Distribution is the product
Most builders fall in love with the product and treat distribution as a problem for later, something you sort out once the thing is finished and beautiful. In many markets, that ordering is quietly fatal. The most elegant product that nobody can reach loses, every single time, to a worse one that actually travels. We learned to stop thinking of building and distribution as two separate jobs done in sequence, and to start treating how a thing spreads as part of the design itself, no less important than what the thing does.
The reason is that discovery does not work the way textbooks assume it does. People do not find the products they end up trusting through a clever advert or a polished landing page. They find them through the people and the channels they already trust. A message forwarded inside a family group. A recommendation from someone who has already tried it and staked a little of their own reputation on it. The trader everyone in the area already listens to. Distribution in these markets runs on trust, not on budget, and trust moves along paths that already exist rather than ones you can buy your way onto.
That has a hard consequence for how you build. If a product is going to travel through a forwarded message and a friend's word, then it has to be simple enough to survive that journey intact. A thing that takes three paragraphs and a diagram to explain will not move, because nobody forwards a thing they cannot summarise in a sentence. So the question of how the next person hears about this, from someone they trust, in words they would actually use, becomes a design question, and it belongs at the start of the work rather than the end. When we build something like WhereTheJobsAre, the way it spreads through the networks people already rely on to find work is not marketing we add afterward. It is baked into the product.
If you take one thing from this, let it be that the product and its path to people are a single object, not two. Design them together. And if you cannot yet answer, in plain and specific terms, how one person will hear about your product from someone they already trust, then you do not have a distribution plan. You have a hope, and hope has never once traveled through a WhatsApp group on its own.
solveX is a product studio building digital tools for African and diaspora communities across Nigeria and the UK.