Answering that would require speculation, since I own no company and have no current plans to "release something" of my own any time soon. I suppose, should I one day decide to hang my shingle out there and sell a product, I would aim to make it of sufficient quality and usefulness so as to not require scummy "link building" to sell it.
It's not enough to be "useful", you need to work on visibility (marketing, SEO). You need to reach the owners of the sites where your potential customers are hanging out and ask them to link to your useful product. This way you will get better positions in search results and more traffic to your site.
There's nothing "scammy" in this kind of outreach unless you're building links for a scam.
If you provide good content, google will find it and back-links will build themselves naturally from organic traffic; he's objecting to the unnatural building of back-links via spamming the Internet. No one likes when they google something and the results are full of spam sites and affiliate links.
Google will find it but it will not place it on top of your competitors if your site has low authority, i.e. small amount of backlinks.
So you will not get any organic traffic because your site is not visible. On-page keyword optimization is a very weak factor compared to the number of backlinks from "powerful" sites.
Cold emails to relevant site owners and bloggers is no more spam than "Show HN" is spam.
As I just said, back-links will come naturally and organically if the content is good and then it will have authority. Good things get found, again and again, it's what Google exists to do and they're pretty good at doing it even for sites that don't try and artificially pump up their back-links. Most sites don't get natural organic traffic because they suck, not because they don't rank high enough. Authority doesn't come from back-links, back-links come from Authority. Don't confuse cause for effect.
They do not come naturally, speaking from experience. Our site is placed on the 2nd to 3rd pages for the vital search queries that our product needs for long-term survival despite relatively low competition.
But most of the first page results have many times more backlinks. We've got less than a dozen organically during the last year.
> They do not come naturally, speaking from experience.
Yes they do, speaking from experience. They aren't coming naturally for you because you're competing in a saturated market or a small market selling things people don't really want or need. Your content probably isn't useful for any reason outside of selling something, which isn't the kind of thing people will naturally link to. If your site isn't useful to people who don't want to buy something, you're not going to attract organic growth. Write interesting content people want to share, and they'll link to it without any marketing efforts. If you can't get organic growth, your content is not interesting.