Not the case for me - never used any bots. First I joined a local community of steemians - they helped me out at the very beginning. Then, I just looked at which tags are popular and figured that’s a good place to start. Posted a few posts in Art and some in gaming and that did the trick. Once your profile is strong enough u can join initiatives such as sndbox or curie etc, to find more like-minded people and collectively help each other out :)