Distribution Playbooks
Getting a product in front of the right people — the channels founders bet on, the partnerships that scaled, and the underrated distribution plays most people skip. Each one is quoted from the founder who ran it.
266 tactics · page 3 of 9
“In weight loss you don't want to talk about it until you've seen success. When you find successes you start losing 5, 10, 15, 50 pounds — now you're going to scream from the rooftops. We've got programmatic emails that go out at a few weight-loss milestones asking people to tell us their story.”
Trigger word-of-mouth at the 5-pound milestone, not at install
Lose It! waits for a 5-pound (or larger) milestone before triggering testimonial/story-collection emails — never at install. In stigmatized categories, asking users to evangelize at signup is wrong because they don't want to admit the problem. Wait for the early win, then make sharing a celebration rather than a confession.
“We were essentially paying ten dollars for a premium subscription and the economics worked for us but it just didn't scale as much as we were hoping. We killed it after like a year.”
Referral program paid $10/sub, broke even, killed after a year
Lose It!'s referral program paid $10 per converted premium signup. It broke even but never moved the needle. Worse, treated cohorts had lower LTV than untreated — meaning they were probably paying for shares that would have happened anyway. The funnel math is brutal: 5% of exposed users share, 5% of their friends convert. Killed after a year.
“Maybe the strategy is, hey we know we're going to get pretty significant market share within this audience — we should look at adjacent audiences or new geographies. If you look at the growth of Spotify, the growth isn't coming predominantly from the US anymore, they've realized we're starting to saturate.”
Once you saturate the home market, go adjacent or geographic (Spotify)
Knowing your SAM tells you when to stop pushing the home market and start expanding sideways. Spotify did this geographically once US growth flattened — the same logic applies to any niche-saturated app: expand the audience, expand the geography, or expand the product.
“We reached out to a bunch of plant retailers — online, in person, brick-and-mortar — and basically said 'we will help your customers have a positive outcome with your product, can you put in our little QR code flyer.' Now when these retailers ship out a new plant every one has this little QR code in it. It led to our first 15,000 users.”
QR codes in retailer plant shipments drove first 15,000 users
Greg solved 'I just got a plant, now what?' so Alex partnered with plant retailers to slip a branded QR code into every shipped plant. Unboxing became the install moment — and the pitch was framed around the retailer's outcome (helping their customer succeed), not Greg's growth. The single channel produced their first 15K users with zero ad spend.
“You're referring users to us — we can refer users back to you, and our scale is large enough that it could actually be a meaningful number. It's a B2B strategy where I'm thinking of the strategic value I can provide to my partners in return for them providing value to us.”
Trade your app's audience back to your retail partners
The reason small retailers say yes isn't generosity — it's a two-way trade. As Greg's user base grows, they can route customers back to partner nurseries, giving small businesses something they desperately want: an audience. Mobile apps accumulate audiences over time; that audience is the currency you spend on offline partnerships.
“A category that's not technically AI that saw a ton of growth is short dramas. They're making hundreds of millions of dollars now, and I've met several startups that are largely using AI to either fully generate or edit these short dramas, so they can make them at much lower cost and spend more on marketing to distribute them.”
Short-drama apps do hundreds of millions — AI collapses production cost so you outspend on marketing
Short-form drama apps are quietly a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars category. The startups winning are using AI to generate or edit the content itself, collapsing production cost so they can pour the savings into paid acquisition. The leverage isn't in the app — it's in the cost structure that lets you dominate distribution.
“A lot of startups now are achieving really fast growth by essentially subsidizing the model cost to the end consumer — like giving away Nano Banana Pro for free. It's almost similar to the on-demand economy like Uber, DoorDash. Most of those, the unit economics catch up to you eventually. You have to be quite good at marketing and distribution and really lock users into the product if you're going to grow that way.”
Subsidizing model cost is the new Uber/DoorDash — unit economics catch up
A common 2026 distribution playbook: subsidize model cost (give away Nano Banana Pro, Sora, etc. for free) to grow fast. It works like the on-demand era — unit economics eventually catch up. Some hit escape velocity and turn users profitable, but only if you're exceptional at marketing and genuinely lock retention. Otherwise you're lighting cash on fire.
