Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
When I started working with a B2B SaaS client a few years ago, they had what looked like the perfect product. Clean interface, solid features, happy users in their small circle. But something was broken – they were getting almost no new signups despite having a "solid" acquisition strategy on paper.
Their approach was classic startup thinking: build the best product, and customers will find you. Multiple channels, decent traffic, trial signups trickling in. The metrics looked OK until you dug deeper and realized they were essentially operating a beautiful store in an empty mall.
That project taught me the most uncomfortable truth in business: distribution beats product quality every single time. Not because quality doesn't matter, but because the best product in the world is worthless if nobody knows it exists.
Here's what you'll learn from my distribution-first experiments:
Why most startups get the product-distribution balance completely wrong
The hidden growth engine that was driving 80% of quality leads (hint: it wasn't their "channels")
My framework for building distribution before product perfection
How to identify your actual growth levers vs. vanity metrics
When to stop optimizing product and start scaling distribution
This isn't another "growth hacking" guide. It's a fundamental shift in how you think about business growth, backed by real experiments and uncomfortable discoveries.
Common Wisdom
What every startup founder believes about product-market fit
The startup world preaches a simple formula: build an amazing product, achieve product-market fit, then worry about distribution. This advice comes from successful founders, accelerators, and every business school case study you've ever read.
Here's what conventional wisdom tells you to focus on first:
Perfect the product – Get your features right, nail the user experience, achieve product-market fit
Validate with early users – Build for a small group of happy customers who love your product
Optimize conversion – Focus on trial-to-paid rates, feature adoption, user retention
Scale when ready – Only after achieving strong unit economics, start investing in growth
Distribution will follow – Great products naturally create word-of-mouth and organic growth
This approach exists because success stories make it seem obvious. When you read about Slack or Zoom, the narrative is always about product excellence leading to explosive growth. The distribution part gets glossed over because it's less sexy than "we built something people love."
The problem? This advice creates a fundamental trap. You end up building the perfect mousetrap while ignoring the fact that you're in a forest with no mice. Most startups die not because their product sucks, but because they never figured out sustainable distribution.
And here's the uncomfortable truth: by the time you've "perfected" your product, your window for building distribution might have already closed. Your competitors who focused on distribution first are already owning the channels, the keywords, and the conversations in your space.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
So there I was, looking at this B2B SaaS client's analytics, trying to figure out why their "multi-channel strategy" wasn't working. Facebook ads, SEO content, email campaigns – they were doing everything the playbooks recommend. But the conversion data told a different story.
The first red flag was all the "direct" traffic. You know how Google Analytics labels traffic when it can't figure out the source? Yeah, tons of that. Most agencies would have started throwing money at paid ads or doubling down on content marketing. Classic mistake.
But I had a hypothesis. While reviewing their setup, I noticed something interesting: the founder was pretty active on LinkedIn. Not in a "look at me" way, but genuinely sharing insights about their industry, engaging in conversations, building relationships. Just being helpful.
So I dug deeper into the data. Looked at user behavior, conversion patterns, time-to-convert. What I found completely changed how I think about distribution: the highest-quality leads weren't coming from their "official" channels at all.
They were coming from people who had been following the founder's content for months, building trust over time, then typing the company URL directly when they were finally ready to buy. That's why Google Analytics couldn't track it – the real nurturing was happening on LinkedIn, but the conversion was showing up as "direct."
Meanwhile, their expensive "channels" were bringing in tire-kickers. Cold traffic from ads would sign up for trials but never convert. SEO traffic would bounce after reading one blog post. The data was clear: warm traffic converted at 10x the rate of cold traffic.
The founder had accidentally built the best distribution channel for their business – personal branding and relationship building – but they didn't even realize it was their growth engine. They were spending time and money on everything else.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once we identified the real growth lever, everything changed. Instead of optimizing conversion rates on cold traffic, we doubled down on the distribution method that was actually working. Here's the framework I developed:
Step 1: Audit Your Real Acquisition Sources
Don't trust Google Analytics at face value. Look for patterns in your best customers. Survey recent converts about how they actually found you. Track the full customer journey, not just the last click. In our case, the "direct" traffic was actually LinkedIn → word of mouth → direct site visit months later.
