Building a product without a distribution plan is one of the most common failure modes in software. Everyone knows this. The advice to “think about distribution first” has been repeated so many times it’s practically a cliché.

But there’s a specific form of distribution that gets less attention than it deserves: the adjacent channel.

An adjacent distribution channel is one that already exists for a related problem, serves a similar audience, and has already done the hardest part of distribution — the education.

Getting someone’s attention is expensive. Getting someone to understand that they have a problem worth solving is even more expensive. An adjacent channel has already paid both of those costs, for someone else’s product, on behalf of your potential users.

When you find a channel like this, you don’t need to build awareness from scratch. You need to show up in the right place with the right message at the moment the audience is already primed.

The clearest signal that an adjacent channel exists is the published workaround.

When a community newsletter runs a “how to do X manually” guide, they’re not just documenting a workflow — they’re documenting demand. The guide exists because readers asked for it. The readers asked for it because they have the problem. The fact that it’s manual is the gap.

The newsletter has already:

  • Found the audience
  • Established trust with them
  • Confirmed the problem is real
  • Explained the problem in the audience’s own language
  • Demonstrated that the audience wants a solution

That’s most of a go-to-market strategy, completed before you wrote a line of code.

The tactical move is simple: become the answer to the question the channel already raised.

Not by buying ads. Not by cold-emailing the editor. By making something that solves the problem the workaround was documenting, and then appearing in that community as a genuine solution.

The community will surface you if you actually solve it. People forward things that make their workflows better. The original author of the workaround guide has an audience that trusts them — and a professional interest in being the person who found the better solution. They want the upgrade to exist as much as you want them to find it.

There’s a timing element too. Adjacent channels age.

A “how to do X manually” guide from two years ago might mean the problem has been solved since, or that the audience gave up and accepted the friction. A guide from the last few months means the problem is active, the audience is still looking, and the window for the solution is open.

The more recently the workaround was published and the more explicitly it names the gap — “I wish there were a tool for this” — the stronger the signal.

Finding an adjacent distribution channel doesn’t guarantee success. But it changes the math.

Instead of starting at zero — zero awareness, zero trust, zero confirmed demand — you’re starting with an audience that already exists, already understands the problem, and already wants the solution. You’re not selling the problem. You’re offering the answer.

That’s a different business from one that has to do all of that from scratch.