“These third-party marketplaces probably make the most sense in two specific cases out of the gate. One is if you're a AAA game and you charge up front — Nintendo could launch the Switch store with backbone as a controller and you pay $30 up front. The second is a more B2B marketplace where you know you're going to have a much higher LTV.”
AAA paid-upfront games + multi-seat B2B = cleanest marketplace launch plays
Both viable opportunities share the same property: tight control over downloads so the per-install Core Technology Fee doesn't compound on free riders. $30-60 upfront for an AAA game absorbs the €0.50 CTF easily; $30/month B2B seats with no viral motion do the same.
“We pulled RevenueCat numbers and from all of our customers, App Store EU-specific revenue is 12%. So even Nintendo coming out with a Switch store — that's a lot of work to build the marketplace, to maybe move the needle on 12% of your revenue.”
EU is only 12% of App Store revenue — opportunity ceiling on the whole debate
Before reshaping your business around EU-only DMA changes, remember it's roughly 5-15% of total App Store revenue for most apps. RevenueCat's aggregate number is ~12%. That sets the ceiling on how much engineering and risk any EU-only opportunity is worth.
“All their ads were 35% off on GPS and health trackers. If your ad is just saying 'Get this disc this. This is what we do.' That's not speaking to someone's job to be done. But then I read one of their reviews and it was about this Siberian husky that had run off... If I saw an ad showing this I would have bought this years ago.”
Mine reviews for the breaking-point install moment, then restage it as your ad
Tractive sold dog GPS trackers via feature/discount ads and missed Daphne for years despite repeated lost-husky incidents. The unlock would have been an ad dramatizing the actual JTBD story — pulled directly from a customer review. Ads showing the rescue, not the SKU, convert latent buyers who don't yet know your category is their solution.
“If you have an aha moment can you work that into the ad in some way that kind of brings people into the app already excited already motivated already kind of understanding that aha moment... With the competition there is now it's never been easier to make an app... you can't wait until they're in the app to get them to that moment.”
Pull the aha moment into the ad — never wait for onboarding to deliver it
Ladder failed Daphne's host because he only discovered the killer feature (custom-swappable exercises) deep inside onboarding — he never even saw their ads. With cheap app production making competition fierce, the aha needs to land in the ad surface itself, otherwise interested users churn before activation. Cal AI's TikToks of someone snapping a meal mid-routine is the canonical example.
“We received not from Bill Gates but from someone pretty close to him — you need to bring it down and stop running, and that was such a nightmare... as soon as we moved the ad the account went from spending 100 to spending 10. I make sure that you have at least four or five creatives that are working at the same time.”
One Bill Gates ad carried Blinkist's account — its C&D collapsed spend 10x
Blinkist had one Bill Gates ad creative carrying nearly all of their Facebook spend. A legal threat forced its removal and the account collapsed from 100 to 10 in spend because Facebook's algorithm lost its event volume. Always keep 4-5 winning creatives live concurrently so any one takedown leaves a backup — and avoid identifiable famous figures.
“I tend to have like the pillars — the channels that are working where I continue investing massively in this channel — usually 30% will go to just testing new things, and in the meantime I will expand my budget like starting to explore new channels knowing that for some of them it's going to take longer.”
Reserve 30% of paid budget permanently for testing new channels
Concrete portfolio rule: keep pillar channels funded, but always carve out roughly 30% of paid spend for testing new ones. This guards against platform dependency and creative fatigue while compounding learning across the funnel — so when a pillar saturates you already have the next winner warming up.
“I think that we'll see a lot of winners win harder because people will just get started and not want to fight the AI that has just sort of been trained to like 'oh use this solution.'”
AI defaults mean winners win harder — get embedded as the default-recommended tool
LLMs default to whatever has the most training data, so Bolt and Lovable standardized on Supabase, and models reliably steer users to React, Expo, and a handful of incumbents. For distribution, getting embedded as the AI-recommended default compounds aggressively — fighting the model's defaults costs energy most users won't spend. New tools need to either crack the default or be unmissably superior.
“If you're designing a product that consumers love — not just love because they have to use it like your healthcare app but love it because hey I will pay money for it, it's that good — there's probably a strong rationale that businesses will want to use this... I wouldn't call it a pivot, I would call it a growth extension.”
