The Distribution Advantage

May 10, 2025

In partnership with

Remember when product was king?

Those days are over.

In today's AI-saturated market, distribution is the only moat that matters.

I'm watching brilliant founders build amazing AI products that nobody uses, while mediocre products with superior distribution are printing money.

The hard truth: When everyone has access to the same AI tools, product advantages evaporate almost instantly.

Last week, I analyzed 17 AI startups that launched similar products within months of each other. The winner wasn't the one with the best tech – it was the one with an existing audience of 50,000 followers.

Game over before it even started.

This is why I'm obsessed with the 70/30 rule: spend 70% of your time building distribution channels and only 30% building product.

What does this look like in practice?

For one founder I know, it meant launching a daily newsletter 6 months before her product was ready. By launch day, she had 22,000 subscribers and did $78K in first-week sales.

For another, it meant creating short-form videos showcasing specific pain points his software solved. One video hit 2.7M views, driving 15,000 sign-ups.

Here's the playbook I'm seeing work:

  1. Build an audience around the problem, not your solution

  2. Create content that positions you as the guide, not the hero

  3. Give away valuable tools/templates for free to build goodwill

  4. Test messaging by running micro-experiments on social platforms

  5. Only then, introduce your paid solution

Most founders do this backward – building in isolation, then scrambling to find users.

In 2025, the vibe-marketing comes before the vibe-coding.

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The question isn't "how good is your AI?" It's "who already trusts you enough to try it?"

What distribution advantage could you start building today, even before your product is ready?