Decide how people will find this before you build it, and make that decision part of the product. Distribution is not a phase that starts at launch. If your answer is that you will put it on the App Store, what you are really saying is that you are relying on people searching for words you have never checked anyone searches for.

This is the step most first-time founders leave until the end, and it is the one that decides whether anyone ever sees the thing. Reaching people is consistently harder than building for them, which is why it belongs in the plan from the start rather than in the week after launch.

Most products do not make any money, and it is not because the products are bad. It is that building the thing is only half of it. You also have to get users, and they do not show up magically. A lot of people skip the research, so when they launch they do not know who the product is for. That makes the second half impossible, because you cannot go and find people you cannot describe.

The first question: where is the room?

Every group you could serve already gathers somewhere. A subreddit, a Discord, a professional association, a conference, a Facebook group, a newsletter. Find that room before you build, and spend time in it while you build, being useful.

This is also where your research lives, which is the point. The same room gives you the people to interview and the people to launch to.

Borrow trust instead of building an audience

My strategy, said plainly: attach myself to the trust and reputation another group already has, so that when people hear about what I do, they already trust it. Someone they trust telling them they can trust you is worth more than months of posting.

In practice that is: a community leader, an organiser, a newsletter, a podcast, a course, a conference. You bring something useful to their people, free, and you get an introduction.

The moves that work with no audience and no budget

• A waitlist page before you build anything. Long-standing practice in business and it applies fine to apps. It gives you a list and it makes you look real while you are still doing the research.
• Your interview participants become your first testers. They already shared with you, they are invested and they want to see what you did with it.
• A sign-up at the end of anything useful you publish. At the end, not the start.
• Something small and self-contained on Product Hunt, treated as one day and one door, not the launch.
• The next-door audience. Once you know your core person, there is usually a group beside them with the same problem for another reason. Often you do not even change the message, you just put it where they are.
• Building for the room you are already in. If you are an engineer with something free and open, technical communities will carry it further than any ad.

What to be careful with

Ads before the product works. It is a waste of money to pay for traffic before you know people get through onboarding. You can buy a hundred signups and discover none of them convert, when you could have found that out for free. When you do run ads, run several versions, or a single flat result tells you nothing about the product.

Running a community as your growth plan. For most solo builders and indie devs, keeping a community alive eats the time you needed for the product.

Social media as the whole strategy. I do not use it as mine. Choose the channel you can actually sustain, rather than the one you think you are supposed to be on.

The part that compounds

The people you help early are the ones who recommend you later. My plan for that is explicit: the people in a class now are the managers in three or four years, and they recommend the thing that helped them to their staff.

That only works if the early experience is good, which means your distribution plan and your product plan are the same plan.

Keep reading

How to Find Your First Users for a New App, Without a Following

I Launched My App and Got Zero Downloads: What Actually Went Wrong?

How to Define Your Target Market When You Have an App Idea

Learn this with me

Launch is class 9 of From Passion to Product, my free six-week live course: app store keyword research, screenshots, your description, monetisation, launch channels and onboarding. The decisions that make a launch work are made back in classes 2 to 4, when you find out who this is for and where those people already are.

That is why the course puts distribution in the research weeks and not just at the end.

Join the waitlist to hear when the next free cohort opens, or start on the workbook while you wait.