Why not to start with tech — start with distribution

You spent 3 months building. Then 0 users showed up. That’s a distribution problem, not a product problem.

The engineer’s trap

We love building. It feels like progress. Every feature shipped, every test green, every deploy — it feels like momentum.

But it’s not momentum if no one’s watching.

I built MagicSell for months before I thought seriously about how people would find it. That was the mistake. The product was fine. The distribution was zero.

Most engineer-founders fall into this trap. Building is comfortable. Selling, posting, talking to strangers — that’s uncomfortable. So we build instead, and convince ourselves we’ll figure out distribution “once the product is ready.”

The product is never fully ready. And by the time you ship, you’ve built something with no audience.

Distribution channels that work before launch

You can start building distribution before you write a line of code.

Twitter/X — post about what you’re building. Share the problem you’re solving. Document decisions. This compounds. The people who follow you while you’re building become your first users.

LinkedIn — especially if your audience is B2B. Write about the problem, not the product. Engineers at companies with Shopify stores are my audience. I post there consistently.

Communities — Reddit, Slack groups, Discord servers where your potential customers hang out. Be helpful first. Mention your product when relevant.

None of these require a product to exist.

Building in public is the cheapest distribution channel

Building in public means sharing your process — decisions, mistakes, progress, failures — as you build.

It’s not oversharing. It’s not a diary. It’s strategic transparency.

Every post you write, every update you share, every honest breakdown of what worked or didn’t — that’s distribution. That’s SEO. That’s credibility building. And it compounds.

I document MagicSell publicly on Twitter and Instagram. People find me through that content. Some of them become users.

What I did wrong at MagicSell

I treated distribution as something to do after launch. Classic mistake.

I launched MagicSell. I had a product. I had no audience, no SEO, no community presence. I was starting from zero with a finished product.

If I had documented the build — the decisions, the Shopify API learnings, the co-founder situation — I’d have had an audience before launch day. The content would have been the warm-up act.

What to do in month one

Before building:

  1. Set up a Twitter and LinkedIn. Post your idea and why you’re building it.
  2. Write one post per week about the problem you’re solving, not the solution.
  3. Find 3 communities where your potential customers hang out. Start being useful there.
  4. Create a landing page. Collect emails.

Build the audience before the product. Not instead of — before.

The takeaway

Distribution is not a post-launch problem. It’s a pre-launch strategy. Start building your audience before you build your product, or you’ll ship to an empty room.

Building something? Follow me on Instagram and Twitter — I document everything.