Distribution for founders who would rather be building

The frame A product with no distribution is a hobby. Founders who dislike marketing usually dislike a caricature of it — spam, hype, tricks. The real job is working out where the people who need your product already are, and showing up there usefully. That's the whole thing. The bullseye method From the book "Traction": there are roughly nineteen channels — SEO, content, paid, email, partnerships, community, PR, sales, and so on. Most founders assume they know their channel and are wrong. · Brainstorm a plausible version of all nineteen. One line each: what would this look like for us. · Pick three to actually test — cheaply, in parallel, short time-box, one clear metric each. · One usually outperforms the rest by a lot. Cut the other two and pour everything into the winner until it stops working. One channel at a time. Two half-run channels beat zero, but they lose to one channel run properly. Before any channel: do it by hand Founder-led sales and founder-written content come first, because they teach you the words customers use and what actually makes them say yes. Automate a channel only after you've done it manually enough to know it works. The free playbooks · Julian Shapiro's Growth Guide — the best free write-up of how growth actually works, from someone who ran an agency doing it. · Marketing Examples — one-page teardowns of real copy and campaigns. Concrete, no theory. · Demand Curve — channel-by-channel playbooks (cold email, paid, SEO) written for early-stage teams. The weekly habit Pick one number that means growth for you — signups, activated users, revenue. Look at it every week, run one experiment against it, write down what happened. Growth is that loop repeated, not a launch.