Minimum Viable Products are all the rage these days. It's pretty common for a startup to hole up for a weekend and put together a prototype of a web or mobile application meant to be the starting point for a profitable business.
The problem is Minimum Viable Products are supposed to be about doing the least amount possible to test some hypothesis about whether or not people want the thing you are making.
Writing code rarely helps you find people who want what you are making.
Enter Minimum Viable Distribution
To find people who want what you are making you need at least some rudimentary way to distribute your product.
And if most startups fail because they don't have customers, wouldn't it make sense to find out if you can attract even just one customer before spending a lot of time building a product?
When you have a product in mind you should have a few ways in mind for attracting an auidence. Better yet, have an audience before you have a product built. This lets you build your product with an audience of early adopters in mind.
37Signals had 542 blog posts (maybe more?) on Signals vs Noise before launching Basecamp. Here's the first post I think.
The smart thing each of these entrepreneurs did was attract an audience that they were able to funnel into a marketing funnel once they had a product ready.
Looking for someone doing this well right now? Check out Nathan Barry who is actively blogging about the difficulty of setting up and running email courses in order to eventually funnel readers into his yet-to-be-built ConvertKit product.
So how can you find your first 1000 true fans?
Write. Write about your domain, your expertise, how you run your company, whatever. Don't be afraid to speak your mind. People will like that.
Create landing pages. Optimize for SEO. Get links to those pages. Drive traffic.
Collect email addresses. Ignore RSS subscribers. Ignore Twitter followers. Ignore Facebook likes. You want to capture your audience in a way that you can most effectively reach back out to them. That means email.
Talk to them as you build your product. Listen to their problems. Keep in mind the words they use to describe their problems.
Then build and launch your MVP. Once you launch your MVP you won't be launching to your 200 twitter followers and 400 facebook friends. You'll be launching to a targeted audience of people who are already interested in you and the specific problem you are solving.
This is Minimal Viable Distrubtion. In a lot of ways it's much harder than building product because you can't just write code. But it's also more valuable.
Does This Work?
Abso-freaking-lutely.
At Zapier we dropped links in SaaS forums where users were asking for integrations. The links pointed back to a short landing page in the service directory where a visitor could leave their email address. We used these email addresses to learn as much about our users as possible.
By the time we launched we had over 10,000 email addresses of targeted users expressing interest how to automate their work.
Additional reading: Finding Early Customers When You Aren't Internet Famous
tldr;
Building a product is hard
MVPs aren't enough
Find a way to build an audience
Use that audience to market your MVP
