Entering a market where everyone else has a bigger bag

Hi everybody, nice to meet you all.

I'm Sinbad, solo dev from the Netherlands. This is my first post here.

I would like to pick your brains on something I think (at least some of) you have encountered. I'm running search ads with a 1.80 euro cap and I'm paying close to that per click. To make that back I need a meaningful share of clicks to convert to paid, and that is not happening enough right now. Which is fine and as expected when starting out.

I think a part of it is who you are bidding against. If the big players in your product category sell a subscription, one customer keeps paying them every month for months/years. So they can offer to pay a lot more for a single click. If you sell something you buy once, that same customer is worth a lot less to you, but the click costs you the same. I think this is the same for any (SaaS) product entering a market that already has some established players, so I'm interested in how your experience was entering a (similar) market.

What I don't want to do is the manual way. Sitting in forums and on Reddit, waiting until somebody mentions a problem so I can drop my product in the comments. I have seen it work for other people, but I don't want to build something on that.

A longer runway is a real answer, and SEO is slowly starting to do something. But I am curious what else is out there. What worked for you to get users without paying for every one of them? Anyone who has been in the same spot and wants to share some experience, I would love to hear it!