How I figured out distribution & marketing

The saying "first time founders think about product, second time founders think about distribution" is very true.

I've started lots of failed businesses in the past - some never even made a $1 in their lifetime.

Although I'm no master at distribution now, I'm much better at generating demand, getting sign ups, and bringing $ into businesses I start building.

For example, I started my newsletter (Unheard Roots) where I dissect the growth of billion dollar startups (Uncover the stories & strategies behind their early days) exactly 74 days ago.

74 days ago (On April 10th, 2023) I had 0 subs and a blank Beehiiv dashboard.
Now on June 23rd, I have close to 500~ subscribers and starting to generate cash-flow (becoming profitable).

Here are some things I learned about distribution:

Take an audience first-approach: Have a clear idea of who your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is and what their attributes & habits are. Where do they spend time? What do they care about? Where do they work? How old are they? Where do they live?
Create a document to dump every single acquisition channel possible. Now that you know who to specifically target, create a list of every single place they spend time on. Teens? Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram. Moms in their 40s? Facebook.
When you start testing with different channels, don't quit on one without spending sufficient time testing & iterating. Sometimes you have the right product and wrong channel, sometimes wrong product and right channel. Or right product and right channel but wrong messaging. And the only way to figure it out is to stick to it, run loads of trials, and iterate / improve based on results of trials.
It's tempting to move on to the next shiny object - in this case next shiny channel. But sometimes you will have to run quite a bit of trials before you crack the code on a specific channel.
Test different channels all at once, you don't need to put your eggs in one basket. The caveat here is to not have too many baskets, don't have 15 different channels being tested unless you have the team for it. But testing 2~3 channels at the same time is relatively reasonable.
When something works, double down. You don't need to keep looking for newer channels, just focus on optimizing the results from the channel that worked. Later on you can consider testing new channels.

And thats mostly it, the lessons above are the most practical pieces of advice I have for anyone building a product.

I'm still learning and extremely young but this framework has gotten me great results and continues to yield to this day.

Mastering it is a long journey and will likely take decades.

One last thing before you click away, if you'd like to learn about how billion dollar startups are built and uncover the stories & strategies behind their early days, consider checking out Unheard Roots.