Intro

There’s an almost infamous saying among entrepreneurs. "First-time founders focus on the product, and second-time founders focus on distribution."

When building businesses, founders tend to have a vigorous bias toward creating value versus capturing it. As most founders are dynamo geniuses, their natural flow is to grasp the “what” of business, and as such they underestimate what it takes to comprehend how your users grasp your product offering.

P1: Working from the same “Frame of Reference”

When people see a product or better yet an offering, our mind creates a set of assumptions around that product/offering that is inextricably connected to what our mind has already seen, i.e making some sense of it, i.e find a label/box in our brain and place it there. When I say Boeing, you think “flying”. When I say “Nike”, you think “sports”.

People look at their problems from an existing point of view and immediately compare it to whatever alternative way they’re solving the problem now. Your product offering should match exactly how users think about that problem. As a founder, your only job is to hold the vision of your company but tie it with your target market’s frame of reference. Your most imminent target market should have a similar frame of reference. If not, you are either:

1. Not solving a desperate enough problem for enough people to build a sustainable business around that problem statement value.
2. You have incorrectly identified your target market’s frame of reference, and have made faulty assumptions about how they think of the problem and how your solution captures that frame of reference.

Let’s take Revolut as an example.

• Revolut did not possess a first-mover advantage. There have been multiple neobanks that have attempted to capture the attention of the “personal finances” market “en masse”. Revolut won the neobank monopoly because their user experience inexorably matches how people think about coordinating personal finances.
• Amount of money is displayed immediately. Their minds requested having that information imminently available. Revolut matched that!
• As per their spending accounts, people value cooperability with other people. Our minds merely say: “I have to split that dinner bill with my dad”. The required actions taken on the product app should simply be: “Split the dinner bill with Dad”.

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P2: Distribution

That’s where distribution kicks in.

Distribution equates to delivering the product to how people already think about that problem.

As a founder, you can visualize a solution that is already within the person’s designated time and space, i.e.: a product manager looking at the next sprint, and seeing what it would take to have his problems go away.

The proposed interaction should be exactly the same as he’s familiar with.

By leveraging existing ways of thinking and problem-solving, a founder can ensure that their product reaches the target audience in a manner that aligns with their expectations and habits.

For instance, if the target audience consists of product managers working in agile environments, the founder can envision a solution that seamlessly integrates into their existing workflows.

The interaction with the product should mimic the familiar processes and interfaces they are already accustomed to, such as the sprint planning tools they use.

By providing a solution that mirrors their established routines, the founder can make it easier for the product manager to adopt the new product and address their pain points effortlessly.

Effective distribution, therefore, involves understanding the target audience’s existing mental models and offering a product that fits seamlessly into their time and space, ultimately making their problems vanish.

Conclusion

History shows that business winners are those who effectively make us change the way we think about a problem in a way that matches our existing frame of reference. A granular approach to effectively match our current behavior around that problem should reside within any innovative company. You can only encompass the attention of the masses, if you solve a desperate enough problem for them, in a manner that is obvious to them, i.e. matches how they already think about that problem.