Launch and Distribution
Nobody cares about your product until you make them care.
Building is 30% of the work. