Hey, how do you distribute your products?

for B2B we stopped chasing "channels" and ran one outbound motion hard for 4 weeks: tiny ICP, one real signal in line one, then email + LinkedIn on the same account.

distribution only compounds after you know why people say no. until then more channels just multiply confusion.

I have seen a lot of products listed recently who promise some form of this idea. Like with everything else, they are just lots of nice promises until you actually prove them. Ask around and see if anyone you know has actually used one of them as a real customer. Did it work for them? What were the drawbacks?

Timely thread — I'm mid-way through exactly this problem. Packaged a real client project (membership/booking web app) into a generic template and put it on Gumroad. First move was posting into dev-heavy spaces (r/webdev, X, here on IH) — got some likes/engagement, but zero real traffic to the actual listing.

Lesson so far: dev communities will engage with the "how it's built" story, but they're not the buyer — the actual buyer for a productized template like this is a non-technical small-business owner (gym/league/studio manager), who isn't reading r/webdev or IH.

Now trying to find where that audience actually is — FB groups for studio/club owners, Product Hunt, etc. Curious if anyone here who's sold B2B-small-business tools (not to other devs) found a discovery channel that actually worked for reaching a non-technical buyer.

Demo + listing if useful context: https://claude.ai/artifact/1NzvyGFAKa1tC14pVUYeNd · https://arielshimmer6.gumroad.com/l/jtiei

I'm just starting with my first small app: it helps people document the condition of a rented flat or car with photos and signatures. I don't know anyone who rents, so I'm trying to reach tenants through tenant unions and forums where people already ask about deposit or fuel disputes, and I answer their questions first before mentioning anything. Too early to say if it works, but replying to real problems is the only thing that hasn't felt like spam. Curious: what got you your first 10 users when you had no audience?

For me, distribution has become part of the product itself.

I’m experimenting with a SaaS where one of the main goals is to get discovered through AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, etc.), so I’ve been thinking about distribution from the other direction:

Instead of only asking “how do I get people to see my product?”, ask “when someone is already looking for a solution like mine, does my product show up?”

So far, the channels I’m paying the most attention to are:

• Search / AI search
• Communities where the target users already discuss their problems
• Product-led content around specific use cases
• Integrations that put the product inside an existing workflow

I’ve tried paid acquisition and broad promotion before, and honestly, getting traffic is much easier than getting the right traffic.

Curious what channels have actually converted into paying users for you guys.

I’m starting to think building the product was the easy part 😄
I launched recently and suddenly discovered my new full-time job: figuring out where the people who might actually want it are hiding.
I’m testing a few very different channels right now, and my biggest lesson so far is that traffic and actual users are two completely different species.
I’m becoming much more interested in small, concentrated communities than in “reach everyone” distribution. Fewer people, but the right people.
If your AI figures out where those people are hiding before I do, please send it my way. 😄

For early-stage SaaS, I’ve found that distribution works better when you go where the problem is already being discussed rather than trying to reach everyone. Reddit, niche communities, founder groups, and targeted cold outreach have been more useful for me than broad promotion.

The key is usually finding the right audience first, then testing a few channels consistently instead of spreading yourself across too many.

Regarding the AI lead generation: from working with agencies, the issue usually isn't defining a lead, it's identifying which prospects actually have intent to buy anything at all. A company can look like a perfect fit on paper, and you'd expect them to reply to outreach, but often they don't. What signal would your AI use to tell intent apart from fit?

What has worked for me on distribution: test one channel at a time, with a number you have decided -> before you start, and tag every link with a UTM per channel. When I ran several at once I couldn't tell which one did anything.

What we've leaned on is posting the specific problem in communities where people already talk about it, then replying to what comes back. It gets you in front of people who already care, which a broad list can't do.

Small bets have worked better for me than one big channel: launch directories for search intent, 1-2 helpful founder communities, then a simple challenge or interactive hook people can share. I’m testing that with a free builder benchmark game for SaaS founders, where the top five get their SaaS link on the leaderboard: https://www.buildersbenchmark.com/

One pattern I've seen hold up across products: write about the problem, not the product. Problem-focused content ranks and gets shared; product announcements get ignored everywhere except launch communities. The channel honestly matters less than whether a stranger would find the content useful with the product stripped out.

For small products, I’d use a tight loop: (1) pick one buyer/job, (2) choose one channel where that buyer already asks questions, (3) publish 3–5 useful answers before linking anything, (4) track qualified conversations and conversions—not impressions, and (5) repeat the message that earns replies. A tiny checklist and a clear next step usually outperform a broad “AI-powered” pitch.

I’m testing this with a small, value-first sprint: $7 for a Close Kit, $12 for a discovery scorecard or keep kit, and $27 for all three. Happy to share if useful; no pressure.

