users podcasts are good, keep doing those. i'd drop most directories after the first handful, they stop adding anything quickly.