There are two hills and one path. You have to crest the first hill before climbing the second. Most teams skip ahead and wonder why nobody showed up.
AI tools made writing code cheap. That makes “clone the competitor” feel rational. The math looks good: 10 products × $100K = $1M. This many products, something something, this much revenue. Profit!
Distribution doesn’t fork. The products you cloned had distribution baked in. Customers, brand recognition, SEO, word-of-mouth, integrations. When you rewrite their code, you don’t get any of that.
A clone reproduces the code, not the conditions that made the original product work. You can write perfect code without learning how to find customers.
The Trap
Rdio launched first with a superior product and founders with Skype pedigree. Spotify launched in the US nearly a year behind. Rdio treated its free tier as a conversion tactic. Spotify treated it as a distribution strategy: get everyone in first. Today, Spotify has 600 million users. Rdio is a Wikipedia page.
I watched an early-stage company repeat this pattern by cloning products and selling them more cheaply. Build costs were plummeting. That part was right. The products shipped; customers didn’t show up.
“It only took a week to build. Let’s give it another month.”
After a month, the team had invested enough attention that stopping felt wasteful.
Twin Peaks, Not One
Basecamp’s Hill Chart is a simple model: every project climbs uphill while you’re figuring it out, crests when you have clarity, then coasts downhill as you execute.
Most teams put Product on the hill. They grind uphill scoping what to build, crest when risks are resolved, coast downhill shipping it. Meanwhile, Distribution is hanging out in the parking lot. It never made it onto the hill. They shipped a product nobody knows how to find.
Distribution has its own hill. It should crest before you start climbing the product hill.
“Can I get someone to care?” comes before “Can I build it?”
| Phase | Distribution Hill | Product Hill |
|---|---|---|
| Uphill (Figuring out) | Who’s the customer? Where do they hang out? What do they already pay for? What makes them switch? | What’s the MVP? What’s the wedge? What’s the architecture? |
| Crest (Clarity) | Channels identified. Early signal on acquisition cost. Someone said yes. | Scope locked. Technical risks resolved. |
| Downhill (Executing) | Outreach running. Funnel measurable. | Building, shipping, iterating. |
How Your Team Runs This
Time-box the Distribution Hill:
- 2 weeks, not 2 months
- Single owner, not a team
- No Slack channel until crested
- No name/logo/landing page until you have signal
- Goal: keep abandonment cost lower than continuation cost
The kill trigger:
- If the distribution work hasn’t produced a signal in 2 weeks, stop it
- Don’t let a cheap build justify another month of attention
- Preserve the notes so you can revisit the idea if the market changes
Assign ownership:
- If everyone’s coding, who owns distribution?
- PM owns acquisition, activation, monetization, and retention
- Weekly check: “What did we learn about distribution this week?”
What counts as “Someone said yes”:
- A deposit or pre-order
- A commitment to pilot when it’s ready
What doesn’t count:
- “We have design partners” (but the value prop is diluted across 7 products)
- “We raised $10M to figure out our ICP”
Can you describe the acquisition channel specifically? Not “posting stuff on LinkedIn,” but “CTOs in fintech who post about compliance pain; a few converted to calls after individual DMs.”
If you can’t describe it, you haven’t crested. If the weekly answer to “What did we learn about distribution?” is nothing, you’re building another Rdio.