if sisyphus wore air force ones...
This week's blog is a little different. I just want to talk about one thing - distribution. Getting people to try what you've built.
Running a startup that's pre-PMF (here) can feel a lot like pushing a boulder up a hill. It's a never ending cycle of building something, getting people to try it, fixing the bits that sucked and starting over.
Doing the second part whilst having a product that isn't perfect (to put it kindly) is the tough part. No one wants to tell their friends to use something that sucks. And ultimately, for a productivity tool to grow quickly, most early users have to be telling their friends about it.
From my experience, not enough early stage startups think about distribution. They worry too much about building product at the expense of getting feedback. Speaking to users 1:1 is great (and 100% necessary don't get me wrong), but there's also a ton of value in getting a product into the hands of 30 real people and seeing how they actually use the damn thing. Do they click on that button you wanted them too? Did they ignore that boring demo you recorded for the onboarding etc.
Balancing growth and product when you're just starting out is hard. For us, it's been about making sure that we have enough users coming through the door so that we can actually test new features. But equally, not spending too much time opening the growth taps whilst the product bucket is still leaking.
There are a few things that really stood out to me this week more than others though that I wanna talk about which were: 1. new users complaining about broken stuff will make you fix product faster than anything else 2. getting new users through the door isn't always something you can do instantly 3. distribution is an edge and should be built into product, not just around it
As a product person, it's easy to lose motivation without users. Mission, discipline, your co-founder shouting at you - they're all less motivating than real users telling you something is broken. If you don't put in the effort to show people what you've built, it's hard to make it better quickly. For us, our product lulls have almost always coincided with us putting in less effort into figuring out distribution.
At Otio, we're starting to think about distribution in the same way we do product. Unlike building product, building a great distribution channels isn't as straight forward. Tactics that worked for one startup tend to not work for others. Often tactics don't work over time either (here). This makes it really tricky to figure out what to do let alone build a repeatable process around getting new users pre-PMF. Luckily, the sorts of uncertainties around distribution mirror those in product. Our approach is effectively the same, pick an experiment based on a hunch, ship it, track metrics and iterate. This takes time and shouldn't be left till a product feature you want to test is 'ready'.
Distribution shouldn't be an afterthought. The fastest growing companies that I've been tracking in our space have distribution built into the product itself. For a product like Otio, that means thinking about natural ways people want to collaborate together on the things they are reading and writing. Luckily, that's a pretty natural thing to do if you're a researcher e.g. working on a group essay together - or sharing your notes on the latest AI paper with friends etc. The tricky challenge here is making sure that we ship multiplayer features that are actually solving user problems and aren't just a growth afterthought.
These were just a few of the ideas that I’ve been thinking about since we’ve started working on growth. Take them with a healthy pinch of maldon salt as I really don’t know what I’m doing yet - figuring it out as we go…
one cool thing i watched this week
If you made it this far - check out this youtube video. I’ve watched every one of Casey’s videos and think he’s a really cool dude - this is one of his best videos to date.