D for Distribution: Build the Audience Before You Build the Product
Most founders don't think about distribution until it's too late. Here's how to build it before you even have a product.
On September 10th, 2025, at 21:47, I got the email I had been waiting weeks for. Chrome Web Store: Item successfully published. My extension was live! So I sent a welcome note to the 1,057 people on my waitlist and waited for downloads to come in.
Sadly, they didn’t.
Opens were fine. Some people had clicked through to the extension page. But the download counter barely moved, and I did what any founder does in that moment. I told myself it was late, people would get to it in the morning. Then morning became the next day, and the next day became me manually emailing every person on the list, one by one.
The replies were warm. “I’ll get to it this weekend”. “Looks great, will check it out soon.” But almost none of them did.
That’s when I understood the most expensive lesson I’ve learned as a founder: a waitlist is a list of people who said yes once because saying yes cost them nothing.
A waitlist is not a customer base. The two things look identical from the outside until launch day.
What made this worse was that I had done everything the playbook says. Landing page, ads, the “creator-founder” content loop, keep the waitlist warm So by every external signal I was set up. And it still failed. Not because the product was broken, but because I had spent weeks perfecting the product and almost no time building distribution.
Why the Standard Playbook Was Never Written for You
Most distribution advice was designed for companies with one thing you don’t have yet: an existing customer base. SEO compounds on domain authority you’ve built over years. Social media algorithms reward accounts with established engagement signals. Google Ads makes economic sense when your build cycle is six months and a demand test costs less than the product, but today, you can ship an MVP in two weeks, which means the test takes longer than the thing being tested. Meta ads on a new account with minimal organic traction train the platform to expect ad spend from you without delivering the audience density that makes those ads convert.
Email click-through rates average around 2–3% across industries, which means even a perfectly executed email sequence reaches almost no one on an action basis. None of this is the fault of the channels. They work well for the companies they were built for. They just weren’t built for an early-stage solo founder with a product and a list of politely interested strangers.
The Four-Move Framework That Actually Works At This Stage
After the launch failed, I started paying attention to the founders around me who were getting real traction (not impressive metrics, but actual paying customers) without ad budgets. The patterns were consistent enough that they’ve become my working framework. Each one is something you can run this week.
Move 1: Find the small room and walk into it.
The large platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok operate as attention auctions, and you will lose those auctions to companies with budgets and brand equity. Small rooms don’t work that way. A Substack with 2,000 engaged readers, a Discord server with 80 members, a local Saturday market, a niche Slack community: nobody is bidding for access to these places. So you can simply show up.
The practical version of this: identify one place where your specific customer already gathers and is already paying attention to something. Not a broad category like “LinkedIn” or “Twitter.” One specific corner. One newsletter. One group. One recurring event. And go there. Repeatedly.
Move 2: Lead with a gift, not a pitch.
Every founder I watched get early traction showed up with something to give before they asked for anything. A useful piece of writing. A free workshop. A bag of homemade cookies at a flea market with a one-page note. A resource that the person would forward to a friend.
This isn’t soft advice dressed up as strategy. It’s a hard-edged distribution insight. The mainstream marketing infrastructure is built entirely on extraction: get the click, get the email, capture the conversion. People have developed real callouses against it. They scroll past, they delete, they block. What they haven’t built defenses against is someone who shows up with something genuinely useful and doesn’t immediately ask for anything in return. The first interaction being a gift changes the nature of every interaction that follows.
Move 3: Pick a position that excludes most people on purpose.
The instinct at an early stage is to soften your messaging to appeal to as many people as possible. The founders who broke through did the opposite. Their landing pages made it obvious that you were either the right person or you weren’t. Their writing said things that some readers would disagree with. They had a pointy point of view.
This is actually a structural advantage of being early and small. A company with a marketing team and a brand to protect cannot afford to be polarizing. But you can. Being specific about who you’re for, and honest about who you’re not for, is one of the few moves that’s harder for a larger competitor to replicate than it is for you to execute.
Move 4: Use the unscalable nature of your stage as an advantage.
This was the pattern I missed entirely when I was looking for channels I could switch on and walk away from. The founders who found their first hundred customers weren’t optimizing for scale. They were doing things that only made sense at their specific stage of zero.
A founder of a clothing swap startup stood outside Goodwill stores in San Francisco and handed flyers specifically to women walking out, because that was her customer, and she wasn’t trying to reach a million people, she was trying to reach the next twenty.
Another founder of a healthy snack hosted a yoga session; people came, and the ones who signed up were the right ones.
When I saw these examples, I started driving to (something even flying to) flea markets with cookies to get a chance of a face-to-face conversation but brand founders. And I got them!
Nothing about any of this was scalable. That’s why it worked.
The Honest Starting Point
Main thing I learnt is that distribution is not a channel you select from a dropdown menu. It’s something you build by hand, in rooms that don’t scale, before you have any evidence it’s going to work.
The framework above is not complicated, but it requires a specific kind of patience that most founders don’t practice: the patience to do small things deliberately rather than big things hopefully. Pick one room this week. Show up there with something useful, not something you’re selling. Do it four weeks in a row.
That won’t complete your distribution strategy. But it’s the only honest place to start, and it’s the one move that most of your competitors, including the ones with budgets, won’t bother to make.
This essay was written using a tool I’ve been quietly building. It’s for solo founders who want the leverage of AI agents without having to build one from scratch. I’m running a private beta. If that’s you, message me.