Article: Distribution is product design
I spent eighteen years quietly looking down on marketing. Then I started building my own products, and nobody showed up. On distribution and romanticising product design.
June 2026
For most of my career I believed the product was the marketing. Build something useful, make it intuitive, solve a real problem, and people will find it. I held that belief for eighteen years. And it held up.
It held up because I was never the one who had to find the users. There was always a company around the product. Traffic, a brand, a sales pipeline, a name people already typed into a search box. The distribution arrived before I did. I just never saw the bill.
The line I argued withWhen Rebuild 01 was happening in Copenhagen, I heard a great talk from Felix Petersen (go read about him; he's been building on the internet since the nineties, started Plazes back when location was still a frontier, sold it to Nokia, and has spent the years since around more products than I can list). He said something very simple, yet it sat with me since:
Product-led is dead.
Distribution is the challenge.
The idea wasn't even new. Thiel (of all people..) had a whole chapter on it years ago, the one where engineers treat marketing as a kind of fraud, because a good enough product shouldn't need selling.
Then I started building on my own
AI took away the slow part. I can build now, fast enough that building stopped being the constraint. So I built.
Opstillingen (a lineup tool for youth football coaches), had traffic from day one. I'd built the front door on purpose: targeted landing pages aimed at what coaches were actually searching for, in an already identified gap in the market. The product is good and useful, but the product isn't why anyone showed up. The landing pages are.
Also tried something completely different. Unitwiz. A pile of calculators, plain to the point of unstyled. A clean machine. An agent that researched, wrote, and shipped pages on its own. Over ten weeks it earned twenty thousand impressions. Nice. And five clicks. Lol. Of a thousand ranked queries, nine hundred and ninety-nine sent me precisely no one. A perfect factory in a town with no road to it.
Two products, same hands, opposite outcomes. I think there’s more to it than marketing worked for one, but not the other - since one tool is useful and unique to the market, while the other is trying to eat an already saturated (and possibly dying) market.
We're trained to chase usefulness. But usefulness only counts after someone arrives, and the feature that gets them to arrive isn't always the most useful one. I don't know where that balance sits, and I don't trust anyone who says they do.
What I do know is that I have been - still am to some extent - romantic about product. I believe the product is the whole promise. It isn't. A product nobody finds is a broken promise, the same as a promise with nothing behind it. You can't have a good product without distribution, and distribution with nothing behind it is just noise.
They were always the same job. I'd been allowed to do half of it and call it the whole thing.