You just bought a domain name and finished your website. This time you did everything right. The state-of-the-art design is ready. The copywriting is exceptional. Your lead generation funnel is configured and tested multiple times without fail. Payments on the site work perfectly. Everything is there. You’ve registered an LLC. You have a bank account set up. You’ve integrated with Stripe, which is waiting to receive the first money. All contracts with suppliers are signed, and they’re waiting for their first customers that you’ll provide them.
Everything is at the starting line. All set to begin the journey toward your first million dollars. You launch the site and check the statistics. Zero visitors. A day passes. Zero visitors. No customers. You have nothing to tell your suppliers who were ready to work since yesterday. But apparently, the launch didn’t happen. Zero customers.
You decide to do something about it and frantically start sending the website link to your friends and acquaintances, announcing that you’ve launched a new product, a new business. They immediately visit your site, look at it, some even write feedback about what to fix here and there.
And now you’re sitting at midnight, making changes to the site based on feedback from friends and acquaintances. Now it should work, right? But nothing happens. A week passes, a random user visits the site, naturally buys nothing. And everything continues as before. You have no business.
You haven’t moved even a fraction of a percent toward the million dollars that was planned in your carefully developed business plan. The bank account remains at zero dollars, just as it was. Familiar situation?
This is actually a bit sugar-coated, and I’ve softened the story for understanding, but in my case, for example, I also had people working who I had to pay salaries to. As a result, my budget went into negative debt to banks because I paid them by taking loans.
And now I not only have no business, but I also have debts that I need to pay off. This is an insanely frightening situation that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but probably only by experiencing it firsthand can you understand that you’re doing something wrong.
The Fatal Product-First Approach
Numerous books, training programs, courses, and so on unanimously insist that you need to create a product that people need. You need to make it, give people value, and they will come to you on their own. If your product is viral, it will spread itself. But in reality, it doesn’t work that way.
If someone had told me this or if I had read information about this many years ago, I think I would have saved a tremendous amount of money, nerves, years of my life, and probably would have already earned my first million dollars.
Something is off here. And that something is the absence of distribution, absence of marketing, which should go first before the product itself. No matter what product you have, what value it provides, how viral it is, you need to find some way to distribute it.
You need to place it in front of a large number of people so that some of them become interested. Some of those interested would then look more closely, learn some details, and even fewer would become buyers. This is called conversion, which represents a certain average percentage of people who, in principle, saw your offer and agreed to make a purchase and actually made it. Because the best indicator of your business is the bank account.
If it’s $0, you have no business. If it’s negative, you also have no business – because business is a system of profit extraction. No profit = no business. You won’t have profit until you have people seeing, interested in, and buying your product.
This may sound obvious to some now, and that’s great. But for me, for some reason, it seemed like such a strange thing at the time. Marketing and distribution always came after the product.
For some reason, I was convinced that to sell something, I needed to have that product. It seems obvious. Because I can’t go to a store and buy emptiness in the hope that the supplier will deliver it someday. No. I go in, I see the product. The product is already there. And I can pay money for it.
But the internet gives us slightly different possibilities. And here the logic works a bit differently. Plus, a large number of products or values that we sell via the internet, that modern internet business creates, aren’t physical things. It’s not a physical product you can touch. The product is usually virtual.
Yes, it continues to represent value, but it doesn’t exist in reality. It exists only on computer screens, in memory, and in the form of pixels.
Let’s cure the cancer
In MJ DeMarco’s book “The Millionaire Fastlane,” there’s an excellent example of a highly valuable product. Imagine you invent a cure for cancer. A product that represents enormous value, and what marketing would you need for such a product?
A hypothetical example is given. And as soon as the first patient sees the result, how long would it take for all other people to find out about it? Most likely, very little. Information about this product would spread at tremendous speed.
This is an ideal example in a vacuum of how a viral product can be created. If its value is so great that a person who received this value will independently, without any pushing from you, spread information about it.
But let’s look at things more pragmatically. You don’t have a cure for cancer. You don’t have a product that’s so viral that you want to tell everyone about it left and right. If you have the skills to create such a product, that’s wonderful.
But even in this case, you need to somehow deliver it to at least that first patient who will try it. And you also need to somehow persuade them to do so. Because a huge number of obstacles arise here. They’ll need to ask if it’s medically proven, if it’s been researched scientifically, what side effects there are, if there are any risks, and so on.
Or invent Facebook
So, it’s not as simple as it seems. You could be Zuckerberg and create, for example, Facebook or a new social network. But if we look at how Facebook was created, we’ll see that its launch didn’t happen somewhere in a vacuum, but on a university campus.
