Leverage means getting more output from the same input. For a founder, the scarcest input is usually time and attention. This guide looks at which parts of finding customers benefit from software leverage, and which parts should stay with a person.
Two kinds of work in distribution
Most early distribution work falls into two buckets:
- Repetitive work: searching many communities, reading threads, filtering out noise, keeping track of what you have seen, and writing a first draft.
- Judgement work: deciding whether a conversation is really a fit, choosing what to say, being honest about trade-offs, and following up as a person.
The first bucket scales poorly with human time and is where people give up. The second is where a founder's knowledge and credibility matter most.
Why software suits the repetitive part
Code does the same thing every time, at any hour, without getting bored. Searching sources on a schedule, removing duplicates and posts you have already seen, and checking each result against a description of your product are all well suited to software. So is producing a first draft that you can edit faster than you could write from scratch.
Why judgement should stay with you
Automated public posting tends to go wrong in predictable ways: replies that miss the point, repeated pitches, or tone that does not fit the community. Each of those costs trust that is hard to rebuild. Keeping a person in charge of what is said in public is not a limitation to be engineered away; it is what makes the replies worth reading.
How Distrarc divides the work
- Distrarc reads your product site and drafts a description of who it is for, which you can correct.
- It searches public sources that suit your audience and returns conversations with a link, a date and the reason they fit.
- It drafts replies that answer first and disclose your affiliation.
- You decide which conversations to join, edit the drafts and post them yourself. Anything public, external or paid needs your approval.
A note on hiring and agencies
Hiring people or an agency to do outreach is a legitimate choice, especially for outbound sales into well-defined markets. It is a different approach: someone else speaks for your product. For very early products, where the founder's own understanding is the main asset, we think founder-led conversations with software doing the searching are a better starting point. For a fuller comparison, see how Distrarc compares.
Related: distribution as a system. Try it on your product with a free first report, or see pricing.