Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
When I first started as a freelance consultant, I made the same mistake most businesses make: I thought marketing and distribution were basically the same thing. Build a great website, create some content, run a few ads, and customers would come, right?
Wrong. Dead wrong.
I learned this lesson the hard way through multiple client projects where we had beautiful marketing but zero results. It wasn't until I started treating distribution as a completely separate discipline that everything clicked. Marketing gets attention. Distribution gets customers.
Here's what most people don't understand: your product can be incredible, your marketing can be brilliant, but if you don't have distribution figured out, you're essentially running a beautiful store in an empty mall. I've seen this pattern across dozens of SaaS startups and e-commerce stores I've worked with.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why most businesses confuse marketing activities with distribution channels
The fundamental difference between getting attention and getting customers
How I restructured client strategies to focus on distribution first
A framework for identifying your most effective distribution channels
Real examples of how distribution-first thinking transformed struggling businesses
This isn't another generic "marketing strategy" guide. This is about understanding the difference between looking busy and actually growing your business. Let's dive into why distribution strategy should be your main focus.
Industry Reality
What every startup founder gets wrong about growth
Walk into any startup accelerator or scroll through any business blog, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like a mantra: "Content is king," "Build your brand," "Create viral campaigns," "Optimize your funnel." The entire business world has convinced itself that marketing equals growth.
Here's what the industry typically recommends:
Build brand awareness through content marketing and social media presence
Create demand with compelling messaging and positioning
Optimize conversion funnels to turn visitors into customers
Scale with paid advertising once you have product-market fit
Measure everything with attribution models and analytics dashboards
This advice isn't wrong—it's just incomplete. These are all marketing activities. They're about creating desire, building trust, and optimizing conversion. But none of them actually answer the fundamental question: How do you get your product in front of people who need it?
The problem is that most businesses treat distribution as an afterthought. They build the product, create the marketing materials, and then wonder why nobody's buying. They're so focused on perfecting their message that they forget to build the systems that actually deliver that message to potential customers.
Marketing tells people why they should want your product. Distribution puts your product where people can actually find and buy it. You can have the world's most compelling marketing, but if you don't have distribution channels, you're shouting into the void.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
About two years ago, I was working with a B2B SaaS client who had everything "right" according to traditional marketing wisdom. Beautiful website, compelling messaging, solid positioning, decent traffic, trial signups coming in. Their conversion funnel looked textbook-perfect in our analytics dashboard.
But here's the thing—they were burning through their runway because customer acquisition was glacially slow. They had maybe 50 trial signups per month, and the conversion rate from trial to paid was hovering around 8%. Not terrible numbers, but not enough to sustain the business.
My first instinct was to do what every consultant does: optimize the marketing. We A/B tested headlines, improved the onboarding flow, tweaked the pricing page, refined the email sequences. Classic stuff. We got marginal improvements—maybe bumped the conversion rate to 12%—but we were still basically rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Then I started digging deeper into their analytics, and something weird emerged. Most of their highest-quality customers—the ones who stayed long-term and had the highest lifetime value—weren't coming from our carefully crafted marketing funnel at all. They were coming through "direct" traffic, which is marketing speak for "we have no idea how they found us."
That's when I had my "aha" moment. I spent a week actually talking to their best customers, asking them how they really discovered the product. Turns out, most of them had found the company through the founder's LinkedIn personal branding. Not the company's marketing content—the founder's personal posts about industry problems and solutions.
We weren't looking at a marketing problem. We were looking at a distribution problem. All our "direct" conversions were actually people who had been following the founder's content for months, building trust over time, then typing the URL directly when they were ready to buy.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I understood the difference between marketing and distribution, I completely rebuilt how I approach client projects. Instead of starting with "What's your marketing strategy?" I start with "Where are your customers, and how do we get there?"