B2B is a growth extension for loved consumer apps — not a pivot
B2C apps that earn voluntary paid love (Slack, Dropbox, Calm, Headspace, Lynda, Photoroom) have a natural B2B expansion path through workforce productivity or employee benefits. Same product, different sales motion, ~10x per-seat price in the business context. Treat enterprise as a channel addition, not a rebuild.
“In a time when anyone can build and the barriers to build are so low because of AI helping us here, the real differentiators are distribution. We're seeing the App Mafia guys and a ton of other really amazing marketers and distributors scaling their apps very, very quickly through TikTok, and it's actually these guys that we're seeing get those exits within 12 to 18 months.”
Distribution > dev: killer marketers, not killer coders, hit 12-month exits
When asked who's hitting million-dollar exits inside a year, Peleg flatly says it's the killer marketers, not the killer engineers. AI has flattened the build moat, so the founders winning quick acquisitions are the ones doing founder-led TikTok content or running tight relationships with niche influencers (a Christian app working directly with Christian creators). Building is table stakes; eyeballs are the job.
“just because algorithm decides to deliver one creative over others doesn't make the other creatives bad creative... that particular creative that got the 90% of the spend was maybe lucky we call it like lucky 5,000 impressions”
Pull the dominant ad to give underdelivered creatives a fair shot
Meta makes early allocation decisions within the first 5–10k impressions, meaning one ad can crowd out others not because it performs better but because it got lucky early. Removing the dominant ad from a test adset often causes suppressed creatives to suddenly bloom. Actively equalizing budget across creatives gives a cleaner read on true performance.
“I think it might matter but it matters a lot more once you get bigger because a lot of the decisions at such stage are driven by MMP/lastclick which is normal... 500k plus then these are becoming more a lot more important”
Last-click MMP works early; incrementality becomes critical above $500k/month
MMP last-click attribution is a practical starting point when budgets are small. But comparing UAC vs. Meta through last-click is misleading at scale because one is a push channel and one is pull — they do not compete for the same marginal user. Above roughly $500k/month, geo-lift, hold-out, and blackout incrementality tests are needed for sound budget allocation.
“we have a million dollars a day budget at the campaign level... with the guard rails in you won't be spending 1 million a day of course you will only spend up to your total campaign cap”
Set campaign budget to $1M/day to remove pacing caps — guard with spend limits
At accounts already spending $50k+/day, an artificially low daily budget signals the algorithm to throttle delivery. Setting the campaign-level budget to $1M/day while placing real spend controls at the campaign-cap level removes that ceiling and lets the algorithm compete for higher-quality inventory. In one case this produced a hockey-stick volume increase while cost-per-purchase fell simultaneously.
“keep it simple keep it logical don't send all possible events because you can... when you send this mixed signals mixed funnel that doesn't make sense from the auction calculation point of view then you're also potentially losing out”
Send clean, logically ordered funnel events — do not fire everything the SDK supports
Ad platform algorithms build audience models from conversion signals. Firing every available event 'because you can' introduces contradictory funnel signals that confuse auction optimization. A clean logically-sequenced funnel (install → trial start → subscription) gives the algorithm a coherent user model; Alper has seen simpler accounts outperform complex multi-event setups because of this.
“an app that organized kind of school kids uh team sports brand partnerships was a really interesting part of their revenue strategy um another one was a sort of social social networking app for beer lovers they also um had a lot of brand partnership opportunities”
Niche audiences are a brand partnership asset, not a limitation
A school kids team sports app and a beer lovers social app both landed brand partnerships specifically because their audiences were tightly defined and identifiable — something a broader app cannot offer. Niche audience positioning is not just a user acquisition constraint; it is a business development asset that unlocks a second revenue stream without growing the user base. Founders should articulate their audience's identity in positioning to attract brand partners.
“Find my came out later Like location's everywhere We would be dead in the water if we tried to... it really helped us because it reduced the stigma that was there... someone's using fine my they've got over the hump that this is a real need and then we're just so much better”
A big-tech free competitor can validate your category for you
When Apple launched Find My, Life360 expected a threat but got a tailwind: Find My reduced the cultural stigma around family tracking and sent Life360 a stream of ready buyers who wanted 'Find My, but better.' A dominant free product from a platform giant can act as top-of-funnel education for your paid product. The key condition: your category has to be genuinely better — not just differentiated — so the validated buyer naturally converts.
