James Sinclair says founders should nail their distribution strategy before building. Don't assume a good product sells itself. Do the first 1-10 deals yourself instead of hiring salespeople too early.
Chapters
After you have pmf, after you have some version of mvp, maybe you have some seed financing, you're about to start blitzing into engineering and actually building your product, really building it and really getting into those engineering cycles. You need to pause for a second and realize there's one thing that has to happen first. Distribution. How are you going to sell your product? How are you going to get this product in front of customers and get them to say yes? What is your GTM go to market strategy, what is your distribution strategy and how's it going to work? And that is more important than a product at this point because you can spend cycles building the most incredible product on earth, but if you don't have customers, you're still out of business. And most first time entrepreneurs make two critical mistakes. Number one, they believe if they build a product that delivers value and is impactful and beneficial and value priced, they will by default scale. It's not true. If you build it, they won't come. It so rarely happens. So you need to remove this concept that just by virtue of being a good product, scale is inevitable. It's not. Not even remotely. The second thing people think about is well, I'm going to hire someone, I'm going to hire a sales rep, a salesperson person, a commission BDR person. That also doesn't work because your first one to 10, whatever those sales are, depending on what your business is, is going to come from you or your founding team. Because you understand the product you're building into, you understand the market, you have the vision, you have the passion. No better suited to sell this product that's at its seedling stage than you or your founding team. Trying to hire someone and infuse them with all of the knowledge in your head and expect them to be passionate about it and expect them to understand and be able to answer all the questions is just not going to happen. What is your distribution plan if you do build this out? If you do these engineering cycles and you end up with a market ready product now what and how can you start thinking about that now and what are the steps you can take now? Because if you don't have a go to market plan, the product really doesn't matter. Good luck.