Here's the framework I developed:
Step 1: Map Your Customer Journey (The Real One)
Forget your ideal customer journey. I started tracking how customers actually discover and buy from businesses. For that SaaS client, I discovered that their best customers followed this path:
See founder's LinkedIn post about an industry problem
Follow founder for weeks/months, building trust
Experience the exact problem the founder writes about
Remember the solution and search for the company directly
Sign up for trial with high intent to buy
Step 2: Identify Distribution Gaps
The founder was only posting sporadically on LinkedIn. He had the distribution channel—his personal brand—but wasn't systematically using it. Meanwhile, they were spending thousands on Google Ads bringing in cold traffic that barely converted.
Step 3: Double Down on Working Channels
We restructured their entire approach. Instead of trying to make paid ads work better, we focused on scaling what was already working: founder-led content on LinkedIn. We created a systematic content distribution strategy that positioned the founder as the go-to expert in their niche.
Step 4: Build Systems Around Distribution
This wasn't about posting more content—it was about building a distribution system. We created:
A content calendar based on customer pain points, not marketing calendars
Engagement systems to turn followers into prospects
Funnel tracking that measured LinkedIn engagement to trial signup
Automated follow-up for people who engaged with founder's content
The Results Were Immediate
Within three months, they went from 50 trial signups per month to over 200. More importantly, the quality was dramatically higher—conversion from trial to paid jumped to 28% because people were coming in with much higher intent.
But here's the key insight: we didn't improve their marketing. The website was the same, the onboarding was the same, the pricing was the same. We improved their distribution by putting their solution where their customers actually were, in a format that built trust over time.
Channel Focus
Identify what's actually working vs. what looks like it should work
Platform Strategy
Treat each channel as a unique distribution system, not a marketing outlet
Content Bridge
Create content that serves distribution, not just engagement
Systematic Approach
Build repeatable processes around your highest-converting channels
The transformation was dramatic and measurable. Within six months of implementing the distribution-first approach:
Quantitative Results:
Monthly trial signups increased from 50 to 300+
Trial-to-paid conversion rate improved from 8% to 28%
Customer acquisition cost dropped by 60%
Average customer lifetime value increased by 40%
Qualitative Changes:
But the numbers only tell half the story. The quality of customers completely changed. Instead of people who stumbled across the product and weren't sure if they needed it, we were getting prospects who had been following the founder's expertise for months. They understood the problem, trusted the solution, and came in ready to buy.
The sales cycle shortened dramatically because we weren't educating cold prospects—we were capturing warm leads who already understood the value proposition. Customer support tickets dropped because customers had realistic expectations about what the product could do.
Most importantly, the business became sustainable. Instead of constantly needing to find new marketing channels, they had built a distribution engine that got more effective over time as the founder's audience grew and engagement improved.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons I learned from shifting to distribution-first thinking:
Distribution beats optimization every time. Perfect conversion rates don't matter if nobody sees your product. Better to have mediocre conversion from the right channels than perfect conversion from the wrong ones.
Your customers are already somewhere—find them. Don't try to create new behavior. Identify where your ideal customers already spend time and figure out how to add value there.
Marketing creates desire; distribution creates opportunity. You need both, but distribution comes first. No point creating desire if there's no clear path to purchase.
Track the full journey, not just the last click. Most attribution models miss the distribution channels that actually influence buying decisions. Understanding true attribution is crucial.
Distribution requires systems, not just tactics. One-off promotional activities aren't distribution. You need repeatable processes that consistently put your product in front of the right people.
Personal brands often beat company brands for distribution. People trust people more than they trust companies. Founder-led distribution often outperforms corporate marketing.
Different products need different distribution strategies. What works for SaaS won't work for e-commerce. What works for B2B won't work for B2C. Product-channel fit is as important as product-market fit.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups specifically:
Focus on founder-led content in professional networks
Build distribution before scaling marketing spend
Track full customer journey, not just last-click attribution
Create systematic engagement processes around your content
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores:
Identify where your customers discover products naturally
Build presence in those channels before optimizing conversion
Focus on channels that allow product demonstration
Develop systematic processes for channel management