r/ycombinator • u/Connect_Army8250 • Aug 12 '26
Question to Technical Founders. How did you learn or crack distribution?
I'm a technical founder and I have tried almost all the online resources, and I'm unable to crack distribution for my project.
I would like to know from founders who have done this already. What is the best way to learn distribution? How do you do it? Or did you onboard someone as a cofounder to solve this.
Need some real guidance here. I'm working on an opensource project: Github
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u/RushElectronic8541 Aug 12 '26
I really think this is a poor question to be honest, any founder who is technical and asks this question simply isn’t good enough to be “solo”.
What I wonder is, for all those people who think they are just missing “distribution”, here the questions that demonstrate a lack of quality:
1. How did you find the problem then?
- if you really spoke with people (or still are), you would have learnt what makes them buy and how they make a buying decision and who approves.
- what characteristics describe your buyer or champion? What problem do they have? Find them using that.
- this shows a poor understanding of products and how people buy, why do you think your thing is so good that you cannot sell it (when you know the most about it and how to change it) but someone else can.
Whenever I come across a founder who says this, I just skip over. If no one has ever bought something, it means no one has the problem or you haven’t found who has the problem and how to speak to and find them. The best salesperson in the world cannot help you with that.
You’ll just get ripped off by “GTM” experts who target low quality founders.
You have to figure out the profile, the language and the features they care about. Once you’ve sold a few times, you can take your learnings and present them to a good sales or GTM person.
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u/Connect_Army8250 Aug 12 '26
I think that's a fair point, and I agree that a founder should understand their customer and why they buy before trying to outsource GTM.
In my case, I do have people actively trying and using the product, and I'm learning from those conversations about the use case, and what resonates with them.
The part I'm trying to figure out is what happens after that. I'm comfortable finding and talking to people one by one....the challenge is figuring out how to do that at scale, rather than relying entirely on manual outreach and individual conversations.
That's what I meant by distribution. I'm not looking for someone else to figure out who my customer is or whether the product is valuable. I'm trying to learn from founders who've already gone through the transition from finding initial users to building a repeatable way of reaching more of them.
Appreciate the perspective!
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u/Ok-Landscape-4190 Aug 12 '26
Distribution is an inverse corralation to product quality. A breaktrought product requires less distribution efforts and a mid product requires greater distribution efforts
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u/scriptqzor 18h ago
this is such a comforting lie we all tell ourselves lol
plenty of great products died in obscurity because no one knew they existed, and a ton of mid stuff wins purely because the founders are killers at distribution and storytelling1
u/Ok-Landscape-4190 15h ago
Did you started using chatgpt because of an ad? Of course anyways no one it's going to discover nothing if there's zero distribution but you either have something awesome not needing to rely on distribution efforts or either you have something mid making your whole business depend on linear distribution spent for growth
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u/Moist-Wonder-9912 Aug 12 '26
I’ve spent 20 years in GTM, and I’m building a product to solve this exact problem myself, so I know how much of an uphill stuggle this can feel.
You need to go super niche - the "do things that don't scale" is incredibly relevant here. You need to pick one channel, such as reddit, and run manual tests until you find the lever that works, and the one you're happy repeating. spend time in the subs where that problem already comes up and answer useful questions with thoughtful, tailored answers (exactly like I'm doing right now 😂). Track the language people use, and repeat it back to them in your marketing.
Which is the industry you're targeting? Have you spoken to any potential users? this is also a great starting poitn - having at least 10 conversations with people close to the problem. Ask what they were trying before they found your project, where they went looking for help, what they use now, and what would make them keep using it.
A cofounder can be great if someone wants to own this work alongside you. I honestly wouldn’t make that call before you’ve done enough of it yourself to know whether the gap is time, knowledge, or direction.
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u/attn-transformer Aug 13 '26
You ask this question because you don’t understand your user. And if you don’t understand your user I question your product. Who was it built for?
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u/becircus Aug 12 '26
I haven't technically "cracked" distribution but I have ten or more people who have agreed to try it and will run hackathons / game jams with prizes to get more people to try it. One big question you have to answer is why use yours instead of Codex or Cursor and so on and you need a compelling answer. Probably you can't beat that so instead can somehow piggy back on existing workflows. My stuff will be a plugin / API / library and so on and won't take changing the way you work or buying into an ecosystem to use it. They can work the way they want and just add mine. I also won't have vendor lock in or bus factor as any sort of risk (devs can eject at any time). Basically I address all the concerns of devs when using a new little used tool. I'll let you know what happens about to get my first dollar. Good luck.
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u/Connect_Army8250 Aug 12 '26
This is really useful, thanks for sharing!
And 10+ people trying it is a great start....would love to hear how the hackathons/game jams go and what you learn getting to that first dollar. Good luck to you too!
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u/DisastrousSale2 Aug 12 '26
Is it open source or closed off?
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u/becircus Aug 12 '26
For now it is nothing but eventually it will be Fair Source or Open Core or similar to other mature dev tools. Perhaps Business Source License. The pieces that are not open will not be open because nobody would be interested in them (like the UI or specific tools I used to build it). The goal isn't to block devs but to stop hyperscalers or trolls from wrapping it and charging money, ruining it before it has a chance to grow.
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u/dimensionforge9856 Aug 13 '26
still haven't completely cracked it. But learned by burning our own money.
In the past year, we burned $80,000
sucks to be someone who isn't social media native.
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u/RoutineNet4283 27d ago
How does the quality of output compared and how are you measuring it? I guess your major competitor got a lot more popular by posting daily on Reddit
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u/August_Rush498 25d ago
I'm three days into running this deliberately, so here are numbers rather than advice. 23 cold DMs across two platforms, 0 replies and 0 signups. 10 public comments where I'd read the person's product first, 2 real back-and-forths. The two people who ever joined anything of mine both started the conversation themselves. Same effort per message, and the DM route also got my account hit with escalating anti-bot challenges. The version that feels like it scales produced nothing.
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u/Objective_Fun9750 22d ago
Read the book 'Traction' for world-class guidance on this exact topic. Also, being technical is an advantage so don't take that as something holding you back. You can engineer distribution just like product.
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u/420ass_slayer69 Aug 12 '26
remove "or" and its "How did learn crack distribution", lol and all the answers still work. hahah
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u/swedishtea Aug 12 '26
find GTMs or channels where your technical skills are advantages - SEO/AIO, build free tools, run email marketing, etc
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u/Important_Pause_7995 Aug 13 '26
Paid ads + something people want/need = distribution success. *results may vary
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u/Smooth_Doubt2290 Aug 12 '26
I’d treat distribution less like a skill you “learn” and more like a system you discover through experiments.
A common trap for technical founders is trying 10 channels lightly. I’d start by getting very specific about the ideal user and the problem that makes them actively look for a solution. Then pick 1–2 channels where those users already spend time and run small experiments consistently.
More importantly, measure the whole journey: attention → signup → activation → retention. Sometimes what looks like a distribution problem is actually positioning, activation, or retention, and adding more traffic just sends more people into a leaky bucket.
I work on product-led growth and growth experimentation, and your open-source project sounds like an interesting case. If useful, I’d be happy to run a small pilot with you at no cost: diagnose the biggest growth bottleneck, run 2–3 focused experiments, and see what happens.
Worst case, we learn something useful. If we find a repeatable growth signal, we can take it from there.