[garciasn]

>I would evaluate ads vs other channels like sales.

This is probably the best advice when it comes to this specific topic; however, there are some other options which I still suggest you play in (see below).

>Ads are ruthless in the early stages unless you have a truly unique product/service and can run Google Ads.

There are entire companies that exist solely to dominate search results for branded and non-branded search terms related to businesses that already have product in market. You're NOT going to compete with companies spending multiple millions of dollars a month in Paid Search.

What you can do, however, is work on dominating Organic Search results via SEO. While these same companies are competing with best-practices in SEO, they cannot win with investment alone. You too can follow the same best practices and potentially get the search engines to pay attention to you too. If you can land on the first page of results, you have a real shot.