In AI, the product was never the hard part. Distribution is.

I'll start with the thing I'm betting a company on: in the AI era, building the product stopped being the moat. Everyone can ship a decent product now. What's actually scarce is getting it in front of people who'll pay for it.

And for most businesses the best distribution channel is still paid ads. Not content, not SEO, not hoping something goes viral. Ads.

They're measurable, they scale with money, and they work on day one. The catch is that ads quietly only work if you already have money. If you're a small business with a few hundred euros a month, you get eaten alive on Meta. That gap is the reason Trippple Club exists.

So here's where we actually are, no spin: 22 customers, around $30K a month in ad spend under management. Small and early. But it's been enough to teach me a few things worth writing down, including a pricing mistake I had to walk back.

Why small budgets lose on ads

When people say "ads don't work for small businesses," what they really mean is that small budgets don't survive the learning phase.

Meta's algorithm needs volume before it gets good. Roughly 50 conversions per ad set per week. On 300 euros a month you never get there. You spend the whole budget feeding the algorithm data it never gets enough of to act on. So the small advertiser decides ads are a scam, quits, and goes back to posting into the void.

Meanwhile the business spending 30K a month clears the learning phase in days, lets the algorithm compound, and pulls further ahead. Ads reward scale. That's the structural unfairness, and it isn't going away, because it's how the platforms are built.

So if distribution is the moat, and ads are the best distribution, and ads only really work at scale, the interesting question becomes: how do you give a small business the benefits of scale it can't afford on its own? That's the real product. Not "an AI that runs ads." An AI that makes a small budget behave like a competent operator's budget. Tight creative iteration, killing losers fast, no wasted learning phases.

The pricing mistake: 15% commission

When we launched I priced it the obvious way agencies do, but cheaper, 15% of ad spend. It felt fair. We make money when our customers spend, we're aligned, everybody wins. Right?

It was misaligned in three ways, and it took customers to show me.

First, it punished the exact people I built this for. A customer spending 400 euros a month paid me 60. That doesn't cover the cost of serving them, so I either neglect the small accounts or quietly hope they spend more. The model fought my own mission.

Second, it created a backwards incentive. On commission my revenue goes up when the customer spends more, not when they get more efficient. But the entire point of the product is to make a small budget go further, which means helping them spend less to get the same result. I'd picked the one pricing model that made me root against my own product working.

Third, it made my revenue as shaky as their ad budgets. Customers pause spend in slow months. Under commission, every customer's bad month was also my bad month. No predictability, impossible to plan around.

The switch: flat fee + their own ad spend

So we moved to a flat management fee. The customer's ad spend stays theirs, it goes straight to Meta, we don't touch a cut of it. We charge for the work and the software, not for how much they spend.

What changed:

The incentives flipped the right way. Now I win when the customer sticks around, which means I win when the product genuinely makes their budget go further. Same goal as the customer for the first time.

Small accounts became worth serving. A customer on 400 a month and one on 3K a month pay the same for the same work, so I can take care of the small ones properly instead of treating them like a rounding error.

Revenue got predictable. Flat recurring fees I can actually forecast, totally independent of anyone's ad-budget mood swings.

The honest downside: a flat fee is a much clearer "is this worth it?" decision every month. There's no hiding the cost inside a percentage. But I've come to think that's a feature. It forces me to deliver visible value or lose them, and that pressure is exactly what keeps the product sharp.

What I actually believe now

The "club" part isn't branding. It's the whole thesis. Small businesses can't individually afford to win at distribution, so the move is to give a lot of them shared access to the machinery. The AI, the playbooks, the creative iteration that only big advertisers used to have. Pool the capability, not the budget.

If I'm right that distribution is the real barrier now, then the biggest opportunity isn't a smarter model. It's making world-class distribution affordable to the people who were structurally locked out of it. That's a much bigger and far less crowded problem than building yet another product.

I could be wrong about plenty of this. 22 customers isn't proof of a thesis, it's barely an anecdote. But it's enough that I'm willing to say it out loud and find out.

One question I honestly can't answer yet, for anyone who's been further down this road: for a service where the whole value is "we make your money go further," does a flat fee eventually cap your upside compared to performance pricing? Or is predictable, aligned, boring recurring revenue just the better long game? I keep flip-flopping on it. Would love to hear from people who've run both.