So you built your product, now what?

Hi friends,

First off, I'd like to explain why you are getting an email from Beehiiv instead of Substack. Well the reason is I was banned from Substack. Why? Unclear. I haven't written a post in over a year and the only post I had was quite unprovocative - it simply talked about my approach to building products.

I suspect I was inadvertently banned because Substack has been dealing with an influx of spam and fraud. However, I took it as a good opportunity to look elsewhere for a new platform and arrived at Beehiv. Which is why you're receiving this email from Beehiv!

Now that we have that out of the way, today I'd like to share my thoughts on *distribution*

Yes as builders we often times focus on building a great product, but what happens after we're done? Sure some people can make a tweet about their product and it goes viral (cough cough shayan). Or others can post on HN/PH and get tons of users. But I think that only works for a very small group of people and will likely fail for you.

For the rest of us common folk, we need to find ways of distribution that are more grind heavy. By grind, I mean we need to do more work. It's not simply submitting a link, or posting a screenshot. It's things like manually commenting on reddit posts, setting up f5bot to notify you when competitors are mentioned and engaging in programmatic SEO strategies that will help expand the potential queries that will land on your website.

As many of you already know, I've been working with a pal on my new product Beam Analytics. We've launched on Twitter, and I've engaged in some basic guerilla warfare tactics on Reddit/HN (see this thread). So far we've managed to get to a little under 100 sign ups and 4 paying users. So needless to say, we have a long way to go.

So what's the plan? Well, transparently, this newsletter is part of the plan. The main plan is to embed this term "Beam" in as many people's heads as possible. When someone thinks "Google Analytics" or "Plausible" or "Fathom", I want them to also think "Beam"! I want them to know that Beam is more feature complete and affordable.

But other than this newsletter, I've done the followng:

1. I set up f5bot to notify me anytime phrases like "privacy preserving analytics" or "plausible" or "fathom" are mentioned on twitter/reddit/hn/etc.

2. I've started scouring text networks like Quora/HN/Reddit, answering questions when I can. Admittedly sometimes using ChatGPT for ideas.

3. I've started tweeting... a lot! If you look at my tweets, they are constantly talking about my wins, my losses, my struggles, my successes. In addition to a bizarre form of therapy, these also serve to embed BEAM into peoples heads. I would estimate I've made maybe 40 tweets about Beam and over 100k people now know about beam. Crazy right?

So that's where my heads currently at. As you can see, this format is more stream of consciousness as opposed to a more structured well thought out post. The problem with the latter is I simply never post! So we'll give this a try. Please give me feedback on if you like this style or not.

See y'all in a bit!

JR