This can dramatically impact your chances of success — and most startups get it backward

Every founder asks how to find customers for their product.

It’s a great question, but they’re asking it far too late.

I’m asked it every week. The story goes something like this:

You’re the founder of an early-stage startup. You found a problem that real customers seem to experience. So you build an amazing product.

And…now what?

You might think the problem is that you don’t have customers. It’s not.

The problem is that you don’t have distribution.

The first step in any innovative effort is to find the customers, to talk to them, to discover their problems, and then to find and validate solutions to those problems. Most founders just miss that first step.

You may have a great solution to a problem, but you don’t have any means of getting it in front of those customers — and you may not even know how to find them.

There’s an old joke about a founder who launches a startup, but can’t find customers. She thinks they’re on Twitter, so she creates a Twitter account. Now, she has two startups.

Building an audience is extraordinarily difficult, so don’t build one — find one.

It’s not complicated:

1. List all the places those customers hang out.

2. Pick the one with the most customers & the least effort to reach them.

3. Run a small experiment to see if you can reach them on that channel.

Never build anything until you know exactly how you’ll get it in front of your customers.

Because if you can’t figure it out, you’ve wasted time and cash. But if you find customers first and then build the product, they’ll buy on day 1.

Heck — they’ll probably pay you to build it!

We often say not to be a solution in search of a problem. But you also don’t want to be a problem in search of a customer.

The correct order is always:

1. Distribution

2. Problem

3. Solution

The reverse is suicide.