The hard part has changed (technology —> distribution)
Building technology has never been easier, but getting anyone to care about it has never been harder.
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 could build something that actually worked, you had a meaningful head start.
At Chango for instance, we needed almost $3m just to get basic platform out the door, and even then it was helpd together by sticky tape to start.
That era is (largely) over.
With AI accelerating development timelines, with no-code and low-code tools maturing, with open source libraries and cloud infrastructure available to anyone with a credit card, the actual building of software has become dramatically more accessible. A small team can ship in weeks what used to take a large team months. A single founder with the right tools can build a prototype over a weekend that would have required a seed round five years ago.
This should feel liberating, and in many ways it is. But it has also created a new problem. If everyone can build, then the product itself is no longer the differentiator. The companies that win are no longer the ones with the best technology. They are the ones that figure out how to get that technology in front of the right people, consistently, at scale, in a way that makes those people want to pay for it.
Distribution has become the hard part. And most founders are still operating as if the product is what matters most.
Building a tech company means getting eight things right at once
When you zoom out and look at what it actually takes to build a successful technology company, the list is humbling. You need to get the technology right, obviously. But you also need:
distribution
operations
execution
positioning
timing
team
and capital.
All of these things need to work in some reasonable harmony, and a serious weakness in any one of them can sink you regardless of how strong the others are.
For a long time, technology sat at the top of that list in terms of difficulty and risk, but it’s clear that the balance has shifted. Technology has slid down the difficulty curve thanks to the tools and capabilities I just described, and distribution has climbed to the top.
This is something I think about constantly (at FOMO.ai), because we live it every day. We work with brands across industries, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. The companies struggling most are rarely struggling because their product is bad, but because they haven’t figured out how to reliably get their product in front of the people who would benefit from it. They have a technology problem that is mostly solved and a distribution problem that is wide open.
Or, how many times have we seen companies build a ‘solution awaiting a problem’.
And that realization, once you truly internalize it, changes how you think about everything from your go-to-market plan to your product roadmap to where you invest your time and money.
What twelve months of cold email taught us at FOMO.ai
I want to share something specific from our own experience.
We have been running cold email at FOMO.ai for about twelve months now. And I will be honest, the first few months were rough. The results were not where we wanted them to be, and it would have been very easy and very reasonable to shut the channel down and try something else. That is what most companies do. They test a channel for 60 or 90 days, decide it isn’t working, and move on to the next thing.
But we kept coming back to this fundamental belief that distribution is the hardest and most valuable problem to solve right now. Cold email was putting us in front of our target market. The conversations were happening, even if they weren’t converting the way we wanted. The distribution was working at a mechanical level, which is actually the hardest part to get right.
So instead of killing the channel, we did something that could have felt counterintuitive at the time. We looked at the distribution we had working, and we tweaked our offering to better align with it. Rather than forcing a specific product through a distribution channel and hoping for the best, we let the distribution inform what we should be selling and how we should be packaging it.
This reinforced something I now believe deeply: most founders build the product first and then go looking for distribution. The ones who win tend to find distribution first and then shape the product to match. Or at the very least, they treat the relationship between product and distribution as a two-way conversation rather than a one-way dictation. A company that is spending 80% of its resources on product and 20% on distribution is going to have a very hard time.
Define the box you’re playing in
None of this works, though, if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach. And I mean really know, not in a vague “we sell to marketers” kind of way, but with genuine specificity about the industry, the role, the company size, and most importantly the problem that is urgent enough and important enough to make someone respond to your outreach or click on your ad or pick up the phone.
This is the foundational step that makes distribution possible. You can have the best cold email sequence in the world, the most compelling ad creative, the sharpest sales deck, but if you’re pointing it at the wrong audience or trying to solve a problem that nobody is losing sleep over, none of it will land.
The way I think about this has evolved over time. I used to approach market definition as a product exercise, asking who would benefit from what we’ve built. Now I approach it as a distribution exercise, asking where can we reliably and repeatedly get in front of people who have a problem we can solve. Those two questions sound similar, but they lead you to very different answers, because the second one forces you to consider not just who your ideal customer is but whether you can actually reach them.
Anchor your story in something undeniable
Once you know who you’re targeting and what problem you’re solving, the next question is why now. Why should anyone care about this problem today instead of next quarter? Why should they prioritize this over the fifteen other things competing for their attention and their budget?
This is where timing and context become critical distribution tools. If you can anchor your message in something that your target market already knows is true, something they’ve been reading about in industry publications or hearing about at conferences or worrying about in their own leadership meetings, your outreach stops feeling like a cold pitch and starts feeling like a timely conversation.
The best companies I’ve seen do this find a macro level shift in their industry that creates genuine urgency around the problem they solve. Not manufactured urgency, not “limited time offer” urgency, but the kind of urgency that comes from a buyer recognizing that the world is changing and they need to adapt. When your cold email or your LinkedIn post or your sales deck can tap into that existing anxiety and then offer a clear path forward, the response rates change dramatically.
One of the things we’ve found most effective in our own outbound is leading with the shift rather than leading with the product. We talk about what’s changing in AI and marketing and search before we ever talk about what we do. That approach works because it meets the prospect where they already are, which is worried about something real and looking for someone who understands the problem deeply enough to help.
Pick your segment and commit
This one is closely related to the distribution question because the segment of the market you choose to serve dictates which distribution channels are even viable for you.
If you’re selling to solo practitioners or very small businesses at a low price point, you simply cannot afford to have salespeople running demos. The math doesn’t work. You need a self-serve, product-led motion where people can find you, try you, and buy you without ever talking to a human. That means your distribution has to be built around inbound channels, content, SEO, organic social, and paid acquisition with very efficient unit economics.
