How we turned our #1 problem into our niche
We're building a mentor platform and our biggest problem is distribution. So we're recruiting the world's best distribution minds as mentors.
We looked at our own wall and realized it's the same wall half this community is staring at: working product, zero traction. The niche picked itself.
We mapped 10 subcategories of distribution, then asked: who is the single most credible person in each one? The list we ended up with is absurd. A YC co-founder. An a16z general partner who wrote the book on network effects. The founder of DuckDuckGo who literally invented the Bullseye framework. HubSpot's CTO. The person who coined "growth hacking."
Ten names. We're cold-DMing all of them.
Selfish reasons drive this. We're already building from their books. Their frameworks are in our sprint methodology, our positioning, our channel strategy. But books give you the what. Sometimes the why. They don't give you the thinking pattern underneath. How does this person reason through a problem they haven't written about? That's what we want to study and make accessible. A book is a snapshot. We want the living version.
We're also converting proven mentors from existing platforms who are maxed out on live sessions. The pitch: you have more demand than you can serve. This lets your expertise work while you sleep. Top down and middle out.
Even the process is worth it. Every DM forces us to explain our platform in 4 sentences to someone who's seen everything. Positioning gets sharper each time. The research builds a recruitment playbook for every mentor after this.
Ten moonshots from the top. Proven mentors from the middle. We'll see which direction cracks first.
The part about every DM forcing you to explain the platform in 4 sentences is underrated.
Those conversations are almost like a real-time positioning test. If someone doesn't immediately understand the value or pushes back with a specific objection, that signal is incredibly useful.
I've noticed a similar pattern when founders actually observe how people react to their product explanation — hesitation, confusion, or curiosity shows up before any analytics data ever does.
Curious if your pitch evolved a lot after the first few dozen DMs.
Honestly every DM is completely different. There's no template. We dig into how each person talks about their own work and build the angle around that. Someone who's protective of their expertise gets a different pitch than someone who wants their thinking to reach further than their schedule allows.
The one thing that stayed constant: 4 sentences. If it doesn't land in 4, more words won't save it.