That is, it’s already a certain area where a huge number of people are present, in front of whom you can present it. Yes, the product has a viral system built in. And it’s more interesting to use the product when your friends are there. And the more of them there are, the more interesting the product becomes for you.
Therefore, it’s in your interest to invite users there, to invite your friends. Again, if you have a similar kind of viral product, then this note will hardly help you. Go and conquer the world, earn your trillion dollars.
But I assume that we’re talking here from the perspective of ordinary people who want to earn a living online at the very least. And also arrange the desired lifestyle for themselves. And in this case, we need distribution.
We need people who will see your product, whatever it may be. Viral, non-viral, digital, or physical. I mean, if you sell it online. If you sell offline, that’s a slightly different story. But the principle, by the way, remains exactly the same.
Because the same store where you physically take the product and carry it to your home is located somewhere near your house, it’s located somewhere near, for example, a bus stop, where there’s high pedestrian traffic, that is, where people already walk and see this store.
And it’s more convenient, for example, when returning home from work to stop by the store, buy a product, and then go home. It doesn’t take much time, so they’re called convenience stores.
But don’t lose control of it
We need to do roughly the same thing with any product that relates to you on the internet. That is, we need to place it where a large number of people pass by, which is called traffic.
If you can find such a place for yourself, these are usually some marketplaces, for example, Etsy, Gumroad, or sites that specialize in selling, usually in a certain category of goods and services or several categories, or, for example, it could be Upwork, where you put up your services.
But this is, in general, a site that people visit in order to find these products or services. This is ready-made traffic. Or you somehow find a way to attract this traffic to your product.
The first approach is definitely good, and, of course, you can use it, and people build full-fledged businesses on such a flow. That is, they place their product in places where there’s already traffic, and this is an excellent method.
The only disadvantage of this method – and probably the biggest one – is that this traffic isn’t controlled by you, and this platform doesn’t belong to you. And any day something can go wrong, the platform can close, the business can fold, traffic can leave from there, they can ban you, block your products for one reason or another, and the entire business will be destroyed in an instant.
It’s good if by that time you’ve already accumulated some resources that will allow you to get out of the situation, but in any case, ending up in it is not a pleasant matter.
The 2-Piece Distribution Puzzle
Our task before we build a product is to build a distribution channel and engage in its marketing, that is, promotion and placement in front of a large number of people so that with a certain conversion we have the right number of buyers. And you can already make some sales forecast and, accordingly, determine how much money your business will potentially earn.
“First-time founders are obsessed with product. Second-time founders are obsessed with distribution.”
– Justin Kan, Co-founder of Twitch (serial entrepreneur), in a 2018 tweet reflecting on startup lessons
Piece 1: Traffic & Marketing
Traffic refers to real people, not bots, who visit the resource where your product is located. Typically, this is some kind of website, or it’s an application, or some other format where the final payment button for the product is located. This is the most final stage of conversion when transactions are made.
It’s clear that after this there are already steps for delivering this product, but this is a technical issue that we solved long ago. And I’m assuming here that, of course, you need to have the skills to deliver this product so as not to be a scammer.
But I’m also sharing my story here, where I have absolutely all the skills, resources, opportunities to make a product. I understand how to do it, I can do it in practice, but when it comes to selling it, I get exactly zero purchases because there are no people who generally visit the site, there are no people who will convert, and there are no people who ultimately pay money.
It is precisely this problem that marketing is designed to solve, the dissemination of information about your product. So, we know what traffic is, we know that we have a product, and we need to somehow spread information about it. This should be marketing.
“Great products deserve great marketing.”
– Vincent Dignan, Growth Hacker, quoted in Dave Bailey’s startup marketing essay (2019) .
Here too there are many ways, and the most famous, most obvious of them is paid marketing. That is, when you pay other businesses that have the traffic you need, money so that they redirect their visitors to your site.
The most obvious examples are search engines and social networks. And each of them has its own advertising network, to which you can simply fork out money, they will redirect their traffic to your site.
Piece 2: (Personal) Brand
But this is also an interesting story, on the one hand, but on the other hand, it’s a thing that depends on money. And as soon as you stop, for example, investing in marketing, that is, buying this advertising, the traffic stops, and your business also ceases to exist.
You want it to work somehow differently. Can it be done? The answer is yes. And the answer is in the business model that we’ve already discussed more than once – building a personal brand.
Why does this work differently? If you have a brand, then people come specifically for it. A brand is what allows information about you to be spread, passed from hand to hand. If your brand is known in certain circles, then you will be recommended as an expert in a certain topic.
