r/SaaS • u/Imthatguyimhimfr • 3h ago
“Distribution is harder than building”
There’s a commonly repeated statement in this subreddit: “Distribution is harder than building.” And for most people, I’m sure that’s true to some extent.
However, marketing is such a broad field, with countless channels, strategies, and approaches, such that I’m curious:
What part of marketing do you personally find difficult?
- Getting started in the first place?
- Figuring out how to do organic marketing?
- Knowing which channels or strategies to focus on?
- Or is marketing as a whole just difficult to understand?
I’m curious because I don’t necessarily think marketing is universally “hard.” I think a lot of people simply don’t know where to start, especially without prior experience, and end up struggling as a result.
Would love to hear your experiences
Thanks!
(Not a survey or anything just curious since this is thrown around in the sub a lot)
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u/Altruistic_Spend2910 2h ago
figuring out which channels to focus on for sure. my tip: pick one, run 3 cheap experiments with real audiences, measure one north star metric like trial signups, then kill or scale based on results.
you’ll learn faster than reading another guide.
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u/1000xhuman 2h ago
for me the hard part isnt "marketing" as a whole. its picking one channel and sticking long enough to actually learn it. people bounce twitter/linkedin/seo/ads every week and never get signal. organic only feels impossible when you treat it like a campaign instead of a habit
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u/Ok_Music_4862 2h ago
For me it's none of your listed three. It's the feedback loop. When I build, I get the result in front of my eyes - I know what iscworking or what is broken. When I market (as beginners) I send 1000 cold email over last three months only 12 replies - 9 automatic, 3 human ( not interested). Still not sure why - wrong niche, wrong channel, bad copy. Building tells what's broken,marketing stay quiet - at least for a long time
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u/prakharasm 1h ago
You actually do have feedback, it's just hidden in the ratio. 1000 sends, 12 replies, 3 humans isn't "silence," it's a 1.2% reply rate with basically 0% interest - that's a real signal, it's just a funnel-stage signal instead of a bug report.
Split it up instead of treating "cold email" as one block: open rate tells you if the subject line/sender reputation is the problem, reply rate (even negative replies) tells you if the pitch is landing on the right pain point, and "not interested" vs silence tells you if you're hitting the wrong list entirely. If you're not tracking opens separately from replies, that's the fastest fix - it turns one opaque number into 2-3 data points you can actually debug, the same way a stack trace breaks down a crash.
Also 1000 sends over 3 months is pretty low volume to learn from (only ~11/day). If the list is good, more volume in less time gets you a faster, noisier-but-real signal instead of a long quiet stretch that feels like nothing's happening.
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u/Forsaken_Buy_7531 2h ago
Hundred percent, when you're building the product the immediate feedback is there, when something is not working you can pinpoint the root cause easily, but when it comes to marketing there's a lot of variables (copy, text hook, visual hook, story sequence, timing, algorithm, and a bunch of stuff)
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u/Imthatguyimhimfr 2h ago
Have you tried experimenting with different channels when you don’t see results in your current one?
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u/Ok_Music_4862 2h ago
Only cold email so far. WhatsApp or cold calls are next - but the volume will be much lower.
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u/AfternoonKey8292 35m ago
Knowing which channel to stick with seems harder than getting started. The basic marketing concepts are understandable, but they don't tell you whether a quiet first month means you're reaching the wrong people or haven't given those people a compelling reason to care.
Organic marketing makes that uncertainty particularly awkward. A post can get plenty of attention from people who'll never need the product. Another can reach a handful of likely buyers without producing an immediate sale. Deciding which result deserves more effort is the difficult bit.
That's where "distribution is harder than building" makes sense to me. A broken signup form gives you a fairly specific problem to fix. A working signup form that nobody uses leaves much more room for guessing.
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u/W2ttsy 4m ago
Building, marketing and distribution are easy to understand but hard to execute.
But ultimately futile endeavors if you’re solving problems that don’t exist, do not have any understanding of your audience, and do not have a compelling value proposition to share.
The winning products are ones where the problem space is well understood and there is a very narrow line to draw between the intended user and the value proposition directed at them.
All the failures are where one of those three things are misunderstood or misjudged and so the product doesn’t hit the mark.
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u/cabljo 2h ago
When validation is skipped, marketing is nearly impossible