Distribution
Summary
The Growth pillar of Market — and for most early businesses, the constraint. Distribution is how a deserving offer reaches and sticks to people, durably. It runs in three phases: Acquisition → Conversion/Engagement → Retention.
Where Distribution sits
Distribution is one of the three Market pillars, alongside Branding (moats, advantage, power) and Product (value architecture, JTBD, demand). Branding and Product define what deserves to grow; Distribution is how it grows. It amplifies whatever Branding and Product hand it — so it compounds when they’re strong and churns when they’re weak. (Earlier versions of this vault treated Distribution as a standalone top-level entity; it’s now correctly nested under Market — see Why Market is the umbrella.)
What Distribution really means
It’s tempting to read “Distribution” as just ads + selling. The fuller definition used here:
- Marketing & sales — the obvious surface.
- Go-to-market — how the offer reaches the market repeatably.
- Channel & funnel building — the durable acquisition→retention machinery.
Distribution is how the offer reaches and sticks to people, durably. Note: moats, brand, and power are not owned here — they live in the Branding pillar. Distribution carries the brand and builds some moats (owned audience, content real-estate, community), but the strategic ownership of moats/advantage/power sits in Branding.
The three phases
ACQUISITION CONVERSION / ENGAGEMENT RETENTION
(get attention) (capture & nurture it) (keep & compound it)
┌──────────────┐ ┌───────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
│ Paid │ │ Website │ │ Product stickiness│
│ Content │ ──────────► │ Social media │ ─────────► │ Customer database │
│ Virality │ "they │ (link in bio) │ │ Community │
│ Social comm. │ search / └───────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘
└──────────────┘ follow you"
- Acquisition Channels — the four ways attention arrives: paid · content · virality · social commerce.
- Conversion and Engagement — where attention lands: website (A/B testing, email, popups) + social media (posting, announcements, link in bio).
- Retention — keeping them: product stickiness · customer database · community.
The hinge between Acquisition and Conversion
Every acquisition channel resolves into the same behaviour: people either search for you or follow you. That’s the moment attention becomes capturable. Optimizing this hinge (a findable brand name, a strong link-in-bio, an easy first action) is high-leverage and cheap. See The hinge.
Why Distribution gets the most structure in this vault
Because it’s usually the bottleneck, and because it’s the entity with the most automatable surface area (content production, scheduling, analysis) — see Part C1 - Case Study - Peptide TikTok Network.
KPIs (top of the driver tree)
- Acquisition: CAC, reach, channel CAC payback
- Conversion: visit→lead %, lead→sale %, content save/follow rate (proxy)
- Retention: repeat rate, cohort retention curve, LTV, community engagement