the distribution advice that worked for me was the opposite of what everyone recommends
before my last launch i read all the standard advice. post consistently, be everywhere, announce loudly, batch your content. i did a bunch of it and it mostly did nothing.
what actually moved the needle was embarrassingly small. a handful of real conversations. one question i asked in a forum out of curiosity brought more of the right people than every announcement post combined. i wasnt even promoting, i was asking about a problem, and the people who had that problem showed up on their own.
which leaves me with a weird conclusion i dont fully trust yet: the loud, scalable stuff performed worst and the slow, unscalable stuff performed best. maybe thats just my niche, or my sample size of one.
so im curious about your data points. whats a distribution move that worked way better than it had any right to? and whats the standard advice that did nothing for you?
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Hi Artem, thanks for writing it up :) It seems to me as less about effort or volume and more about what you're actually doing: touching a real problem vs. making noise about your product. The announcements fall flat because they're about you, but the forum question worked because it started with someone else's problem. It's the point behind "The Mom Test": lead with the problem, not the pitch. Posting more is a tactic, starting from the problem is the strategy.
@alieksia Anastasiia you just explained my own data to me better than i did. "announcements are about you, the question starts with someone elses problem" is exactly the mechanism, thats why the same audience ignored one and showed up for the other. and the Mom Test link is right, i was accidentally running it in public without calling it that.
"posting more is a tactic, starting from the problem is the strategy" might be the best one-line summary of this whole thing. stealing it for my own thinking. have you seen the problem-first approach fail anywhere, or does it hold across everything youve tried?
@artem_fedorovich Honestly, not yet. But I'm early - you've run this further than I have. Not sure how it can scale, though.