Distribution is the bit I always skip, so I built a free tool for it

I treat distribution as a product constraint, not a launch task. Before building, I pick one channel where I can name 20 specific people who already discuss the problem, then write the first three posts in that channel’s native format. If I cannot outline those posts, I have not earned the build yet.

This is a smart way to think about channels. One thing I’d add under sharing: make the product itself give non-users something to try, not just a landing page to read. I’ve been playing with that angle on BuilderBench, where founders compete across 8 quick events and the top five get SaaS links: https://www.buildersbenchmark.com/ . It makes discovery feel earned instead of begged for.

That was fast 😅 I’ll run the $39 one-off page through it now. I’ll send you the exact point where the result becomes useful — or where it breaks.

The "does your site give the channel what it runs on" check is the sharpest part of this, and there is one channel where the honest answer is always no, which might be worth building in explicitly.

AI answers and "best X" queries. When an engine answers "best tools for X", it assembles the answer from articles about the category, not from vendor sites. We measured it on ourselves: of the 20 articles that feed AI answers for our category, we are in zero, while our brand name returns our own pages in the top 7. The site is fine. It is just never a candidate for that query.

So that channel looks like SEO but runs on something no site can supply for itself, which is third party coverage. A check along the lines of "does anyone else write about your category, and are you in it" would catch a lot of founders who think they have an SEO problem and actually have a PR one.

The hard-stop vs. warning framing is useful. I’d be curious whether you’ve considered separating “can’t run” from “not yet repeatable” for solo founders—a channel may be technically possible but still fail on setup time. A small time-to-first-signal input could make the output more actionable than a binary shut/open.

The one-off gap matters. I’m testing a $39 one-time founder product, so my problem isn’t churn — it’s whether one person can keep finding enough fresh buyers every month. Are you planning to add that model?

I went to run this on mine and stopped at the first field. "Price / month". Mine is a one-off purchase, not a subscription, and there's nowhere to put that. Same for churn — there isn't any, because there's nothing to cancel.

Which is a shame, because the number that annoyed you most gets worse in that model, not better. On a subscription you replace the 5% that leave. On a one-off you replace everyone, every month, forever. The treadmill you described is the gentler version.

That's probably a real gap rather than an edge case. A lot of what gets built here is one-off — templates, courses, cohorts, tools. The arithmetic gate still works for them, it just needs margin per sale instead of price times payback.

If it's useful: I have a channel with a known outcome you could test the third gate against. Directory listings, six weeks, twelve sessions that reached my site, not one of them got past the first question. I know what the answer should be. If your structure check would have called that shut, that's a stronger claim than any testimonial.

And a trade, if you want it. I spend 30 minutes on your landing, you spend 30 on my entry page. Not opinions — a task. I'd hand you something like "find out what this costs and how long it takes", then shut up and watch where you stall. You'd do the same to me. Mine is a five-question quiz page. It's the part I already suspect is broken. 92% of people who land there never click a single question, and the numbers can't tell me whether they left or just sat there. No hard feelings if it's not your thing, and no follow-up from me.

The “channel is shut” logic is interesting. Have founders actually changed their distribution plan after using DistroFit, or is the output mainly confirming what they already suspected?