It’s a tale as old as time.

You have worked for countless hours and poured your love, spirit and affection into the development of a new product. It could be any sort of product. Maybe it’s a song you’re producing. It could be a book that you’re writing, an event that you’re planning or a good that you’re selling.

Subscribing to the old adage that “if you build it, they will come”, you furrow away confident in the knowledge that as soon as your product is ready, people will work their way to your door upon its launch. In fact, not only will they get to your door, they will line up in such high quantities that your site will crash or your product will sell out from the jump. All you need to do is focus on creating the best quality product possible, and the rest will naturally take care of itself.

So you go on. You work day and night at your craft, chipping away faithfully until one fateful day, you wake up to find that your product is finally ready. You are at last happy enough with the work that you would be excited to put it out into the market and share it with the world. You set up your analytics dashboards, tell your friends to tell their friends, and proceed to share your work on one of the major distribution sites (Spotify, Shopify, Netlify and all the other ify’s).

One day passes.

Two days pass.

Three.

Annnnddddd crickets…

Damn, what happened ?

Kinda feels like you prepared a Michelin star dish, and walked out into an empty restaurant.

Maybe your dish isn’t all that ?

Or could it be instead that you forgot to remember that people don’t walk around with a sixth sense for where the great food is. People decide where they want to eat from the options that are available to them. If you aren’t a perceived option, then you won’t be the place that they go to eat. Ergo, empty restaurant.

A friend of mine often says, “people don’t buy the best product. They buy the best marketed product”. They buy the product that first comes to their mind when they want to solve a specific problem or experience a specific feeling.

One of the biggest challenges that great designers face is how to drive awareness and visibility for our product or work. It causes many sleepless nights as we realise we have reached a point where their product is ready to go prime time, but there isn’t an audience that has been primed yet to receive it.

By focusing on the product first and the distribution second, we often make a big mistake. We think that the product and its distribution stand distinctly from each other. But with the modern dynamics of the internet and the fact that information is so freely available, distribution effectively IS the product.

The brand. The effect. The funnel. The emotional touch points that are layered across the above. That is often what is being bought, not just the product itself.

To illustrate, let’s dip into the history books.

The famed American inventor Thomas Edison considered himself not just a great product person, but he credited his ability to get mass adoption for his products as the key thing that differentiated him from other inventors in his time. As evidence he claimed that he did not simply develop the light bulb, leave it at that, and wait for the public to beat its way to his door. Instead, he went about inventing an entire electric grid and power distribution system to get his product to market. Without the distribution system, his innovations around the light bulb would likely have not reached mass adoption and the world would be poorer for it. Moreover, he wasn’t the only person working on light bulb technology at the time either. There were others, including the likes of Alessandro Volta, Humphrey Davy, and Joseph Swan, who were technically as sufficient as Edison, if not more. It was his development of the electric grid and power distribution system that ended up being the differentiating factor.

Creating a great product that is well designed, crafted beautifully and has great engineering is a significant feat. But if not enough potential customers are aware of the product, then it’s existence becomes significantly less valuable. We see this reflected even in the world of finance. When M&A bankers value a business, they aren’t valuing the form, function or quality of a specific product. They are valuing the size and profile of the audience that buys it. They aren’t measuring the features and specifications, they’re measuring distribution.

And why do they care so much about distribution ?

Well, because there’s a lot of noise competing for our attention. To cut through the noise and to have any resonance with potential customers, a product has to become known and valued by customers. A product having robust and effective distribution helps achieve and maintain the needed visibility and value. It’s a signal of trust, of relevance, and of credibility; and those matter.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

Does that mean we should ignore quality, value and differentiation in products and design ?

Of course not.

Ultimately, the world is a marketplace of ideas. Some ideas express deeper truths than others. Quality is a truth that is expressed throughout nature. It’s consistent in poetry and prose. Poor quality has minimal to no repeat value, and it also has a moral dimension to it. Differentiation is also an idea that is seen even in the animal kingdom in the form of natural selection. Those species that are not differentiated are at the highest risk of extinction. Truly the most effective combination is to build great and differentiated products, and to have great and differentiated distribution.

In the 1900s, the best designers and engineers manufactured supply. The likes of Henry Ford were great at optimising the production line. Their success was built on manufacturing supply because there was an abundance of needs and a limited supply. In this day and age with a global market, the internet and remote working capabilities, there is never a limited supply of goods. As a result, it’s very difficult for products to not become commoditised. In fact, the culture of limited drops and the excitement around that actually shows that we are in a place where there is such an abundance of supply that people are inclined to push back on over supply.

Those who will really win over the coming years will take the same mentality that the likes of Henry Ford applied to the production line and apply it to their distribution line. They will look to to shorten it, to speed it up, to make it more robust. Just as it would take 10 steps to produce a complete car, and Ford would look to push that down to 7. So too will modern designers and engineers look to take the 10 touch points needed to generate demand for a product, and push that down to 7 touch points. And there’s no better way to create great touch points, than to make great things and share them.

In 2023, the power is in our hands. The teenager using TikTok to promote his Minecraft builds. The adult using Substack to monetise her blog. The list is endless. In this sea of sameness, the only thing that cannot be commoditised is a point of view.

A point of view is the result of a life lived. When the reflections from a life get distilled into product and distribution that are unique and authentic to that life, then great things really start to happen.