Chris (00:01.038)
You don't have a product problem. You have a distribution problem. Something another investor told me during our interview. And it was mind blowing because everything that you see on social is about marketing. When I was in the agency world is about marketing. When I'm in the startup world is about marketing. Everybody, even in podcasting, every time I talk to a podcast host, they ask me, how do you market your show? That's the biggest thing. And I don't know why founders think it's different. If you want to work with an investor, if you want to get funded,

you have to have distribution. So today I want to break it down and get into it. So distribution is always more important than product, right? Investors know this great distribution can fix a mediocre product, but a perfect product can't fix zero reach. That means if your product is amazing, if it's perfect, if it's the best thing since sliced bread and people don't know about it, means nothing. It's useless. Meanwhile, the other guy can have a crappy product.

that needs a bunch of tweaks and fixes and all of that stuff, but we got distribution. To put it in founder terms, somebody can spend, let's say, six months coding their own platform and building something that is perfect and it's so special, it's amazing. Somebody else with distribution can make that same thing and vibe code it on Bolt or Replet or Cursor or one of these other vibe coding platforms.

And if they have distribution with the Vibe-coded platform, it's going to do better than a perfectly coded platform. That simple. And I know that's something that's hard for a lot of the developers to believe, but distribution matters. It's important because for talent for an investor to work with you, they want to know that you have some kind of traction, some kind of progress. If you just built this amazing thing in your quiet time, yeah, that's fine. It's cool. We as developers know it's great. Blah, blah, blah.

not me, but the developers are going to know it's amazing, right? But the people, the ones who are going to pay you for it, they don't know anything. How are you going to get them to know? If you're going to the investor saying, hey, our product is great. Now I just need your money to help me get customers. They're going to look at you like you don't have any customers. That's not a good thing. You're kind of behind the eight ball, you know? So it's something that you as a founder got to recognize, right? Investors are going to ask these early questions if you're a founder.

Chris (02:26.894)
Do they know how they'll get customers? Do you know, do you have a process? Have you executed this process before? Is this the thing that got you to your first hundred or thousand customers? What's this system you have in place right now? What are you doing? And this is why I try to tell founders it's not good to just go the ad strategy. We just pour money into ads. Unless you have a good return on that and it's really working and you figured out ads at the highest level.

That's not distribution. That's advertising. Those are different things. Now you got to understand your channels. That's another question investors are going to have. Do you understand your channels? By channels, mean, do you know how to find your customers or people you want to work with? I know that if I develop a product right now to help start our founders in some kind of way to get the founders that are building, go on Twitter, active in communities, engage with the top influencers and experts within the startup.

ecosystem, put out some kind of digital thing that's free, build my audience, a newsletter, and I'm off and running. Right. If I want to get another type of founder, I can go to LinkedIn. Those are usually going to be the more experienced, more seasoned founders or the people who kind of work behind the scenes in stealth mode a lot. Right. So that's the process though is knowing your channels. You need to know this in depth. I know that because I studied that stuff for this podcast. Like I wanted to make sure to show it successful.

To do that, I got to know more about you guys, my listeners, right? Stay with me. So key takeaway here first is your go-to-market plan is your credibility. It's proof that you understand your customers beyond the product part. Understanding product is great. It's cool. When you understand distribution and product, you're a superhero. Now, the second thing is the product trap. You don't want to build in silence. There is an exception to this, and I'm going get to that. But...

Founders spend 90 % of their time building and 10 % telling the world. That has to be opposite. So you should spend 10 % building and 90 % telling the world. I know that sounds crazy, but let me cook. When you spend more time telling the world what you're building, they're going to tell you if it's good or not, how you can improve it, if they are willing to pay for it or not. You'll learn all of that upfront. All of it. You'll get all the details upfront early on in the process. So imagine building for

Chris (04:50.006)
nine months and after you're done, you start marketing and you say, okay, I'm gonna bill for nine months in the last part of the year, last three months, I'm gonna just market it. What's gonna happen is you'll run into a situation where you're marketing something that people don't really want. To avoid that, you actually start distributing earlier. It could be with a wait list. It could be with, I think Zoom calls or interviews are the best to get people on the phone. Look them in the eye while you do this.

ask them the questions, had a conversation, be willing to get turned down, right? Get that honest, harsh feedback. Because when people start giving you positive feedback that's actually working and then giving you money, now you know you're winning. Now, distribution has to start before your launch. You don't work on it and then you just launch it. No, you have to distribute and have those channels ready to do that research all of that time and effort into marketing before you put the product out there.

You can't, like the backwards way, it doesn't work. Right? And I'm going give you some tips on how to do this. Really simple. I've heard Rob Walling talk about why you shouldn't build an audience. And I don't think you have to go with building an audience. You don't have to go and say, I'm going to build a 20,000 person newsletter. I don't think it's that. I think you need to focus on storytelling, partnerships, and positioning. Now storytelling is going to help you in terms of this is what I'm building. This is how it's going to work.

