Essay

Distribution before development

Every founder wants to talk about the product first. What it does, how it works, what makes it different from the other twelve things like it. I get it — the product feels like progress. Distribution feels like a problem for later.

I ask a different question first: can you reach the people who would pay for this, today, without writing another line of code?

Building has gotten cheap. AI tools, no-code platforms, cheap contractors — the cost of putting something on a screen keeps falling. What hasn’t gotten cheaper is getting in front of the right hundred people and having them care. That’s the part that actually kills companies, and it’s the part almost nobody tests first.

With TitanFlow, everyone told us to build for web. Bigger market, easier distribution, standard advice. We built for iOS instead, because the people we needed — active retail options traders — lived in specific Discord servers and subreddits, and mobile was where they actually made decisions during market hours. We didn’t compete with the web tools. We weren’t in the same room as them. Distribution, not the product, decided the platform.

So before I let a client write real code, I want an answer to one question: where do the first hundred customers come from, and can you reach them right now? Not “we’ll run ads” or “it’ll go viral” — an actual channel you can point to and test this week. A community you’re already in. A partnership you can make one call to close. A list you already own.

If you can’t answer that, the code isn’t worth writing yet. Not because the idea is bad — because you don’t yet know if it’s sellable, and building without knowing that is how teams spend a year and learn nothing. Prove you can reach buyers first. Then build the smallest thing you can sell them.