Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Here's the uncomfortable truth that took me years of working with SaaS clients to fully grasp: your product can be objectively better than your competitors and still fail spectacularly. I've watched founders pour months into perfecting features while their inferior competitors captured the entire market through superior distribution.
Most SaaS founders are building in isolation, hoping the market will find them. This doesn't work. You need to be where your customers already are, speaking their language, solving their immediate problems. Distribution isn't something you bolt on after building - it needs to be architected from day one.
After working with dozens of B2B SaaS clients, I've seen this pattern repeatedly: the winners aren't necessarily the best products, they're the ones with the most effective distribution engines. Yet somehow, this fundamental truth gets lost in product roadmaps and feature debates.
Here's what you'll learn from my real-world experiments:
Why traditional acquisition strategies fail for most SaaS companies
How I helped clients build distribution engines that compound over time
The framework for choosing distribution channels that actually work
Real case studies of distribution-first growth that scaled to millions
How to validate distribution channels before building product features
This isn't about growth hacking tactics or vanity metrics. This is about understanding that distribution is your product's life support system.
Industry Reality
What the startup ecosystem preaches about product-first growth
Walk into any startup accelerator or scroll through Y Combinator advice, and you'll hear the same mantra repeated: "Build something people want." The entire startup ecosystem has convinced founders that if you build an amazing product, distribution will naturally follow.
Here's what the industry typically recommends:
Perfect your product first: Spend months in development, obsessing over features and user experience
Product-led growth will save you: Build viral loops and referral mechanisms into the product itself
Content marketing is enough: Write blog posts and hope for organic discovery
Launch and iterate: Release your MVP and let user feedback guide distribution
Community will find you: If your product is good enough, word-of-mouth will handle growth
This conventional wisdom exists because it's easier to control product development than distribution. Founders feel productive when they're shipping features. Distribution feels messy, unpredictable, and outside their direct control.
But here's where this approach falls apart in practice: product-market fit without distribution-market fit is just expensive user research. I've seen technically superior SaaS products die because founders treated distribution as an afterthought. Meanwhile, their competitors with inferior products but superior distribution engines captured the entire market.
The reality? In today's saturated SaaS landscape, being great isn't enough. You need to be great and findable and accessible through the channels where your customers already spend their time.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with a B2B SaaS client, their acquisition strategy looked textbook perfect on paper. Multiple channels, decent traffic, trial signups coming in steadily. But something was fundamentally broken in their conversion funnel, and it wasn't what we initially thought.
The client was a project management tool targeting creative agencies. They had beautiful landing pages, a solid onboarding flow, and features that genuinely solved real problems. Yet their cost per acquisition was astronomical, and most trial users disappeared after day one.
My first move was diving deep into their analytics, expecting to find the usual culprits - poor onboarding, confusing pricing, or feature gaps. What I found instead was a classic case of misleading attribution data. Tons of "direct" conversions with no clear source. Most consultants would have started throwing money at paid ads or doubling down on SEO.
Instead, I dug deeper into the user journey. I started interviewing their best customers - the ones who not only converted but became power users. The pattern that emerged was fascinating and completely unexpected.
The breakthrough came from a simple question: "How did you first hear about us?" The answers consistently pointed to the same source, but it wasn't showing up in any analytics dashboard.
Most of their quality leads were actually coming from the founder's personal content on LinkedIn. Not the company's LinkedIn page, not their blog posts, not their paid campaigns - but the founder's personal posts about project management challenges, industry insights, and behind-the-scenes startup stories.
These "direct" conversions weren't really direct at all. They were people who had been following the founder's content for weeks or months, building trust over time, then typing the URL directly when they were ready to evaluate solutions. Our attribution was completely blind to this relationship-building phase.
This discovery completely changed how we thought about their distribution strategy - and it would eventually reshape my entire approach to SaaS growth.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Based on what I learned from the LinkedIn discovery and subsequent client experiments, I developed a framework that flips traditional SaaS growth on its head. Instead of building product first and figuring out distribution later, we validate distribution channels before building product features.
Here's the step-by-step framework I now use with every SaaS client:
Step 1: Distribution Channel Mapping
Before touching product development, we map where the target audience already congregates. For B2B SaaS, this usually means LinkedIn, industry-specific communities, podcasts, or email newsletters. For the project management client, LinkedIn was obvious, but we also discovered Slack communities for agency owners and specific Facebook groups for creative professionals.
