I spent 3 months doing distribution manually before building agents to do it. Here's what I'd do differently.

For the first 3 months of my SaaS I was doing distribution entirely by hand. Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, communities. Showing up in threads, writing comments, posting original content. Every single day. It was eating 2-3 hours minimum and I was still shipping features on top of it.

The results weren't bad. I figured out which subreddits actually convert, what kind of comments get replies vs get ignored, and I built this vocabulary list of how my users actually describe their problems (completely different from how I described them on my landing page). That manual phase was genuinely useful.

But it doesn't scale. At some point you're choosing between writing code and writing your 14th Reddit comment of the week. And the Reddit comments were winning because they felt more urgent, which meant the product was falling behind.

So I started building agents to handle pieces of it. Not the whole thing. Just the parts that were repetitive enough to specify clearly: scanning for relevant threads, drafting initial replies that match the tone of each platform, scheduling posts at the right times. The judgment calls (which threads are actually worth engaging with, what angle to take, when to be contrarian vs supportive) still need a human. That part isn't automatable yet and honestly I'm not sure it should be.

What surprised me: the automated version only works because of those 3 months of manual reps. The agents need to know what "good" looks like, and the only way to teach them was to do it myself first. Every shortcut I tried before that (generic templates, AI-generated comments without context) got ignored or downvoted.

If I was starting over I'd still do the manual phase. But I'd cap it at 6 weeks instead of 3 months. That's roughly how long it took for the patterns to become obvious enough to write specs for. Everything after week 6 was just me being stubborn about doing it myself.

Currently I'm building this into a product (AI agents that handle distribution for solo founders) because every founder I've talked to has the exact same problem. Good product, no distribution system, can't afford a marketing hire. Still early but the agents are running my own distribution now and it's freed up roughly 10-12 hours a week.

Curious if anyone else has tried automating parts of their distribution. What worked? What blew up in your face?