Honestly still figuring this out myself. Tried Facebook groups first —
most posts got auto-removed before anyone saw them. Reddit needs
account karma before it'll even let you post. Direct outreach (DMs,
emails to people who'd actually use the thing) has been the only
channel that doesn't have some kind of gatekeeping built in, so that's
where I've been putting most of my time lately. Curious if others
found something that worked faster.

For a B2B WordPress plugin (I build TurnKey Directories - it lets someone launch a business directory site), what's working at the pre-revenue stage is boringly manual. I picked the handful of communities where my exact buyers already talk - WordPress, local SEO, people trying to launch directories - and show up daily with actual help, not promos: public replies first, never cold DMs. The second leg is qualification over volume. I hand-pick maybe five real prospects a day and offer founder-assisted onboarding instead of a checkout link. A hundred targeted touches beat a thousand impressions at this stage because you learn why each no happens. On the AI-lead-distribution idea: identification is the easy half, the message that lands is the hard half - same trap as flyers. What's your plan for the outreach part once the AI hands you the list?

Distribution that scaled for me was never a channel I built, it was one I borrowed. Henson Group grew for almost two decades on Microsoft's field sellers, because they already had the meetings and we only had to be the partner they trusted to hand the work to. Before you build AI lead gen, ask who is already selling to your exact buyer, then figure out what you can do for them that makes introducing you worth their time.

A scoreboard from the other side of this question: solo founder, a few weeks in, small EU-accessibility scanner. X suspended my account three times and Reddit auto-removed comments from a new account, so both were dead ends before I had a single conversation. About 150 cold emails so far have produced one human reply and no payment. Search is the slow bet: five articles built from data I collected while scanning, too early to say anything.

The trust-borrowing framing in this thread matches what I saw. The one thing that got a reply was giving the recipient something checkable without asking them to trust me first. That's what I'd want an AI lead tool to prove: not "here is your list," but "here is a checkable reason this person should care." Has anyone here seen that work at scale?

What worked for me over twenty years was not finding customers, it was finding whoever already had them. At Henson Group we grew on the back of Microsoft's field sellers, because one partner who already owned the relationship beat any volume of cold outreach we could run ourselves. Before you build AI lead distribution, work out who already sells to your buyer every week and what you can hand them so they bring you along.

Your flyer metaphor is the sharpest part of your post, and I'd take it one step further. A flyer works on a busy street because the street already has the traffic, and the human vendor picked the street — the targeting was done before the flyer was printed. Most distribution failures I see are the reverse: founders build the flyer (product, landing page, outreach list) and then pick a random street.

A framework that helps me rank candidate channels: score them by how much trust they come with pre-loaded. Cold outreach borrows zero trust — you pay for every reply with effort. Communities borrow a little, via your comment history. Search borrows Google's. Referrals borrow someone else's reputation. The "AI finds the customer" idea only solves discovery; it doesn't add any trust to the channel, which is why scaled outreach still converts at ~1%. The lever isn't a better list, it's a channel where the trust is already there.

Concretely, once you pass praneetbrar's "one ugly sentence" test — who it's for, in one line — ask where those exact people already admit the problem out loud: search queries, subreddits, Slack or Discord communities, comparison threads. Pick exactly one street, and commit to 90 days of showing up there before touching another channel. Almost every indie distribution story that works is "I became a regular somewhere for three months," not "I tested twelve channels." The AI can help you find the street. It can't hand out the flyers in a way people trust.

Seen this problem now with many founders. Distribution is honestly where a lot of them seem to get stuck after building the product.

I think the first question is less “what channel should I use?” and more of 'where are the people who already have this problem looking for answers?' That could be search, Reddit, communities, comparison sites, reviews, etc. Once you know that, you can work backwards and figure out what would actually get the product in front of them. AI can help with the research, but I don't think it replaces the actual understanding of the customer.

I’ve had better luck treating distribution as a set of small experiments rather than one AI-powered list. For each channel I log who I contacted, the problem they mentioned, and whether a real conversation happened. One reply with a specific pain is more useful than a large batch of prospects. I’d keep the first outreach manual and narrow enough that a recipient can tell why they were selected. How are you thinking about consent and relevance when using public data?

The gap in the AI distribution idea is that public information tells you fit and almost never tells you timing, and outreach is mostly a timing problem. A company can be a perfect match for two years and only be buying in one particular week. What does carry timing is change rather than state: somebody just posted a complaint about the tool you would replace, a job ad appeared for the role that owns this, a pricing page moved. If the AI watched for what changed this week instead of scoring companies on how well they fit, you would get a much shorter list with a reason to write today attached to each name.

Honestly the flyer picture is the useful bit. The AI part is just a faster way to pick the wrong street. What actually worked for me was one place I could sit in the same week and answer, not a pile of potential clients. If I cannot say who it is for in one ugly sentence, more targeting just burns the morning faster. Are you stuck distributing the old SaaS, or is this lead thing already the product?

Distribution is the moat. We spent €150 on Google Ads and got 0 installs. Pivot to organic: reply to growing conversations on Threads, build in public, cold DMs. Personal > paid every time.