Your Product Is Live. Where Are the Right Customers?

Your Product Is Live. Where Are the Right Customers?

You can spend six months building a product and still have no tested way to reach someone who needs it.

The website is live. The signup works. You have announced the launch.

Then comes the silence.

You post again. Try another platform. Consider running ads. Eventually, you return to the roadmap because building another feature feels more manageable than figuring out why nobody is coming.

Before you build again, investigate how the right customer is supposed to find you.

That is where your startup distribution strategy begins.

Distribution starts with a customer, not a platform

For this article, think of distribution as the path through which a potential customer discovers your product, understands its relevance, and takes a meaningful next step.

A channel is one part of that path. Search, communities, partnerships, referrals, and direct outreach are possible routes.

But “we’ll use LinkedIn” leaves several questions unanswered:

• Which people are you trying to reach?
• What problem will make them pay attention?
• Why would they trust your message?
• What will you invite them to do?
• What behaviour will tell you the channel is worth pursuing?

A useful starting hypothesis might be:

“We believe small agency owners struggling with overdue invoices will respond to practical advice about collecting payments and consider trying our follow-up tool.”

That gives you something specific to investigate.

You can examine whether those people are accessible, whether the problem matters, and whether your offer earns a response.

Apply the validation mindset to customer acquisition

The title of my book, Stop Building, Start Validating, offers a useful prompt here: which assumption needs evidence before you invest more?

Apply that question to distribution.

You might believe your customers search Google for solutions. You might expect a professional community to welcome your product. You might assume an industry partner can introduce you to buyers.

Each belief needs testing.

A practical early-stage customer acquisition strategy should help you answer:

Can we reach a particular customer, with a relevant message, through a route we can use again?

Finding that route requires more than announcing that your product exists.

What Stripe’s early experience teaches about finding customers

In Do Things That Don’t Scale, Paul Graham describes how Stripe’s founders recruited early users directly.

When someone agreed to try Stripe, the founders helped them get set up immediately, rather than simply promising to send a link.

The lesson for an early-stage founder is practical: customer acquisition can include helping an interested person cross the gap between agreeing to try and actually using the product.

Consider what that approach lets you observe.

Can the person explain why they need it? What prevents them from starting? Where do they get confused? Does completing setup lead to a useful result?

Those questions make founder-led sales valuable as a learning activity, alongside its role in generating business.

How to choose your first distribution channel

Start by learning how customers already look for help.

During customer discovery interviews, ask:

• “The last time this problem happened, where did you look for a solution?”
• “What did you search for?”
• “Who did you ask?”
• “Which sources did you trust?”
• “How did you choose what to try?”

Listen for actual behaviour.

A founder saying they enjoy podcasts does not establish podcasts as a buying channel. Ask whether a particular episode led them to investigate or purchase something relevant.

Look for a route that gives you access to suitable prospects and lets you observe their response.

For an initial test, choose one primary channel you can execute with care. Set the others aside long enough to learn something useful.

Build a small distribution experiment

Here is a hypothetical example.

You have built an invoice follow-up tool for small agencies. Your broad launch attracted visitors, but few completed setup.

Instead of increasing traffic immediately, you could design this experiment:

Audience: Agency owners who personally chase overdue client payments.

Problem: Following up repeatedly takes time and creates uncomfortable conversations.

Channel: Individual outreach to relevant agency owners.

Message: An invitation to discuss their current invoice follow-up process and assess whether the tool fits.

Offer: Help setting up a real follow-up workflow.

Evidence: Relevant replies, completed conversations, actual setup, use on a real invoice, and decisions about paying.

Choose a manageable outreach limit, time budget, and review date before starting. These are operating choices for your experiment, rather than universal startup benchmarks.

The aim is to learn where the path works and where it breaks.

Measure what happens after the click

Traffic deserves context.

A visitor who reads your headline and leaves provides different evidence from an agency owner who connects their invoicing system and uses your product.

Before testing a channel, define a meaningful first outcome.

For example:

• A scheduling product helps someone receive a real booking.
• A reporting product helps someone produce a report they use.
• An invoice tool helps someone complete an actual follow-up.

Then track the path from discovery to that outcome, and onward to payment and repeat use where relevant.

This connects customer acquisition to activation, retention, and sales.

It also helps you distinguish a channel that produces attention from one that brings people who experience value.

Diagnose the break before changing the channel

Suppose your experiment produces disappointing results.

Avoid treating every weak outcome as proof that the platform failed.

If few suitable people see the message, investigate access and targeting.

If people see it but do not respond, investigate relevance, timing, credibility, and the request you are making.

If they respond but do not start, investigate the offer and the effort required.

If they start but never reach a useful outcome, investigate onboarding and product fit.

If they use the product but decline to pay, investigate willingness to pay, packaging, purchasing authority, and alternatives.

These are hypotheses. Use conversations and observed behaviour to decide which explanation deserves another test.

Changing the audience, message, price, and onboarding simultaneously makes the result harder to interpret. Where practical, change one major element and document what happens.

Distribution and product-market fit inform each other

Reaching the wrong audience can make a product look less useful than it is.

Reaching a suitable audience can reveal that the problem is less urgent than you expected.

That is why distribution and product-market fit belong in the same investigation.

Ask which customers reach value, return, buy, and recommend the product. Then examine how they found you and what they understood before signing up.

A burst of launch attention gives you a moment to study. A repeatable route to suitable customers gives you something to develop.

Before you build again, test the path to the customer

Write down five things:

Who needs this?

Where do they already seek help?

What message reflects their problem?

What specific next step will we offer?

What evidence would justify continuing?

If those answers are still assumptions, distribution deserves a place beside development on your weekly agenda.

This is one way to put the validation mindset behind Stop Building, Start Validating into practice: identify the uncertainty that matters, then gather evidence before committing more resources.

If your product is already live and you need help investigating weak traction, explore my product consulting through the same website. We can examine the path from customer discovery to acquisition, activation, and payment, then identify what to test next.

Before investing in another feature, test whether you can reach the people who need the product you already have.

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