Step 2: The "Distribution Test"
We run a simple test: can we generate genuine interest and email signups by talking about the problem we're solving, without even showing the product? For the project management tool, the founder started posting about common agency workflow frustrations. If these posts couldn't generate engagement and email captures, building features wouldn't help.
Step 3: Content-Product Alignment
This is where most SaaS companies get it backwards. Instead of creating content to promote existing features, we built content that validates which features to build next. Each LinkedIn post became a feature hypothesis. High engagement on "time tracking integration challenges" told us to prioritize that over the kanban board redesign.
Step 4: Systematic Relationship Building
We turned the founder's personal brand into a systematic distribution engine. Daily LinkedIn posts, weekly newsletter, monthly industry roundtables. But here's the key: we treated this like product development - with metrics, experimentation, and continuous optimization.
Step 5: Multi-Channel Orchestration
Once LinkedIn was working consistently, we expanded to other channels where agency owners spent time. Podcast guesting, guest posts on agency blogs, speaking at industry events. Each channel reinforced the others, creating a distribution network effect.
The results were dramatic. Instead of spending $200+ per trial signup through paid ads, we were generating qualified leads at $15-30 each through this distribution-first approach. More importantly, these leads converted at 3x the rate because they already knew and trusted the founder.
But the real power came from the compound effect. Each piece of content built on previous ones. Each relationship opened doors to new distribution opportunities. Unlike paid ads that stop working the moment you stop paying, this distribution engine became self-reinforcing.
Channel Validation
Test demand before building features through content engagement and email captures
Direct Attribution
Track real customer journey beyond last-click attribution using customer interviews
Content Hypotheses
Turn content performance into product roadmap validation signals
Relationship Compounding
Build systematic personal brand distribution that reinforces across channels
The transformation was measurable and sustained. Within six months, this B2B SaaS client went from struggling with $200+ cost per acquisition to generating qualified leads at $15-30 each. But more importantly, the quality of leads improved dramatically.
Trial users from the distribution-first approach showed 3x higher engagement in their first week compared to paid ad traffic. They were using more features, staying active longer, and converting to paid plans at 40% vs 12% from cold traffic sources.
The founder's LinkedIn following grew from 800 to 15,000+ targeted connections in eight months. But followers weren't the real metric - it was the inbound opportunities. Partnership inquiries, speaking opportunities, investor interest, and most importantly, customers who were pre-sold before they even started a trial.
By month nine, 60% of new customers were coming through this distribution engine. The compound effect kicked in as customers started sharing the founder's content, creating an organic amplification loop we never could have achieved through paid channels alone.
The most unexpected result? Customer retention improved. When people discovered the product through educational content and relationship building, they had realistic expectations and understood the value proposition better. Churn dropped from 15% monthly to 8%.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After implementing this approach across multiple SaaS clients, here are the top lessons that would have saved months of trial and error:
Distribution beats product quality every single time. I've seen technically inferior products with superior distribution engines completely dominate markets. Your product doesn't need to be perfect - it needs to be findable and accessible.
Attribution is mostly fiction. Traditional analytics miss the relationship-building phase entirely. Customer interviews reveal the real customer journey - usually 2-3 months of content consumption before any "conversion" happens.
Personal brands outperform company brands 10:1. People trust people, not logos. The founder's personal content consistently outperformed polished company marketing across every client I've worked with.
Content isn't marketing - it's product validation. Each piece of content becomes a feature hypothesis. Engagement patterns tell you what to build next, not what features you think users want.
Distribution channels compound, but slowly. Don't expect results in the first 30 days. Real distribution momentum typically takes 3-4 months of consistent execution before the flywheel starts spinning.
Multi-channel reinforcement is crucial. LinkedIn alone isn't enough. You need 3-4 channels where your audience hangs out, and they need to reinforce each other strategically.
Community beats scale. 1,000 engaged followers who actually care about your insights are worth more than 50,000 passive followers. Focus on engagement depth, not reach breadth.
The biggest mistake I made early on was treating this like a marketing campaign instead of a core business function. Distribution isn't something your marketing team handles - it's something your entire company needs to be built around.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing distribution-led growth:
Map founder expertise to content distribution channels
Test content engagement before building features
Track real attribution through customer interviews
Build personal brand as primary distribution channel
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce businesses adapting this approach:
Focus on founder story and brand authenticity
Use social proof and customer stories as content
Test product demand through pre-launch content
Build community around brand values, not just products