Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Every founder thinks they need to build the perfect product first. I used to think the same thing. Then I watched a B2B SaaS client with a solid product, decent traffic, and trial signups struggle with conversions while their founder kept insisting we needed to "improve the product more."
The harsh reality? Distribution beats product quality every single time. I've seen mediocre products dominate markets because they figured out distribution, while brilliant products died in obscurity because their founders were too busy perfecting features instead of figuring out how to reach customers.
This isn't about building bad products - it's about understanding that even the world's best product is worthless if nobody knows it exists. After working with dozens of SaaS and e-commerce clients, I've learned that distribution isn't just important - it's the primary factor that determines whether your product succeeds or fails.
Here's what you'll learn from my experience:
Why the "build it and they will come" mentality kills businesses
How I helped clients pivot from product-first to distribution-first thinking
The exact framework I use to identify distribution channels before building features
Real examples of how distribution strategy changed my clients' trajectory
The uncomfortable truth about why most founders get this backwards
You might not like what I'm about to tell you, but if you're serious about building a business that actually grows, you need to read this. The SaaS playbooks everyone else is sharing won't prepare you for this reality.
Industry Reality
What Silicon Valley keeps telling founders
Walk into any startup accelerator, read any "how to build a startup" guide, or listen to most VCs, and you'll hear the same advice repeated endlessly:
"Focus on product-market fit first. Build something people want. Get the product right before you think about marketing."
The conventional wisdom looks something like this:
Build a minimum viable product (MVP)
Test it with users and iterate based on feedback
Achieve product-market fit
Then figure out how to scale distribution
Growth will happen naturally once you have a great product
This advice exists because it sounds logical, and frankly, it's easier to talk about product features than distribution strategy. Product development feels like "real work" - you can see progress, measure improvements, and show demos. Distribution feels messy, unpredictable, and harder to control.
The problem? This approach assumes that great products automatically find their market. It's based on survivorship bias - we hear about the rare companies that succeeded this way, but we don't hear about the thousands that built amazing products and failed because nobody discovered them.
Even worse, this advice treats distribution as an afterthought. "We'll figure out marketing later" becomes the startup equivalent of "we'll figure out how to make money later." But by the time you have a "perfect" product, your window of opportunity might have already closed.
The uncomfortable truth is that most founders prefer this approach because building product feels safer than selling. You can control what you build, but you can't control whether people will care about it. So they hide behind product development, convincing themselves they need "just one more feature" before they're ready to really push for distribution.
But what if I told you this entire framework is backwards?
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
I learned this lesson the hard way through a B2B SaaS client who came to me convinced their conversion problem was a product problem. They had a solid tool, decent traffic from SEO and some paid ads, and trial signups were coming in regularly. But their trial-to-paid conversion rate was stuck around 2%.
"We need to improve the onboarding," they told me. "We need better tutorials, more features, a cleaner interface." Sound familiar? Every conversation circled back to product improvements. Meanwhile, their burn rate was climbing and their runway was shrinking.
Here's what I discovered when I dug into their data: The highest converting users weren't coming from their "best" traffic sources. They weren't coming from their carefully optimized paid ads or their SEO-driven blog traffic. The users who actually converted were coming from the founder's personal LinkedIn content.
Think about that for a second. All those "direct" conversions they were celebrating? Those weren't people who randomly found their website. Those 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 buy.
But here's the kicker - they were spending 90% of their time and budget trying to fix the product and only 10% thinking about distribution. They had stumbled onto their best distribution channel by accident and didn't even realize it.
This is when I started seeing the same pattern everywhere. Another e-commerce client was convinced they needed better product pages, but their real problem was that they were treating their 1000+ product catalog like it needed to work with Facebook Ads - a channel that demands quick decisions and simple choices. Their strength was variety and discovery, but they were forcing it through a distribution channel that rewarded the opposite.
The painful reality? Most businesses are optimizing the wrong thing. They're trying to make their product work for their current distribution instead of finding the distribution that makes their product shine.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I started seeing this pattern, I developed what I call the "Distribution-First Framework." Instead of building features and hoping they'd improve conversion, I started by mapping out where the best customers were actually coming from - not where we thought they should come from.
Step 1: Distribution Archaeology
I dig deep into analytics to understand where quality customers really originate. Not just first-click attribution, but the entire customer journey. For that B2B SaaS client, this meant tracking which LinkedIn posts drove the most "direct" traffic spikes, which topics resonated, and what the founder was doing when conversions jumped.
What I found was fascinating. The founder's posts about industry problems got 10x more engagement than posts about their product features. People weren't following him to hear about his tool - they were following him for his insights. But those insights were what built the trust that eventually led to conversions.
