🥊 Product vs Distribution
Hello! Adam Thornhill here. ‘The Podcast Guy’ saving you 10 hours a week.
Enjoy the 150th Podup, with special thanks to ChatGPT Consulting - a proven 4-week program to transform your team’s productivity and creativity.
Today, you’ll learn if you should invest in product or distribution thanks to 20VC.
Life’s not fair. Just because you have the best product, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically win. Harry Stebbings argues why distribution is king, and why having a market leading product isn’t a guaranteed recipe for success.
Is distribution more important than product?
I don’t think it matters if your product is better anymore.
Distribution trumps all.
I’ve seen so many unbundled OpenAI solutions that are better products.
For example, there are 10 different medical transcription products. They’re all better than Microsoft’s version.
But there’s no way large incumbents and enterprises will choose a niche provider that’s 5% better over a product bundled into Microsoft’s suite.
Harry Stebbings
Why it matters
‘Build it and they will come’ no longer holds true in today’s attention economy.
As AI begins to commoditize content, distribution becomes even more difficult, pushing startups to find more creative ways to reach their target audiences.
To help with this, you can steal my playbook for better distribution.
I call it the multi brand strategy.
If there are multiple keywords you can attack in search, create an exact match domain (EMD) for each opportunity (ie blackshoesformen.com), then have a shared backend to standardize fulfilment.
This gives you a second bite at the cherry in search, improving visibility and sales.
It works just as well for B2B companies - simply position your EMD brands as resellers for your core brand.
Next steps
Where does your growth bottleneck lie - product quality or distribution? Here’s how you can find out the answer:
Evaluate customer feedback. Analyze customer feedback on your product to learn if there are significant pain points or shortcomings that need addressing.
Benchmark against competitors. Compare your product and its distribution with your competitors. Are they outperforming you because of the product itself or because they have a better go to market strategy?
Conduct market research. Talk to customers to understand if there are insights or emerging trends in how your product should be marketed.
Consult stakeholders. Engage with dev, product, marketing, sales, and customer service teams to get a holistic view of where the gaps might lie between product expectations and customer experiences.
Invest appropriately. Consider the ROI of improving product features against the ROI of expanding into new markets or optimizing existing channels.
Your thoughts?
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