Step 2: Map the Trust Timeline
Most B2B sales, especially for SaaS, require multiple touchpoints before conversion. We mapped out that our best customers typically had 3-6 months of exposure to the founder's content before buying. Cold traffic expects to evaluate and buy in one session – completely different buying behavior.
Step 3: Build Distribution Systems, Not Campaigns
Instead of running campaigns, we built repeatable systems. The founder started publishing consistently on LinkedIn – not promotional posts, but genuinely helpful industry insights. We created a content calendar around problems they were uniquely qualified to solve.
Step 4: Scale the Human Element
Personal branding doesn't scale... or does it? We systematized the founder's expertise sharing. Turned client conversations into LinkedIn posts. Documented internal processes as educational content. Built templates for engaging in industry conversations consistently.
Step 5: Measure What Actually Matters
We stopped tracking vanity metrics like impressions and started tracking relationship metrics. How many meaningful conversations per week? How many industry connections? How often do people tag them in relevant discussions? These leading indicators predicted revenue growth.
The key insight: distribution is about building relationships at scale, not just broadcasting your message. Most companies treat distribution like advertising – push your message to as many people as possible. But the most effective distribution feels like being helpful, not being promotional.
Within six months, this approach transformed their business. But here's what most people miss: this wasn't a "growth hack." It was a fundamental shift from product-first to distribution-first thinking.
Channel Audit
Track real attribution, not last-click metrics. Survey customers about their actual discovery journey.
Trust Building
Map the relationship timeline for your market. B2B requires 3-6 touchpoints before purchase decisions.
Systematic Expertise
Turn founder knowledge into repeatable content systems. Scale personal branding through documented processes.
Relationship Metrics
Measure conversations and connections, not just traffic and conversions. Track leading indicators of trust.
The results spoke for themselves, but not in the way you might expect. Traffic didn't explode overnight. Conversion rates didn't suddenly double. Instead, something more important happened: the quality of their leads completely transformed.
Before our distribution overhaul, they were getting maybe 20-30 trial signups per month, with a 2-3% trial-to-paid conversion rate. Mostly tire-kickers who'd use the product once and disappear. After focusing on relationship-based distribution, trial signups actually dropped to 15-20 per month initially.
But here's the magic: conversion rates jumped to 12-15%. These weren't random people who found them through ads. These were qualified prospects who had been following the founder's insights for months, understood the product's value before even starting a trial.
The shift happened over 6 months. Month 1-2: mostly building systems and consistency. Month 3-4: started seeing engagement and inbound questions. Month 5-6: meaningful revenue impact. By month 8, over 60% of new customers could trace their journey back to the founder's LinkedIn presence.
But the unexpected outcome was even better: customer quality improved dramatically. These relationship-sourced customers had lower churn, higher engagement, and provided better feedback. They already trusted the team before buying, so onboarding was smoother and expansion revenue was higher.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Distribution channels have physics – Each channel has rules you can't change. LinkedIn rewards helpful expertise; Google Ads rewards relevance and budget. Don't fight the channel's nature.
Cold traffic needs different nurturing – People who find you through ads need much more education before they'll trust you with their business. Warm traffic already knows and trusts you.
Personal branding scales better than campaigns – Content and relationships compound over time. Ads stop working when you stop paying. The ROI curve is completely different.
Measure relationships, not just traffic – Traditional metrics miss the nurturing phase. You need leading indicators that predict future revenue, not just current activity.
Distribution strategy is product strategy – How you plan to reach customers should influence what you build. If you're planning LinkedIn distribution, build features that make customers look smart to their networks.
Start building distribution on day one – Don't wait until your product is "ready." The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Most "failed" products had distribution problems – Before you pivot your product, audit your distribution. You might have a great product in the wrong channels.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups, distribution-first means:
Start content creation before product development
Build relationships in your target market early
Focus on channels where trust builds over time
Measure relationship quality, not just trial signups
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores, this translates to:
Build audience before launching products
Invest in email and social media presence early
Focus on channels where product discovery happens naturally
Track customer lifetime value by acquisition source