We don’t stare into a gaping hole in our calendar, waiting for a niche B2B SaaS company to jump in and fill it. That’s why distribution is the hardest part of software businesses.
When you start out, nobody pays attention to you. It’s not only hard to get customers, it’s hard to even get someone to pay care enough to say no.
If you’re lucky, virality solves distribution. But most products aren’t viral. That’s why starting at zero with distribution is hard. You need to give people something they want.
Think of attention as a current of which none is flowing towards you. But the current of attention flows. It flows to influencers, big companies, social media…
You can reroute a tiny bit of the current to you. You can position yourself where attention is already flowing. That’s what we did:
Attention was already on Lenny, on Deel, on The Browser Company. We rerouted some of that attention towards us. But ultimately, that strategy others control: Whether someone engages isn’t up to us. Whether a Reddit mod deletes our post isn’t up to us.
That’s why we’re building our own distribution. Sustainable growth can only come from owning distribution.
Microsoft has the ultimate distribution—Office 365 is standard issue everywhere and Windows is the world’s biggest operating system. You can’t beat that.
But you need to route some of the current of attention to you.