I thought launching the product was the hard part

I have a problem that is almost embarrassingly convenient for a software engineer.

I have too many things I want to build.

There are SaaS ideas sitting in my head, little tools I want to try, websites I want to make, and a bunch of businesses I want to test just to see whether they work.

Building them isn't the part that scares me.

I can make the thing.

What keeps stopping me is a much more annoying question:

Who the hell is going to see it?

That question is what got me thinking about distribution.

My employer has something I don't

I work as a software engineer.

Sometimes I look at the work I'm doing and think: why am I working on this for someone else instead of building something of my own?

Then I remember the part of the business I don't have.

My employer can get the project.

There are existing relationships. There is credibility. There are people who know the company, people who have worked with it, and people who can introduce it to other businesses.

Someone has already created a path from “this business needs something” to “these people can build it.”

Then I get the requirements.

I build the software.

The company gets paid.

That doesn't mean distribution is the only thing the company has. It still needs people who can actually do the work. But the ability to consistently get in front of potential customers is a business capability on its own.

And I don't have that capability yet.

That's when the idea started bothering me.

Maybe the thing I need to build isn't just another product.

Maybe I need to build the ability to distribute whatever I build next.

I was treating Product Hunt like the distribution

My first instinct with my own products was pretty straightforward.

Build something.

Put a payment interface on it.

Launch it on Product Hunt.

See what happens.

It sounds reasonable until you ask where the users are supposed to come from.

I've watched a friend launch products on Product Hunt without getting much reach. That made me think about what I was actually expecting the platform to do for me.

I was treating the launch platform as if it were the distribution strategy.

It isn't.

Product Hunt itself actually makes this pretty clear. Its current launch guidance tells makers to get familiar with the community ahead of time, build a presence, grow their followers, involve their community, and prepare people for the launch. It describes distribution as one of the main reasons people launch there.

That changed how I was thinking about it.

I don't need to find the perfect place to launch. I need to build access to people who might care.

Then I can launch there.

Marketing and distribution aren't quite the same thing

I had been using “marketing” and “distribution” almost interchangeably.

They're related, but I think the distinction matters.

The American Marketing Association treats distribution as one part of marketing — “Place” in the traditional 4Ps — while promotion is the part concerned with communicating and encouraging purchase.

That's useful, but the distinction I'm interested in is simpler.

Marketing can help someone understand why they should care about something.

Distribution gives you a way to repeatedly get that something in front of them.

A Shopify store is an easy example.

The store doesn't automatically bring customers.

A business might use search, social media, ads, creators, affiliates, email, partnerships, marketplaces, or salespeople to bring people to it.

The website is where the customer might buy.

Those other things are ways of getting the customer there.

That's the part I was missing.

So I'm trying to build distribution before I need it

I'm about to launch my first app.

It's called Roast My Website.

The basic idea is that you give it a website and it gives you a roast along with actionable feedback about the site's user experience, accessibility, and conversion problems.

My old instinct would have been to finish it and then start telling people about it.

Instead, I'm trying something different.

I'm building content around the problem.

I'm roasting websites.

I'm talking about web design.

I'm explaining why certain websites work and why others don't.

I'm making content for people who build websites: developers, students, beginner designers, and people building businesses themselves.

The product is somewhere inside that world.

That's important to me.

I'm not trying to make every piece of content an advertisement for Roast My Website.

If I spend every day saying “look at my product,” I don't think I've built much of an audience. I've just repeatedly announced that I have something to sell.

I'd rather teach something useful.

Someone watches a website roast.

They learn something.

Maybe they follow me because they want more of that.

Later, they see the product.

Maybe they try it.

Maybe they eventually need a full website audit.

Now the same distribution can support a product and a service.

That's much more interesting.

An audience isn't automatically distribution either

This is another distinction I'm still learning.

Having followers isn't the same thing as having distribution.

If I have thousands of people following me who couldn't care less about websites, those followers don't magically become customers for a website-related product.

The audience has to be relevant.

That's why I care about making content around the actual areas I want to work in.

I want people who are interested in design, websites, software, businesses, and building things to keep finding me.

And I want to keep teaching them.

That's the part I'm good at.

The follower count is secondary.

The useful question is whether I can repeatedly reach people who have a reason to care about what I'm building.

There's also a durability problem here.

An Instagram audience is not completely mine. The platform decides who sees what I publish.

So I'm starting to think of social media as one layer of distribution rather than the entire asset.

If some of those people eventually become direct relationships, email subscribers, customers, clients, collaborators, or members of a community I can reach without relying entirely on an algorithm, the distribution becomes more durable.

That distinction matters if I'm trying to build a business rather than just make posts.

This changes how I want to build things

I don't want to become the person who spends six months validating an idea without ever making anything.

That's not how I work.

I learn by building.

I'll still build things.

I'll still put them in front of people.

I'll still charge for them.

I'll still let the market tell me when an idea is stupid.

But I don't want to wait until the product is finished to start thinking about how anyone will find it.

The question becomes:

How am I going to distribute this?

Maybe the answer is content.

Maybe it's sales.

Maybe it's relationships.

Maybe it's partnerships.

Maybe it's a marketplace.

Maybe it's paid advertising.

Maybe it's something specific to the industry I'm entering.

I don't need the answer to always be the same.

I just need to stop pretending there doesn't need to be an answer.

I want to build something that survives the product

This is the part that matters most to me personally.

I don't just want to make software.

I want to build businesses.

I want enough income that I can pay my bills, keep learning, experiment with new ideas, and eventually build teams around the things that work.

I also want to teach.

Teaching is one of the things I already know I'm good at, and there's an interesting loop there.

I can learn something.

I can teach it.

That attracts people who want to learn it.

Some of those people might eventually become customers.

Some might become collaborators.

Some might become people I can work with later.

The content becomes useful even when there isn't a product to sell.

That's the part I like.

I'm not building an audience only because I have something to launch.

I'm trying to build an audience because I expect to have many things to launch.

That makes distribution an asset rather than a launch-day activity.

The thing I'm changing

I used to think the sequence was:

Build → launch → market → hope.

I'm starting to think it should be closer to:

Build the product and build access to its audience at the same time.

Not because every product needs a massive audience before it launches.

It doesn't.

Product Hunt itself acknowledges that different makers have different launch strategies, and that some people deliberately ship early to get feedback.

The point is simply that launching doesn't magically create demand.

You still need a way to reach people.

And I'd rather spend the months before a product launch building that capability than arrive at launch day with a finished product and nobody to show it to.

I'm still testing whether this works.

Roast My Website will be one of the first real experiments.

If it works, I'll have learned something about distribution.

If it doesn't, I'll have learned something else.

Either way, I'd rather find out by building the thing than spend another year wondering whether I could have made it work.