Get your first customers

Why does everyone say 'distribution is more important than product'?

Because a great product nobody can find dies quietly, while an average product with a strong channel wins the market. Most founders overspend on building and underspend on getting the product to people, the classic advice is 50% of your time on product, 50% on traction. The channel you can win is often more strategic than the feature you can add.

Go deeper

2 resources, 2 link-checked.

📖 Book
✓ Link checked Paid Beginner

When you have no budget, the worst move is to pour your limited time into a channel that was never going to work for your product. Traction gives you all nineteen ways a startup can reach customers and a simple way (the Bullseye framework) to bet on two or three worth testing first. Treat it as a menu and a method, not a verdict: your free channels will come from this list, you just have to find the ones that fit you.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

From Portfolio (Penguin Random House) by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares

  • Most startups die from no distribution, not a weak product, so give traction real time, not leftover time.
  • There are nineteen channels (content, SEO, communities, PR, sales, and more), and most founders ignore the ones that would actually work for them.
  • Bullseye: brainstorm across all channels, rank them, then run cheap tests on your top few instead of guessing.
Open penguinrandomhouse.com →
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Freemium Intermediate

A tactical follow-on covering the channels and motions top B2B startups scale after the first ten. Grounds distribution strategy in real company examples.

How to win your first 10 B2B customers

From Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky ~15 min read

  • Content/SEO is a surprisingly dominant B2B channel (Vanta, Amplitude, Figma, HubSpot).
  • The core B2B channels: self-serve inbound, sales-assist inbound, outbound, content, paid, partnerships.
  • Pick and systematize the one channel that compounds for you.
  • Distribution strategy should follow evidence, not fashion.
Open lennysnewsletter.com →

People also ask

How do I figure out which distribution channel is right for my startup? 2 → What are the actual distribution channels I can choose from? 1 → Should I focus on one channel or spread across many? 2 → How do the fastest-growing B2B companies find and scale their distribution? 2 → As an Indian founder, how do I think about distribution for a global product? 3 → I have zero marketing budget. What distribution can I actually do for free? 3 →

Also in D2C

The same ground, over in Launch & get your first customers, our D2C track.

Where do my first 100 orders actually come from if I have no brand yet? 3 → Should I make myself the face of the brand, or keep the brand separate from my personal identity? 3 →

Also in How Founders Use AI

How founders actually use AI for this, over in Sales Prospecting.

Why use AI to find and qualify leads (Clay, Apollo + AI workflows)? 22 → How do founders personalize cold outreach at scale without being creepy? 22 →

Also in GTM

The same ground, over in Build pipeline, our GTM track.

I have never sent a cold email in my life. Where do I even start? 4 → Everyone says do content. What does inbound actually mean for a startup with no audience? 4 →
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