Distribution is Everything
There’s a dangerous myth in technology… it’s the romantic notion that if you just build a beautiful, innovative, 10x product, the world will knock on your door.
It's a fantasy. In today's market, that belief isn't just naive—it's fatal.
We are living in an era of infinite supply. For every customer problem, there are a dozen well-funded, well-designed solutions vying for attention. The bottleneck is no longer invention; it is awareness.
Your beautiful, innovative product doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists in a deafeningly loud room, competing for attention not just with direct competitors, but with every other notification, email, and distraction in your customer's life.
This reality forces a fundamental shift in how we must think about building companies. The most critical strategic question is no longer "What should we build?" but "How will this reach its intended user?" The product and its path to the customer are not two separate things; they are two sides of the same coin.
This is why a great product is just the ticket to the game. It is not, however, the way you win. Victory isn't decided by who has the best product. It’s decided by who has the best distribution.
From Theory to Table Stakes: The Mandate of the Growth Engine
The debate between linear funnels and compounding growth loops is over. The loops won. The essays have been written, the conference talks given. We know the theory.
The urgent question for any leader in 2025 is why so many of our organizations are still structured to support the obsolete funnel. We talk about PLG and growth loops, yet our teams remain siloed. Marketing is goaled on MQLs, Sales on closed deals, and Product on retention—an assembly line that creates deep, systemic friction. This organizational debt is a direct reflection of a GTM model we claim to have left behind.
True growth engines don't bolt onto a product; they are engineered into its core. They are the defining architecture of our most consequential companies:
Calendly’s viral loop isn't a feature; it is the product's method of delivery.
Figma’s collaborative loop isn't just for user engagement; it's an embedded enterprise sales motion.
Substack’s content loop doesn't just attract readers; it uses creators as its distributed, global marketing team.
These aren't clever tactics. This is embedded distribution.
In today's hyper-saturated market, a product without a native growth loop is born with a structural disadvantage. It must pay a perpetual tax to ad platforms to rent awareness, fighting a battle of brute-force capital that is rarely won. Loops are no longer a growth hack; they are the table stakes for building a defensible, capital-efficient company.
The Uncomfortable Truth: Your GTM Model Seals Your Fate
A mediocre product with an incredible distribution loop will always beat a world-class product with a broken one.
This isn’t hyperbole; it’s a function of two fundamental market laws:
Feedback is a Function of Distribution: A product cannot become great in a vacuum. You need users to provide the feedback, data, and usage patterns that illuminate the path forward. Without distribution, you're guessing. A product with a strong initial loop gets a torrent of feedback, allowing it to iterate toward product-market fit at a blinding pace. The "perfect" product with no users dies on the vine.
Distribution Creates Defensible Moats: The strongest competitive moats are not features, which can be copied, but dynamics built by distribution. Network effects—where a product becomes more valuable as more people use it—are the ultimate moat. A technically superior product can’t break through once a competitor’s network gravity becomes too strong.
The Next Battlefield: Distribution in the Age of AI
Just as we’ve wrapped our heads around growth loops, the ground is shifting again. AI is not just another feature; it’s a tectonic force rewriting the rules of distribution. For product leaders, mastering it is not optional.
From Onboarding to Real-Time Adaptation: Forget static user onboarding. AI allows for a product experience that adapts in real-time to a user's behavior, predicting their needs and guiding them to their "aha" moment instantly. The GTM motion is no longer a pre-planned journey; it’s an intelligent, living system tailored to a segment of one.
The New Search: Winning the AI Recommendation Engine: Product discovery is rapidly moving beyond the Google search bar. The most important question is becoming, "How do we get recommended by a user's personal AI assistant?" These agents will curate solutions based on a user’s goals and past behavior. Winning this new channel requires structuring your product's value proposition and data in a way that is clear, authentic, and easily consumed by AI models. This is the SEO of tomorrow.
The Autonomous GTM: Blurring Product, Sales, and AI: The walls between product-led and sales-led growth are dissolving. AI can now monitor product usage, identify a user showing buying intent (a Product-Qualified Lead), and trigger a personalized outreach from a sales AI. This creates a seamless, hyper-efficient system that frees up humans to focus on the highest-value strategic relationships, combining the scale of PLG with the precision of a sales team.
The Mandate
The lesson is clear. We must stop throwing products over the wall to marketing and sales and hoping for the best.
Your job is no longer just to build the product. It’s to build the engine that delivers it. You must treat your go-to-market model as your most important product—something to be designed, tested, and iterated upon with the same rigor you apply to your code.
Because in a world overflowing with great products, the company that wins is the one that builds the best engine.
