Distribution > Product
There are amazing products that failed because they never got traction. I just don’t know of them.
There are bad products that succeed, and that sucks.
Distribution is the difference between a good product failing and a bad product succeeding.
I don’t fault any product or company that fails due to lack of traction. In fact, it’s the 3rd most common reason companies fail.
The internet is crowded:
1 billion websites exist today
2 million articles posted everyday
The key to break through is not to have a better product but to have better channels to distribute your product.
For content marketing, Derek Halpern recommends you spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time distributing it.
Launching companies should have a similar rule:
Spend 20% of your time building product and 80% of your time distributing it.
Some of the best tech companies understand this and got creative for early distribution. Here are some famous examples:
- Snapchat: work the corner in real life
Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s (now Snap) founder and CEO, on early distribution:
But it was tough in the beginning. I can even remember when we were first trying to get people to get on the service, I stood on the (Santa Monica) promenade and I would go up to people and be like: “Hey, you should try this application. You can send disappearing photos.”
2. Airbnb — door to door sales. Literally.
Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s co-founder and CEO, on what he did to get early customers:
We went door to door with cameras taking pictures of all these apartments to put them online. I lived in their living rooms. And home by home, block by block, communities started growing.
Channels are not limited to the internet even if your product is.
3. Zynga — Facebook spa.. umm.. notifications
How Zynga used Facebook updates to scale:
So it [Facebook] decided to move from an algorithmic news feed of stories to a real-time stream of information that focused on status updates.
Zynga reacted by designing its communication channels for real-time. The result was users seeing all sorts of stories around games.
4. Rap Genius — Google 1, everyone else 0
Cautionary tale of being too dependent one channel and violating terms and conditions:
But in a sketchy failed attempt at growth hacking, Rap Genius started the “Rap Genius Blog Affiliate” program where it would promote anyone’s blog post through social media in exchange for the blogger inserting sets of links to Rap Genius lyrics into their posts.
The punishment dealt out on Christmas had a devastating impact on Rap Genius’ traffic since a significant amount of it comes from Google searches. Quantcast says Rap Genius fell from around 700,000 uniques a day to around 100,000.
Ok, so these examples have already been done and would be hard to replicate or might not be relevant for you. You’re probably thinking ‘How do I get traction for my startup?’
Assuming your product is great and meets a need, you need to work backwards and figure out where are your future users hanging out now?
A good place to start is looking at top referral sources (from parse.ly)
Assuming you’re a new site or app, you won’t be generating a ton of traffic and users from Google nor Facebook off the bat. We’ll have to get creative in other channels. Even if your site or app isn’t launched, you can still start working on distribution today.
Here are 3 starter ideas for early website traffic:
- Facebook groups
An interest group around a related topic for your product can attract many potential users and customers. Just make sure to take it easy on the self-promotion and focus instead on education.
2. reddit / forums
Reddit works great for early traffic if you can find a related subreddit or other forum. Hacker News works well for tech related link posts and ‘Show HN’ posts for product launch feedback.
3. Link in your personal email address
You probably send 100+ emails per day. Those are 100 people that want to check out what you’re working on. If they don’t, email someone else.
Hope that helps! Happy launching 🚀 💸 !!!
P.S.
If thats not enough, here are 101 Website Traffic Ideas
