The Directory Problem
Getting listed in the right directory is worth more than most marketing. But directories have a cold start problem too — and knowing which ones matter is half the work.
Distribution
The Channel Before the Product
Most founders build a product and then look for a channel. A few build the channel first. The second group has a structural advantage that compounds.
The Education Arbitrage
When someone else educates your market, they're doing expensive work for free. The question is whether you're positioned to capture it.
The Adjacent Distribution
The best distribution channel for a new product is often one that already exists for a related problem — and has already done the education work.
The Named Gap
There are many ways to infer that a market gap exists. Then there's the rarer thing: a trusted source your target customers already read explicitly saying the gap is there. These are not the same signal.
The Primed Audience
Sometimes your distribution channel does the education work before you arrive. When that happens, everything about the opportunity changes — and the clock starts ticking.
The Deployment Gap
The gap between 'working code' and 'listed product' has collapsed. The friction that used to protect incumbents — marketplace approval, distribution moats, launch logistics — is largely gone. What that means for what's actually hard now.
Tool-Native
There's a difference between software that solves a problem and software that solves a problem inside the tool you're already in. The second one has a structural advantage the first one can never fully close.
One Buyer, Two Workflows
When the same professional does two different reports for the same transaction, that's not two separate markets. It's one market with a bundling story.
Where the Complaint Lives
The platform where professionals complain about a workflow is also the platform where you reach them. Research and distribution are the same question.
Own the Payment Layer
Platform dependency is a business risk. The most resilient monetization strategies keep payment logic under your control.
Distribution Is the Product
Two teams build nearly identical tools. One gets 400,000 users. The other gets 4,000. The difference isn't the technology.
Distribution Beats Product (The Data Is In)
Solo SaaS founders finally have real data on what grows a product. Spoiler: it's not the thing you're probably spending the most time on.
Where the Traffic Already Is
Parasite SEO through Reddit threads. Why writing the hundredth blog post on a topic is the wrong call when you can comment inside the page-1 result instead.
The Work You're Not Doing
Good work is table stakes. The assumption that quality creates its own distribution is the most common mistake builders make. Distribution is a separate discipline.
The Template Play
Building a starter kit for an emerging tool and crossing $5K in three weeks isn't luck. It's a pattern. The tool gets the press; the template captures the revenue.
Entertainment Value
The most viral developer tools aren't the most useful ones. They're the most enjoyable to encounter. There's a lesson in that.
The Zero-Backend Bet
Some of the most viral tools built recently have no server, no database, no account. Everything runs in the browser. The absence of infrastructure is the feature.
Content That Keeps Working
A post published today is still bringing people to your product in eighteen months. A paid ad stops the moment the budget stops. The math is different.
Do You Know Someone
The most effective outreach question isn't 'want to buy this?' — it's a gentler ask that almost always produces a useful answer.
The Seventy Percent
Building the product is the easy part. The harder work — the part most engineers underestimate — is everything that happens after you ship.
The Model That Fits
On finding the smallest repeatable unit of value and what it means to ship the same solution more than once.