And the next time, for example, the conversation turns to one topic or another, it’s your name that will come up in people’s conversations. This is the viral effect, and this is the power of word of mouth.
By the way, I experienced it myself, when I was engaged, and still am engaged, in development services. I never spent a penny on marketing, promotion, or advertising of my services. It was always my clients.
They recommend me, and still, for many years now, I don’t even do anything for this at all. But clients come to me who say, “we came on the recommendation of your past client or current one,” or some of my current clients recommend me, and thereby this allows me to stay afloat for many years.
And I lived like that for several years, by the way, exclusively on such word-of-mouth power. This is a personal brand, but unfortunately, I didn’t make any efforts to develop it in any way. This was organic.
But even organically, this is a very powerful way to spread information about yourself. What if I had deliberately engaged in its development?
Building a personal brand involves accumulating an audience. The audience is that very traffic that will potentially see your product. That is, these are your subscribers, respectively, the information that you spread to your subscribers, that is, the content that you create online, it will be placed before the eyes of this multitude of people.
This is the very traffic that we’re looking for here. And finally, what’s interesting, there’s a network effect at play here. That is, if you just, for example, write a post on your, let’s say, Instagram or X, then your audience will see it. And only a fraction of it, because there’s a certain algorithm for how your subscribers will see your posts.
But you can find a way, and as soon as you have some validity in this social network, it’s much easier to do. Your post can be shared, and other people who have their own audience can share it
And thus your content appears before a much wider circle of people, and now they can either become your subscribers or simply become interested in this product. But what happens next, these people also have subscribers and their friends, because of these are social networks.
And here, when your content is distributed, you can get the attention of not only your subscribers but also a much larger number of people thanks to the network effect.
For diving deeper into the topic of building personal brand read my recent article “The One-Person Brand Blueprint: Standing Out In The Digital Economy.”
Piece Them Together
And finally, marketing, which implies the dissemination of information about your product. It’s clear that when building your personal brand, we won’t be constantly advertising, otherwise it will be a brand screaming in all directions about sales, which doesn’t give anything except the opportunity to buy something, and this looks like another virtual brand of any company.
No, your brand should provide value for free, it should be useful, it should serve some purpose, it should be interesting to consume, it should be something that is useful to people.
And at some certain moment with some certain frequency, you can already sell, advertise your product to your own audience, which is gathered for your personal brand, for the same traffic that you own.
And in this case, you don’t need to go looking for people, in this case, people already come, they already communicate with you in these social networks, and they just see your product. And this is what should be even before building the product itself, that is, building a personal brand, accumulating this very traffic.
Then already an offer that converts to purchases, and only after that can you even build a product, if its properties imply such an approach. And what can you do with a product after you have orders for it, especially if it’s a digital product.
So, following my own advice, here’s my product plug.
Creating your personal brand means creating a ton of content. I’ve built and refined for moths my own system that I’ve now packaged as the ANTIghostwriter course. This is the exact system I use to create my content at a constant pace, building my personal brand traffic engine without the massive time investment most digital entrepreneurs struggle with.
The system allows me to produce weekly:
- 2 newsletters in the form of detailed articles with quotes, scientific data, and personal stories
- 2 threads to promote the newsletter or other products
- At least 3 posts per day across social platforms with various formats
- Minimum 3 short video scripts per week
All of this content forms my personal brand traffic engine – the foundation of my distribution strategy that ensures when I do launch a product, I already have an audience eager to buy.
Instead of using AI as a generic content creator (which produces the robotic, templated text we all recognize and ignore), the system uses AI as an intelligent editor that preserves my authentic voice while accelerating my output.
By building this traffic engine first, you’re essentially creating your own marketplace.
Your Launch Must Be Successful
The crucial shift in thinking here is understanding that distribution – having people see, engage with, and ultimately buy your offering – is the true foundation of any successful business. The product, while important, comes second.
As Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, bluntly states:
“If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business — no matter how good the product.”
This encapsulates everything we’ve discussed.
Remember, the best indicator of your business is the bank account. If it’s at zero, you don’t have a business yet. If it’s negative (as mine painfully was), you definitely don’t have a business. By following this distribution-first method, you ensure that money starts flowing in before you’ve committed extensive resources to product development.
The digital world offers us opportunities to validate before we build, to sell before we create, and to ensure success before we invest. Don’t make the million-dollar mistake of building something nobody wants. Build your audience first, validate through pre-orders, and then create with confidence.
Your future customers are waiting. But they can’t find you if you haven’t built the path to your door first.