If you’re selling to enterprises at higher price points, you can afford a longer and more complex sales cycle, but you need to reach decision makers who are notoriously hard to get in front of. That means your distribution might lean more heavily on outbound, events, partnerships, and relationship-driven selling.
The point is that your positioning and your distribution strategy are deeply intertwined, and you can’t figure out one without the other. Too many founders pick a segment based on where they think the biggest opportunity is, without asking whether they can actually build a distribution engine to reach that segment. And too many founders try to serve multiple segments simultaneously, splitting their distribution efforts and diluting their messaging to the point where nothing resonates with anyone.
Commitment to a segment feels risky. But in my experience, focus is what makes distribution work. The more specific you are about who you’re talking to, the more your message can be tailored to their exact situation, and the more likely they are to feel like you built this thing for them.
(Side quest… proactive versus reactive)
Remember, when you do choose a segment, the work you put into scaling growth is your PROACTIVE distribution. However, you may stumble across some sales prospects who want to work with you, find you organically, and are not really different enough from your ICP to cause problems, so you take them on. That is REACTIVE distribution. If you don’t take this too far, this is a great way to organize your team around a common goal, while at the same time grabbing some opportunistic revenue.
Know the landscape before you spend a dollar
Before you invest serious time or money in any distribution channel, you need to understand what your prospects are already seeing from other companies in your space, because you are not operating in a vacuum. Your potential customers are being reached by your competitors through many of the same channels you’re planning to use, and if you don’t know what those competitors are saying and how they’re positioning themselves, you’re going in blind.
Spend an hour mapping it out. Look at competitor websites, read their reviews, pay attention to the ads they’re running, and the content they’re publishing. Try to understand not just what they’re selling but how they’re distributing it. Are they dominating a particular channel? Is there a channel where nobody is competing effectively? Are they all saying the same thing, which might mean there’s an opportunity to say something different?
This exercise almost always surfaces one of two opportunities. Either you find a segment of the market that is genuinely underserved, where the distribution landscape is wide open, or you identify a way to differentiate your message so clearly that you can compete directly and win. Both are valuable. But you can’t find either one if you’re not looking.
Make your message simple enough to survive a cold email
Here is something our twelve months of cold outbound taught me about messaging: if your value proposition can’t be understood in the time it takes someone to glance at a cold email on their phone, it is too complicated. That is the real test. Not whether it sounds impressive in a boardroom or whether your investors nod along during a pitch meeting, but whether a busy person who has never heard of you can read one sentence and immediately understand what you do and why it might matter to them.
Most companies overcomplicate their messaging because they’re trying to sound sophisticated. They use jargon, they layer in buzzwords, they try to communicate every feature and every differentiator in a single paragraph. And the result is that nobody processes any of it. The message gets deleted, the ad gets scrolled past, and the website visitor bounces in three seconds.
The discipline of simplification is one of the hardest parts of building a go-to-market plan, and it is also one of the most impactful. When we simplified our messaging at FOMO.ai, when we stripped away the insider language and said plainly what we do and who we do it for, our outbound performance improved meaningfully. People could actually understand what we were offering, which meant they could actually decide whether it was relevant to them.
Your messaging also needs to work across two very different scenarios. The first is overcoming apathy, where your prospect kind of knows they have a problem but isn’t motivated to do anything about it right now. The second is overcoming comparison, where your prospect is actively evaluating you against a competitor. Good messaging handles both. It creates urgency by connecting to something the prospect already cares about, and it differentiates by being specific about what makes you the better choice.
Execute one channel, learn, then scale
Once all of these foundational pieces are in place, the temptation is to go wide and try everything at once. Resist that temptation.
The smartest approach I’ve seen, and the one we follow at FOMO.ai, is to pick one or two channels, execute them well, collect data, and learn. Figure out whether your messaging actually resonates in the real world. Figure out which segments of your target market respond best. Figure out what objections come up and what questions people ask. All of that learning is gold, and you can only get it by being focused enough to actually pay attention to the signal.
Once you’ve found something that works, even modestly, then you can start to scale it and layer on additional channels. The founders who do well are the ones who own their early go-to-market motions themselves rather than immediately outsourcing to agencies or fractional hires. They develop a firsthand understanding of what works and why, and then when they do bring in outside help, they can hand over a playbook that is grounded in real data rather than assumptions.
(Our exception is cold email. We have a dedicated team managing it because it is SO hard these days.)
This is also where patience becomes a genuine competitive advantage. As I mentioned, we could have killed cold email after month three. Most companies would have. But by staying with it long enough to learn and adapt, we turned a channel that felt like it was failing into one of the most valuable distribution assets in our business. The lesson there isn’t that you should stick with something that isn’t working forever; the lesson is that distribution channels almost never work on the first try, and the companies that figure them out are the ones that stay long enough to iterate.
The real takeaway
The landscape has shifted underneath us. Technology is no longer the moat. In a world where anyone can build, the companies that win will be the ones that figure out distribution and have the patience to let it compound over time. That means your go-to-market plan isn’t just one workstream among many. It is arguably the most important strategic decision your company will make.
And it means that the foundational work, defining your market, understanding your timing, choosing your segment, studying the competition, simplifying your messaging, all of that boring, unsexy, strategic thinking, is actually the highest leverage work you can do.
Because without it, every dollar you spend on execution is a guess, and with it, every dollar works harder than the last.
Dax is the Co-Founder & CEO @ FOMO.ai, and the author of 84Futures.com. Take my new (free) course on How to Win With AI Search and get a free $5,000 customized Playbook for your business.