When do you start thinking about distribution?
I'm currently building HelloHailey in public at The MVP Sprint. This week I'm focused on distribution.
All I have right now is a landing page with a waitlist. My goal is to have a clear idea of how I'll reach users before I invest the time into building an MVP.
In the past I haven't done this - I just dive right into the fun part (actually building something...)
I want to understand a couple things:
- Distribution channels - what makes a good channel? Which channels could I use? What would be some strategies for leveraging them?
- Purchasing processes - My product is B2B. I don't know a ton about SaaS purchasing processes within companies. I'm bucketing this under distribution for now even though I suppose it's only tangentially related.
Before getting too deep into this stuff, I want to hear from all of you
- Is all this really necessary before building an MVP?
- How do you evaluate distribution strategy?
Thanks in advance for the help!
Early days i used to think of it last ("oh there's competition so there's surely users")
Nowadays I think of distribution channels I know best FIRST, then see if the product i'm thinking about can fit into that
A great article written recently by the founder of zubtitle covering just this:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/we-just-hit-1m-arr-for-the-second-time-heres-my-best-advice-142d4efd37
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
I'm a first-time founder, and this might be a "disagree and commit" moment. Which comes first is highly context-dependent. For example, I am building a chat app for sports teams (https://wildkard.io). My customers currently use WhatsApp, Email, SMS, GroupMe, Meetup, FB Groups, etc. If I solely focused on how to build a wait-list, then took 6 months to build a MLP (minimum lovable product), I'd lose the waitlist - assuming I was doing nothing but engaging them via outreach and events. Attention spans are shrinking, and everything is crowded. I'd say product and distribution go hand-in-hand. I will agree that knowing your acquisition channels per stage of growth is paramount (1-100 customers, 100-1k, 1k-10k, etc.). For us, 1-1k was cold emails. Now we're pivoting to cold calls.
This is gold. Thanks for the value.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
love this @yonajune but don't leave us hanging :D which channel actually worked for you?
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
How long did it take until SEO efforts started paying off?
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Much faster than I expected. I guess I shouldn't rule it out as a somewhat-near-term growth strategy.
awesome
Thanks for the response and congrats (almost) on $5k MRR! That's a huge milestone, especially for a side project.
Love this!
This comment was deleted 5 years ago
Yea, leveraging others' audiences could be a great strategy. It definitely requires a bit of creativity, and probably some upfront investment in building a reputable personal brand that people will feel comfortable vouching for.
I'll give this some more thought.