most founders, me included, treat distribution as one big scary problem.
i need to grow. i need customers. i need marketing to work.
framed that way, it’s unsolvable. there are too many variables, no clear first move, and when it doesn’t work you can’t even tell which part failed. you spend money, people sign up but don’t buy, and you’re left with a vague feeling of inadequacy and a pile of maybes:
- maybe the ads are misleading
- maybe they’re just looking for something free
- maybe their pain isn’t high enough to pay to solve it
- maybe the messaging set the wrong expectations
- maybe they never experienced the value after signing up
- maybe they didn’t understand what the product does after onboarding
- maybe…
every one of these might be true.
that’s exactly the problem: they all might be true, and staring at them as one undifferentiated pile, you have no way to tell which one is actually costing you the sale.
worse, each maybe secretly belongs to a different part of the funnel.
- “misleading ads” and “wrong expectations” are messaging problems.
- “never experienced the value” is an activation problem.
- “pain isn’t high enough” might mean you never had validation in the first place.
so “fix distribution” isn’t one job; it’s six different jobs wearing the same coat, and you’re trying to do all of them at once with no idea which one matters.
the fix is to stop treating distribution as one problem. it’s not. it’s a chain of smaller problems, each with its own question and its own answer. once you break it down, you stop asking “why isn’t this working” and start asking the only question that’s actually solvable: “which link is broken right now?”
here’s how i think about that chain.
two principles before the chain
1. order by leverage. the links aren’t equal. fixing an upstream link multiplies everything downstream of it. reach is worthless if conversion is broken. conversion is worthless if activation is broken. activation is worthless if nobody stays (retention). the earlier the link, the more it’s worth fixing.
2. earlier links gate later ones. this is the leaky-bucket rule. pour water into a bucket with a hole and you don’t get a fuller bucket, you just lose water faster, and pay for the privilege. so you don’t earn the right to work on reach until the bucket actually holds water.
spending on traffic before the funnel converts isn’t growth, it’s accelerated burn.
keep both in mind, because the most common and most expensive mistake in distribution is working on a downstream link while an upstream one is still broken. i almost made it myself.
the chain
for each link: the question it answers, how you know it’s solved, and what failure looks like.
0. validation: the gate before distribution
not technically distribution, but nothing downstream matters without it. do people actually have this problem, and does your solution solve it enough that they’ll pay?
- signal it’s solved: real customer feedback plus real payments. not “this is cool,” but money.
- failure mode: you try to distribute your way out of a demand problem. distribution amplifies demand; it can’t create it. if the underlying pull isn’t there, more ads just expose the gap faster.
1. retention: does the bucket hold water?
once a few people pay, the very next question isn’t “how do i get more”; it’s “do the ones i have stick around?” talk to your first 50–100 users daily and iterate on the product based on their feedback until they love it enough to stay and keep paying.
- signal it’s solved: churn flattening, cohorts retaining month over month, people renewing without being chased.
- failure mode: people pay once and leave. every dollar you spend on acquisition leaks straight back out the hole in the bottom. growth here is a trap: it makes the leak bigger.
2. messaging: do the right people instantly get it?
for the people most likely to sign up and pay, is there a message they understand without explanation, that names the pain they already feel? messaging is two things fused together: the wording and the audience assumption, who you’ve decided your buyer is.
- signal it’s solved: people “get it” in one sentence, the right people show up, click-through holds.
- failure mode: people arrive with the wrong expectations, or the right people scroll right past. a message that’s clear but aimed at the wrong audience fails the same way one aimed at the right audience but unclear does.
3. activation: do sign-ups reach the aha moment?
the people who sign up, do they actually finish onboarding and feel the value, fast? this is the single most overlooked link, because it sits in the blind spot between marketing and product.
- signal it’s solved: a high share of sign-ups complete the core action and hit the moment where the product proves itself.
- failure mode: people sign up and never come back, because they never reached the point where they could see what it does. (my own number here was brutal: nearly half of sign-ups never even completed onboarding. they never gave the product a chance to work. you can’t convert someone who’s never seen the value.)
4. conversion: do activated users decide to pay?
these are all the moments where someone who has felt the value decides to buy, because they can picture their pain staying solved going forward.
- signal it’s solved: a healthy free-to-paid or trial-to-paid rate.
- failure mode: people love the demo but never pull out a card. usually it’s pricing, friction at the moment of payment, or unclear ongoing value; they got value once but can’t imagine needing it every month.
5. channel: where does your audience actually live?
now, and only now, you go looking for the best place your audience hangs out, pays attention, and engages with what you put in front of them.
- signal it’s solved: one channel where the acquisition math works, where what you pay to get a customer is comfortably less than what that customer is worth.
- failure mode: spraying across five channels at once, none of them profitable, and no way to tell whether the problem is the channel or everything upstream of it.
6. reach: scale the channel that works
once a channel converts profitably, the job is simple: do more of it. spend more, reach more, get more leads, get more sales.
- signal it’s solved: you can pour money in and it comes back out with a margin, predictably.
- failure mode: scaling before the channel is proven, which is just scaling a loss. reach amplifies whatever’s true. if the unit economics are negative, reach makes them more negative.
7. referral: make growth compound
once the whole machine works end to end, you get users to bring users. incentives, loops, the things that make growth feed itself.
- signal it’s solved: organic and referred sign-ups become a rising share of total growth.
- failure mode: bolting referral incentives onto a product people don’t love yet. you can’t pay people to recommend something they’re lukewarm about. referral is a multiplier on love, and zero times anything is still zero.
the important caveat: it’s a chain, not an assembly line
if you take the order too literally, you’ll feel stuck waiting to “finish” a phase before you’re allowed to touch the next one. that’s not how it works. these links co-evolve.
you can’t finalize your messaging without knowing what the aha moment is, and the aha moment is an activation question. you can’t tell whether activation is broken until people arrive with the expectations your messaging set. channel and messaging are tangled together too: B2B on LinkedIn and B2C on Meta aren’t the same words in a different room, they’re different messages entirely.
so treat the order as priority, not sequence. it tells you what matters most and what gates what. it does not mean you finish one link, lock it, and never look back. you loop through the whole chain constantly; the order just tells you where to spend your attention when you have to choose.
how to actually use this
when growth isn’t working, don’t ask “why is my distribution broken.” that question has no answer. instead, walk the chain from the top and find the highest link that isn’t solved yet. that link, the most upstream broken one, is your bottleneck. everything below it is noise until you fix it.
more traffic into a leaky funnel just costs more money. the discipline is to resist optimizing the link you understand (usually reach: it’s the most visible) in favor of fixing the link that’s actually broken (usually something upstream and less obvious, like time-to-value).
that’s the whole point of breaking it down. distribution stops being one unsolvable blob and becomes a list of small, ordered, answerable questions. you don’t have to solve distribution. you just have to find the one broken link and fix it. then the next one.
one link at a time.