Hard Part First is a publication for founders who know that tech is a commodity in 2026 and distribution is the moat.
I’m Dax Hamman. I’ve been a founder three times: at Chango (sold to Rubicon Project for $122M), and now at FOMO.ai, where I’m building AI + human marketing teams for brands like Noom, Minted, and PetMeds.
Before Chango I led performance marketing at iCrossing/Hearst, helping brands like Hilton, Mercedes-Benz, and Bank of America navigate programmatic advertising in its earliest days. After Chango, I served as Chief Product Officer at Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI), a $1B+ market cap company. Twenty-five years across the marketing-and-distribution stack, with one consistent observation: the bottleneck moved.
Tech used to be the hard part, and distribution used to be easy. That’s flipped.
AI has collapsed the cost of building, so the new game is reaching the right people and earning their trust. Founders who do the hard part first, distribution before product polish, will win the AI era. Most founders are doing the opposite, and it’s why most are bleeding cash.
I write weekly about what distribution-first founders actually do differently. The thesis, the playbook, the data, the case studies, and the interviews. Sometimes blunt. Sometimes uncomfortable. Always grounded in the operator reality of running FOMO.ai today.
If you’re a founder who feels the gap between building a product and getting customers, this is for you.
Start Here:
The hard part has changed (technology —> distribution)
There was a time, not that long ago, when building a technology company meant spending most of your energy and most of your money on the technology itself. You needed engineers, infrastructure, months of development cycles, and a significant amount of capital just to get a functioning product into the world. The technology was the bottleneck, and if you…
You can find me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/daxhamman or book a 1:1 advisory session at intro.co/daxhamman.