“when you're on the mobile platform all this payments and sales tax thing is handled by Apple and Google and that was really a good point for me to start there”
App Store handles payments so solo devs can focus on product
For solo developers building consumer apps, the App Store acts as merchant-of-record: it handles payments, sales tax, and compliance across thousands of jurisdictions automatically. On the web, a solo founder would need to deal with all of that themselves — which is prohibitive for a consumer lifestyle app. HabitKit earned $110K in the first five months of 2024 without ever managing a payment flow.
“maybe this is another piece... because we were offering it for free the carriers came to us and said can we tell people about it like yeah so like literally I get a call at the time it was Time Warner right now spectrum they were coming to us”
Free tier can pull B2B partners inbound
Because the landline product was completely free, carriers like Time Warner and Spectrum came inbound asking to integrate it — they got to offer robocall protection to their users at zero cost. Nomorobo got a massive distribution channel without a single enterprise sales hire. A free product targeted at a segment that large platforms serve can become a deal magnet instead of a cost center.
“We're hiring folks like it could be indie folks that live that are in college in New York City... they're just sort of like making a bunch of content and we're giving direction and like we have almost like a chat of folks that are making content together that are coming up with different ideas together.”
Build A Stable Of Part-Time Creators: Pay Per Post, Post From Their Accounts, Test 20 Angles
Portola's TikTok engine isn't an in-house team or an influencer agency — it's a networked stable of part-time creators who post from their own accounts. They share a group chat for brainstorming, each tries different content angles, and Portola pays per post. One in 20 videos goes viral. This is cheaper than big influencer deals and naturally tests more angles faster.
“Because the tolens are so bright and visual we were able to like have a relatively low cost per install from the get-go even on paid so it kind of gave us a lot of leeway to just experiment.”
Design For TikTok Virality From Day One — Visual Brightness Is A Distribution Feature
Portola didn't start with TikTok in mind but discovered that their deliberately bright, visual alien characters were naturally optimized for short-form video. The low cost-per-install on paid ads was a direct result of asset quality. Ajay's lesson: consumer app founders should evaluate distribution fit during character/design decisions, not after.
“Finding the way you can get scalable installs as cheaply as possible is part of your if not your product market fit your product market channel fit right like figuring out how you can actually like make this a scalable like situation.”
Find Product-Market Channel Fit: Scalable Organic Distribution Is Part Of The Product
Ajay distinguishes PMF from what he calls product-market-channel fit — knowing not just that users want the product, but that you can reach them cheaply enough to build a sustainable business. For Tolen, TikTok virality (from visual brightness + relatable content angles) drove cost-per-installs so low that paid ads became nearly redundant. Channel fit should be evaluated alongside product fit.
“until like several hundred thousand per month we spend zero dollar in ads why because we invented basically the animated posters in stories... people were just referring the app without any like referral mechanism”
Product virality funded early growth: zero ad spend to hundreds of thousands/month
Mojo reached several hundred thousand monthly users spending nothing on paid acquisition. The product itself was shareable: Mojo invented the animated Instagram story poster format, so every post was a walking ad. Users were DMed by friends asking how they made it. Organic referral built entirely through product output, not a bolted-on referral program.
“us is like a third of revenues only number one country yes but just a third so then you always have to think about all the countries”
US is only one-third of revenue — design globally from the start
Even though the US is Mojo's single largest market, it accounts for only one-third of revenue. The European founding team treated internationalization as default from the start rather than a growth hack added later. This means paywall localization, regional pricing experiments, and market-specific influencer campaigns were part of the core growth process, not afterthoughts.
“very quickly we were like we need designers we need our own design team... that was kind of a really key hire which was quite hard to find... i immediately poached from the agency and they've been full-time for the last three years”
Dedicated marketing design team is a prerequisite for performance at scale
One of Lisa's earliest hires at Fishbrain was a dedicated marketing design team — not product designers moonlighting, but people whose entire job was producing marketing assets. She poached two people from an agency and kept them full-time. A solo social media manager burning out producing all creative output is a bottleneck; a channel-specific junior designer unlocks scale without burnout.