The following are a set of notes from my tweets. I may eventually flesh this out into some sort of coherent blogpost.
Some preamble: “solve for distribution” is a phrase I came up with to talk about marketing without using the word marketing. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the word marketing, but it’s quite loaded, people have lots of associated assumptions with it, and I find it helpful to use fresh words from time to time to brush off the dust of familiarity, so that we can think clearly.
More specifically: people often tend to think about marketing as a sort of nebulous, “advertise your brand” and “do promotion” enterprise – which might not be too far off when you’re thinking about extremely established brands/companies like say, Coca-Cola. “Solve for distribution” is much more direct, about getting your product to customers. (It’s interesting to examine Coke’s history, too – when they were starting out, it was a product to be introduced at soda fountains. What Asa Candler did was give away coupons for free Coca-Cola, and he also gave free barrels of Coke syrup to stores that otherwise wouldn’t have stocked the drink. This solved the cold-start problem, ie this was how Coke solved for distribution in the early days!)
✱
Decent products with good distribution defeat good products with poor distribution.
My products – t-shirts, ebooks – aren’t that good. I’d rate them around ~3.4/5 stars myself. but that’s about all you need. just Jet to about 3 out of 5 stars on product, and 4 out of 5 stars on distribution, and then you can sell and sell and sell to more and more people. And you can then reinvest the $ from all those sales to make your product even better.
Most people’s intuitions don’t seem to be calibrated to understand this. there’s a sort of stereotypical assumption that salesy people just don’t care about product at all. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can care if you want to. I care. (original tweet)
How do you get better at this? I think about it in very “natural” language. Whatever it is you’re selling – whether it’s a physical product or an idea,
- talk earnestly with as many people as you can
- practice good reply game, ask genuine questions, build relationships, develop a genuine understanding of people’s problems and perspectives
- assembling the information from (2) into content that you can then share with more people. Write blogposts, make videos, make it easy for people to share your ideas with other people
Repeatedly do lots of 1-2-3 and you develop a sense of “the market” or “the audience”. It’s not some amorphous blob or alien entity. It’s literally just people. Talk to people. Help people. Do this a lot.
✱
You can do almost anything for a living if you solve for distribution.
(original thread) The wack thing about making a living out of anything is that a lot of it boils down to the delivery mechanism of the thing that you’re doing. Yes friends, I am once again talking about distribution.
Loosely, a lot of what a job is, is you’re counting on your employer to do the delivery for you. The employer then functions as a proxy, a middleman for the market.
This is obviously true for writers, artists, musicians – but it’s also true for dentists and plumbers and so on. Product and distribution are significantly different problems, even if they are intimately intertwined. And a lot of people constrain their earning potential because they don’t really want to get involved in the distribution side of things – they just want to do their job well and be done with it. I don’t want to force anybody to do distribution work if they don’t want to, but I also want to make sure that people at least know the options they have.
I started on this train of thought with the silly-fun idea “you can make a living making silly observations if you’re serious about it”. That statement on its own, however, obfuscates half the challenge for people who don’t intuitively see the product/distribution duality.
Otherwise smart people continually, repeatedly underestimate distribution at their own peril. People collectively waste billions of dollars on this, it’s wild to see.
There are two main reasons your business failed: failure of product, or failure of distribution. Peter Drucker might say, this is failure of innovation, or failure of marketing.
You could maybe say is “you failed because your unit economics didn’t work” – unit economics to me is a meta-level concept about the costs of both product and distribution. It cost you too much to distribute your product, and you ran out of resources. Game over.
A lot of makers get kinda precious about the stuff they make (I do too!), and it impedes them from looking with clear eyes about what the market wants from them.
A good way to work through this is to spend a month closely examining your own consumer behavior.
I’m not saying that you should simply “give the market what it wants”, that often ends up being a race to the bottom for the lowest common denominator. I’m saying that it’s worth taking the trouble to *understand* the market in your domain, so you can negotiate with it to get what you want out of it.
✱
Don’t leave distribution up to chance.
(original thread) Slightly annoyed that my brain has coopted “product” and “distribution” for thinking about basically all strategy. People with “superior product” are always shocked and dismayed over and over again to be defeated by people with “superior distribution”.
“But the superior product must win!” Why? “Because it’s the superior product!” To who? “To me! And the 10 people I’ve talked to!” Ok but your competitor has talked to 10,000 people and they like his product well enough. And he’s hiring your product guy, oops, better luck next time.
I am sympathetic to the idea that great products, great artists, creators, etc should be appreciated. but also, “the audience” or “the market” is not actually some perfect, platonic ether. It’s people. And people are busy and tired and generally prefer to be met where they are.
If you don’t go out and do the work of teaching people how to appreciate you, your odds of being appreciated are very, very slim. you’re basically depending on chance, on the whim that Serious Appreciators will notice you. It’s very risky to leave this up to chance.
People refusing to acknowledge, understand and appreciate this is a big part of why most businesses fail, most patrons fail, most twitch streamers have no audience, etc. There’s this assumption of “if I want it badly enough and if I do the work then I will be rewarded for it,” which is a fairytale model of reality. And fairytales should really come with warning labels, because they misrepresent how reality works.
✱
Distribution for public intellectuals
(original thread) There are two parts to the challenge, the “product” and “distribution”. different people will have different tastes and preferences about how to allocate your attention and resources towards each part of the problem.
the “product” is your work itself – your tweets, your blogposts, your essays, your youtube videos, your book. I generally advise against making overly large/complex/ornate products w/o doing any audience-building work, without (at least partially) solving for distribution.
there are many reasons for this. how heartbreaking it must be to spend years writing a fantastic novel but nobody knows who you are and nobody is interested in what you have to say. how demoralizing and frustrating. you *have* to be in coffeeshops talking to other authors etc
I’d go further than that: it’s very hard to make any kind of great work without riffing and parlaying with other creatives. the completely isolated genius. it’s maybe possible in fields like math, or maybe music… but even einstein hung out with other nerds.
Einstein himself by the way is an interesting figure who was likely very good at playing the public/media game, which is part of why we talk about him so much. why don’t we talk as much about Faraday, or Maxwell? I think it’s partially because Einstein was better at PR.
> Time magazine’s Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was “a cartoonist’s dream come true.” here we get to iconography! the power of symbolism and imagery. you can deliberately play and experiment with this. There is a whole understudied art to this.
The thing I’m trying to say with all of this is that this stuff can be studied and it can be understood and it can be deliberately influenced. I can’t guarantee that anybody will become The Next Big Thing but you can really improve your odds dramatically.
if you do 100,000 tweets in isolation there’s a possibility nobody will ever care. but if you do lots of replies to other people, there’s a good chance you can build relationships, then you can build a network/graph of friends, then you can build an audience, then a scene.
You don’t necessarily need to be the smartest, the most competent, the most skilled and so on. you just need to be decent enough, and you can be the one that introduces everyone to everyone else, and there is great value in that.
✱
Athletes, supermodels, etc make more money than teachers and nurses in part because their work can be distributed to a much larger audience/market. This is very unintuitive to a lot of people.
✱
To be updated. Note to future self: search my twitter for “audience” and “market” next
✱
Made a video: