Personality-led growth & other distribution imperatives for Product Builders.
You can build an amazing product, but if you can’t find users, it won’t matter. Distribution is the difference between a weekend project and a scalable business.
While watching Love is Blind UK Season 2, a reality TV show on Netflix, I noticed two entrepreneurs had joined the cast.
That’s not a coincidence.
Founders are stepping into mainstream reality TV because building personality and awareness of your personal brand has become a growth hack.
If you tuned in, you probably caught Kieran Holmes-Darby, a gaming entrepreneur who co-founded one of the UK’s first professional Esports teams, Excel, and is now a business director at a marketing agency that focusses on sports and gaming.
Less spotlighted was Jack Rogers, but his track record is even more telling: a serial founder who co-founded Chappy, a gay dating app later acquired by Bumble, and is now building a new social app called Picnic.
To be clear, this isn’t to suggest their intentions for going on Love is Blind weren’t genuine.
But it does highlight something important: founders are increasingly stepping into mainstream reality TV because building personality and awareness of your personal brand has become a growth channel in itself.
The line between entrepreneur and creator/influencer is disappearing.
In today’s market, it’s not enough to build a great product. In a world of potentially infinite software, distribution is no longer just “a product marketing problem.”
Distribution is the moat.
And a new Builder playbook is emerging:
👉 Step 1: Build audience
👉 Step 2: Build a great product.
Et voilà: you have built-in distribution.
Why distribution is harder than ever:
Builders everywhere are noticing it, as highlighted by this Reddit post in r/Saas.
“Code for a month → polish features → fix edge cases → launch quietly → …crickets.”
There’s a few key reasons this is happening.
1. The Explosion of Software
The cost of building is dropping. Vibe coding and coding assistants mean that the number of products will grow exponentially.
Vibe coding critics will tell you that nothing useful/usable has been built with vibe coding tools. Fair enough.
But with AI developing at a rapid pace, it’s easy to imagine a future where vibe coding and AI coding assistants reach the point of infinite, near-zero-cost software development.
The point is:
More builders + near-zero costs to develop + more competition = harder to get noticed.
2. Micro SaaS on the Rise
Indie builders on X are proof: find a small problem, launch a focused SaaS, share it with your network, and see if it sticks.
Products like Mailbrew and Typefully started this way, even before AI coding assistants were a thing.
More Builders are finding small problems, creating point solutions, and scaling distribution through promoting on communities like Build in Public on X and on Reddit with subreddits like r/SaaS and r/startups.
3. SEO is losing its punch.
SEO isn’t dead, but the game has gotten more complicated with AI summaries and chatbots.
AI summaries scrape and answer queries, sometimes without sending traffic. According to Cloudflare, ChatGPT scraped a website 1,700 times for every 1 visitor sent to the publisher’s webiste. Compare this to traditional Google search, which had a scrape-to-visit ratio in the single-digits before AI summaries were introduced, according to an interview with Hubspot’s CMO Kieran Flanagan.
🔑 The New Trends in Distribution
You can build an amazing product, but if you can’t find users, it won’t matter. Distribution is the difference between a weekend project and a scalable business.
Here are the new distribution trends every Builder needs to know about:
1. Personality-Led Growth
There’s a new game in town. You’ve probably heard of product-led growth, but the new operating model is Personality-Led Growth.
We’re entering an era where founders themselves become the distribution channel.
Hank Green, a YouTuber with over 2.5M followers, recently launched Focus Friend, which hit #4 in the App Store simply by Hank sharing it on Threads.
Cluely, an always-on AI copilot, went viral on X thanks to its founder sharing his story publicly about getting kicked out of Stanford when he used an early version of the tool to cheat on an Amazon Interview. (Side bar: See my Cluely launch strategy deep-dive here.)
You’ll see more Builders investing in their personal brands through creative means like content, podcast appearances, or even reality TV.
➡️ Action for builders: Invest in your founder brand now. Begin posting on X, Linkedin, or Reddit. Start sharing your story.
2. Owned channels & community
We’ve seen the explosion of influencers for eCommerce over the last 10 years, but I believe we’re still in the early days of influence networks for software products.
Community, thought leadership, and creating owned influence channels will be critical for software distribution.
LinkedIn Research reports 80% of marketers are doubling down on creator-driven content. You’ll start to see more brands invest in newsletters and building owned audience channels like email and podcasts.
Beehiiv, led by Tyler Denk (ex-Morning Brew), raised $33M in a high-profile funding round, proving newsletters and email aren’t going anywhere.
In e-commerce, MM Lafleur scaled their newsletter The M Dash to 86K+ readers with genuine leadership stories from founder Sarah LaFleur and mirror selfies from employees.
In the AI space, co-founder and CEO of Superintelligent, Nathaniel Whittemore’s The AI Daily Brief podcast powers his startup’s reach and influence.
➡️ Action for builders: Borrow distribution from creators and networks. Build community-first, product-second.
3. Ranking for Questions, Not Keywords
The SEO era was about optimizing for keywords and short search terms. The LLM era is about optimizing for answers.
You’ll start to see Builders use more tools like OGTool, which automatically spots high purchase-intent Reddit threads and seeds authentic replies that later surface in AI chatbot answers.
Another great example of this is Kandji’s The Sequence, a A weekly collection of articles, podcasts, videos, and data reports from Kandji, which now enables them to “rank” in AI summaries and responses.
Sylvia LePoidevin, CMO at Kandji, wrote in a Linkedin post:
“We may have just stumbled on the biggest LLM optimization hack ever.
We built a content brand with its own domain - and LLMs love it
….
Since it lives on its own domain, LLMs started treating it as an *external* source.
When we ask LLMs questions about Kandji, it references The Sequence heavily.”
Hubspot’s CMO Kieran Flanagan recommends building micro product pages optimized towards different questions buyers may ask. In an interview with the 20VC podcast, Kieran suggested the concept of a landing page is outdated, and product marketers need to optimize for answers to hundreds of different questions and micro-audiences to rank in LLM queries.
➡️ Action for builders: Build content engines that answer exact questions about your product.
You want your product to show up when your customers ask ChatGPT “what’s the best software for XYZ task?”
🏆 The New Playbook for Builders
Distribution is the moat. To win:
✅ Build trust & distribution through audience. People, even B2B buyers, buy from people, not generic brands.
✅ Create distribution through community. Invest in newsletters, podcasts, and communities.
✅ Optimize your product marketing for questions. Optimize for LLM answers, not just Google keywords.
💬 If you launched tomorrow, how would you get your first 1,000 users?