a retweet gets you 50 users

A team showed me a gamified prediction market. Good product. I asked for the marketing plan. The plan was: Monad tweets about it.

One tweet from Monad, or Solana, or Vitalik, or god, is not going to do anything. You’ll get a thousand eyeballs. Fifty people sign up. Ten deposit. And then what? Three days later the feed has moved on.

This is the thing I’ve said more than almost anything else in the last two months, because it’s the thing founders most want to be untrue. Building has become easy. Two people with AI can build, market, and run basic ops. The cost of a product is near zero. Which means the product is not the moat anymore. Distribution is. Whoever owns the distribution owns the product.

A retweet is a booster. If the car is bad, the booster just gets you to the crash faster. You need an engine. The engine is a reason for someone to come back without being told to. One unique market a week that isn’t available anywhere else. A World Cup bet that runs itself. After the third time I’ve seen it on my timeline and not deposited, I deposit. That’s the loop you’re building, and no foundation can build it for you.

I wrote a fundraising tool in a weekend once. It took me a weekend to build and I never got a paying customer. That’s the whole lesson in one sentence.

So when a founder in my cohort says the next three months are for scaling the dataset and adding features, I say no. The next three months are 90 percent sales and 10 percent product. Are you ready for 50 cold calls a week? That’s the question. Most people would rather code. Coding is the comfort zone. Mine too.

The strongest version of this: the founder who understands distribution is now the rare one. There are a thousand good engineers who read about the problem on Twitter. There are very few who’ll go sign up 20 resellers on LinkedIn in a week. That second thing is what makes you fundable.

the call where i said it best

An energy-optimisation startup wanted to replace the factory’s energy auditors. I said don’t. The auditor has the relationship and the habit. Sell to the auditors instead. Give them 30 percent, even 50, let them sell it inside their existing contracts. Tally did this with accountants. When your CA tells you to use Tally, you use Tally. If you sign 20 auditors you don’t have a product with no users anymore. You have a channel. That’s the thing a VC can picture.

do this this week

Write down, in one line, why a user who’s happy today would come back next week without a notification. If the line is empty, that’s the whole job.

the line to remember

one tweet from monad or solana or vitalik or god is not going to do anything. you will get 1000 eyeballs, 50 people sign up, 10 deposit, and then what?