Step 2: Channel-Product Fit Analysis
Instead of trying to make every channel work, I started matching product characteristics to channel strengths. That e-commerce client with 1000+ products? Facebook Ads was fundamentally wrong for them. Facebook wants you to promote 1-3 hero products with clear value props. But their strength was being a discovery platform where customers could browse and compare.
So we pivoted hard to SEO and content. Instead of cramming their catalog into Facebook's format, we built programmatic SEO pages that let people discover products through search. We created thousands of category pages, comparison guides, and use-case content. The result? Their organic traffic 10x'd because we were working with their product's natural strengths, not against them.
Step 3: The Distribution Multiplier Test
For every potential channel, I now ask: "Does this distribution method make our product better, or does our product need to change to work with this channel?" If it's the latter, we either find a different channel or we're honest about whether this is the right product for our goals.
That SaaS client? We doubled down on the founder's LinkedIn presence. Instead of trying to improve product features, we improved his content strategy. We documented his expertise, turned client case studies into LinkedIn posts, and created a content calendar around industry insights - not product announcements.
Step 4: Distribution as Product Feature
Here's where it gets interesting. I started thinking about distribution as a product feature itself. For the SaaS client, the founder's expertise and industry insights weren't just marketing - they were part of the product experience. People weren't just buying software; they were buying access to his knowledge and network.
This reframe changed everything. Instead of "How do we get people to try our product?" the question became "How do we make our distribution so valuable that our product becomes the natural next step?"
Distribution Audit
Map where quality customers actually originate, not where you think they should come from. Look beyond first-click attribution.
Channel Fit Test
Match your product's natural strengths to channels that amplify them rather than forcing mismatched combinations.
Content as Distribution
Turn founder expertise into a distribution channel by documenting insights and industry knowledge consistently.
Distribution Integration
Design distribution into your product experience rather than treating it as separate marketing activity.
The results spoke for themselves, but not always in the ways you'd expect. That B2B SaaS client saw their trial-to-paid conversion rate jump from 2% to 8% within three months. But the bigger win? They reduced their customer acquisition cost by 60% because they were attracting people who were already pre-sold on the founder's expertise.
The e-commerce client's transformation was even more dramatic. Their organic traffic increased by 10x over six months once we stopped fighting Facebook's algorithm and started working with Google's. More importantly, these weren't just vanity metrics - their revenue per visitor increased because people were finding exactly what they were looking for instead of clicking on random ads.
But here's what really surprised me: the companies that embraced distribution-first thinking started moving faster, not slower. When you know your distribution channel, you know exactly what features matter. The SaaS client stopped building random features and started building things that gave the founder more content to share. The e-commerce client focused on product data and categorization instead of flashy homepage redesigns.
The timeline varied, but the pattern was consistent. Companies that prioritized distribution saw results within 60-90 days, while companies that kept focusing on product improvements stayed stuck for months.
Most importantly, these weren't just short-term wins. By building distribution into their core strategy, these companies created sustainable growth engines instead of relying on constantly optimizing conversion rates or adding new features.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Looking back on dozens of these projects, here are the lessons that changed how I approach every new client:
Distribution beats product quality, but only if you match them correctly. It's not about having bad products - it's about finding the distribution channel where your specific product advantages become obvious.
Most "product problems" are actually distribution problems in disguise. If people try your product and don't convert, the issue might be that you're attracting the wrong people, not that your product is broken.
The best distribution channels often feel "unfair" to competitors. The SaaS founder's industry expertise wasn't something competitors could easily copy. The e-commerce catalog's variety wasn't something Facebook Ad competitors could match.
Distribution strategy should inform product roadmap, not the other way around. When you know how customers find and evaluate you, you know exactly what features and content matter most.
The "build it and they will come" mentality is the biggest startup killer I've seen. Even great products need distribution strategy from day one.
Channel-switching costs are higher than founders think. It's usually better to go deep on one distribution channel that fits your product than to spread effort across multiple channels that don't.
The most defensible competitive advantages come from distribution, not features. Features can be copied. Distribution relationships and channel expertise take years to build.
The biggest mistake? Treating distribution as something you figure out after you build the product. In reality, your distribution strategy should influence what you build and how you build it. The companies that get this right don't just grow faster - they build more defensible businesses.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups:
Map founder expertise to content distribution before building features
Track trial sources beyond first-click attribution
Build distribution insights into product roadmap decisions
Test channel-product fit before optimizing conversion rates
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores:
Match catalog complexity to channel strengths (SEO for variety, ads for hero products)
Prioritize product data and categorization for discoverability
Build programmatic content around product search behavior
Focus on channels that reward browsing over quick decisions