Why Distribution Wins in the Age of AI

Signup Write New Story Why Distribution Wins in the Age of AI by Thomas DeRoussel by Thomas DeRoussel | @ thomasderoussel Founder of Relvara, an AI operating platform for real estate agents. Writing about useful AI, building products, and growing distribution.

Founder of Relvara, an AI operating platform for real estate agents. Writing about useful AI, building products, and growing distribution.

A familiar question has been on every founder’s mind lately: should you launch a product as fast as possible, or wait until it is truly ready?

For years, successful entrepreneurs have taught us that speed is king. The sooner you get your MVP to market, the sooner you gather the feedback needed to improve it.

In the age of AI, however, the market is completely oversaturated with software. Standing out is harder than ever. Because of this, many now argue that perfecting the product before launch is the only way to differentiate yourself.

I believe the right path is a mix of both.

When I started building Relvara, I spent 15 hours a day immersed in the same features and workflows. Eventually, I went numb to the product, and that blindness clouded my judgment.

When I finally put the software in front of real users, it was a brutal reality check:

As creators, we easily fall into the trap of assuming we know what the user wants. We expect people to intuitively understand our vision. Getting outside perspective early is the only way to escape that dangerous loop of product psychosis.

Still, a central question remains: how do you differentiate your product when millions of new ones are released every day?

Attention is, without question, the most valuable currency today. AI has commoditized knowledge and made technical execution accessible to everyone. Anyone can build a great product now, and the process will only get easier as technology advances.

Most founders fail not because their product is lacking, but because they never built a distribution network.

I have been fortunate enough to generate over a billion views on social media across my personal brand, my clothing brand, and my meme pages. I do not share that to brag. I share it to highlight the sheer scale of what is possible right now.

One billion views is more reach than ten Super Bowl commercials. Yet, countless founders leave that reach on the table. Some are too embarrassed to put themselves out there, while others naively worry that someone will steal their idea.

If a competitor builds your exact product in silence while you build a distribution network in public, you will win.

With AI, I could code a working replica of a massive software company tonight. If I launched that version tomorrow, however, nobody would switch to it. Without a distribution network, a great product goes nowhere.

Building that distribution is not magic; it is a game of volume and data.

Your goal is to post genuinely valuable content that compels people to stop scrolling and watch. In the beginning, you will not know what resonates. You have to test a wide variety of styles, hooks, and formats.

Once you start posting consistently, study the analytics ruthlessly. Double down on what works, and cut what does not.

Furthermore, building in public gives you constant feedback from future users while you work. It allows you to cultivate an excited community before launch, grow a waitlist, and accurately gauge demand.

Kinso is the perfect example of this. They are developing a unified inbox to manage all of your messages, and they have already amassed a massive waitlist. Countless engineers could replicate that software. Still, Kinso is not afraid of copycats because they know distribution determines the winner.

Once you have a waitlist, you can bridge the gap between speed and perfection.

With Relvara, I invited a small group of beta testers from our waitlist to try the early product at a discount. Crucially, they still had to pay.

When you give a product away for free, users attach zero value to it and forget to use it. Charging from day one ensures your early testers have real skin in the game. That commitment gives you the honest behavioral data you need to fix your blind spots before a public release.

Do not mistake this philosophy for saying the product does not matter. It absolutely does.

You still have to ship software that is reliable, intuitive, and free of bugs. In a market flooded with AI slop, quality is nonnegotiable. Pay for experienced developers; your users will thank you.

While AI makes it easy to bring an idea to life, running a prototype on your laptop is completely different from maintaining it in production. Long-term survival requires a lean, clean codebase that can evolve over time, and AI simply cannot manage that architecture on its own yet.

When building a company today, you must cultivate an audience that is hungry for your product before it is even finished. We live in an attention economy where you can prototype an idea in a single night. That combination is lethal.

Launch a phenomenal product to an audience that is already waiting for it.