This was going to help always tying a story to it through somebody else's pain or progress. Simple. That's a simple framework. Tell stories about what you're building using pain or progress as the main points that people can relate to. Because if it's pain they've experienced, they relate to you immediately because it's something they've gone through. If it's somebody else's progress. Okay, great. They've won the way I want to win. I'm now relating to what you're building and what you're doing. So I want to learn more. I'm going to follow you, get on your newsletter.

All that good stuff. Now, the other strategy is partnerships. Literally go to your channels where your people are active that you want to work with and find five to 10 people in there that are influencers. Follow them, engage with their content. Don't be an ass kisser, but engage with their content. Have the conversations, bro. I'm telling you, it works. And a lot of these people are willing to work with you in some kind of way. They could end up being a

Chris (07:13.934)
board member or something like that, long, long term, obviously. Some of them may lead you to other investors. All kinds of opportunities come from that. But if you do the opposite of I'm going to build in silence, you close all these opportunities, all the stuff I'm talking about now, you can't take advantage of because you're scared somebody is going to steal your little idea, bro. People can build entire websites and marketplaces and directories and all of that stuff within minutes now. Let it go. let it go.

Chill out. Nobody's going to steal anything from you. You'll be all right. So the takeaway here is stop waiting for the perfect launch. It doesn't exist. All the biggest companies, Apple, Google, all of them, they launched over and over again until they got it right. You can launch over and over again. It don't mean nothing. I've launched different podcasts. I've had over a hundred podcast launches. Whether it's mine or Client's Work, I'm going keep on doing it. Every season when I launch, I truly like the shows brand new. That's what you got to do.

Cause not as many people are paying attention as you think they are. So get out of your head on that one. Now there are three layers of early distribution, right? And I'm going to break this down. I'm not going to go too deep into it, but I want to kind of give you an overview of how this works. Right? Number one is direct to you, right? Like you and a customer, cold DMS, outreach, your personal network, all of that stuff. and this is at the very, very early stage. Now number two is more indirect, right? It's like your own content.

You like your newsletter, social platforms, podcast, maybe a press release. Those are the kinds of things you put that content out. You put that information out there and you attract people with it. I think that really is helpful for your positioning too. Cause if you're trying to be seen as a founder on kind of on a different level than what you were, I think it's really, really good to do those kinds of things. Be a guest on podcasts, get some press releases out there, get some social posts about you going like

That's going to help with your credibility a lot. The third part is a partner, you and somebody else's audience. I said, going on other people's podcasts, collaborating with YouTube videos, being active in their communities. I think being talked about on their newsletters is so many ways to leverage existing audiences. That's why when Rob said that in his video, like, I agree that you shouldn't try to build an audience forever.

Chris (09:37.091)
But I also think the focus should be on leveraging existing audiences to build yours. Right. So if you're going on a podcast, send them to your podcast. If you're being talked about on newsletters, send them to your newsletter. And over time it will compound and you have a massive audience. All three of those processes you can do simultaneously and that's your marketing. Right. So I look at it this way.

You want to balance it out with code outreach, some DMS here and there, creating a network, right? And then you also want to put out your own content, do the content that works for you. For me, I can get on camera like this and just go. Like when you're watching these episodes, this is one take. But I want to say, I've been doing this for a decade. I've been talking to myself in empty rooms for a decade. So it takes time to get good at it. You know? And I do think you need the right tools and stuff like

I wouldn't be able to do this if I couldn't sit my computer in front of me, have this fancy boom arm over my shoulder. I got like three lights on. it's a process for sure. But I think you got to find one that works for you and lean into it and triple down and quadruple down once you find it. Like I'm never going to stop being on video. I'm never going to stop podcasting because it's my distribution. You get what I mean? So if yours is writing, you should be writing every day. Every single day. Right. Every day.

If you are a writer, if you're a founder and your skill and your distribution is writing, don't stop doing it ever. Keep going. Keep it part of your system. Right. And then with the partners, I think that's just about finding people, finding the right people that are your people that you align with. And the beauty here is you don't have to be cool with everybody. Like there are some people in the startup space I'm just not interested in being cool with. Not a big problem, not a big issue, but I'm not.

Focus on those people. I'm going to focus on the ones that I can win with. Right? So when I'm launching, they help me launch. So when they launch, I help them launch and we work together. If I got some kind of connection or collaboration or whatever opportunity, I send it to them. You know what I mean? Like that's the power of this. So distribution is going to be the most important thing for you as a founder. And I hope that this episode really explains how you can start to distribute better and put out more content. If you do have any questions,

Chris (12:01.635)
Hit me up on Twitter. I'm on Twitter more than LinkedIn now, honestly. It's just better, more conversations with real people. And we can chop it up on there. Hit me up on Twitter, thecoachchris underscore. I'll put a link to it in the show notes.