The difference between reach, and distribution

Some posts and comments here on IH got me thinking, "hm, it seems like a lot of people think reach and distribution as interchangeable...and that explains a lot of peoples' challenges."

Here's what I mean:

• Reach is the ability for your thing (idea, message, etc) to reach people. For a lot of people, the part of reach that's most important is the ability to reach new people with your idea or message.
• Distribution is the ability for you to reliably create a transaction

Subtle, but not the same. I have a hunch that this confuses a lot of people because historically, reach and distribution were done (at least in part) by the same entity. Some examples (but certainly not all):

• Book Publishers
• Record Companies
• Movie Studios
• Big box stores
• E-commerce Marketplaces (eBay, Amazon, Envato, etc)

In all of these cases, you create a thing, and then you put it in the hands of an entity that already has a) lots of people looking for things like your thing and b) the means/mechanisms to make the sale (marketing and merchandizing, sales and checkout, etc etc)

Twitter (and social media in general) can be good for reach, but it's not good for distribution. When you post, you have almost zero certainty that anybody who has followed you will see what you posted. The timeline whizzes by quickly, and people browsing social media rarely have buying intent.

Product Hunt is reach, but it's not distribution. People can find out your product exists but the primary call to action is to upvote because that's the action they are incentivized to have users take. "Get it now" is de-emphasized. Imagine if Amazon made "buy it now" the least important button on the page.

Gumroad is distribution, but not reach. Their marketplace/recommendation engine kinda changes that, but only once your product has made some level of sales, so you still need to bring your own reach to kickstart that process.

Patreon and Kickstarter are distribution, but for most campaigns, not reach. It's possible for your project to be featured or go viral, but neither of those paths are reliable or consistently reproducible. The vast majority rely on you bringing your own reach at least initially.

Marketplaces might provide both reach and distribution, BUT since they own both, they also will tend to take a much larger slice of the sale. That's fine if they bring you enough sales volume to make up for it, but it's rare for a marketplace to be reliable in that way. It's a much more common strategy that a marketplace helps get you smaller sales, then you find ways to funnel those customers off the platform to make larger sales later.

That's not to say that any of these tools are BAD (except product hunt, I really think Product Hunt is bad).

But my point that each one is just one part of the strategy for building a business and in most cases, you'll need at least one more tool to bridge reach and distribution. An email list, for example, is an extremely powerful tool for converting reach into distribution.

If you can reach people, but you can't reliably create a transaction, you don't have a sustainable business. If you have the ability to create a transaction, but you can't reach people, you don't have a sustainable business.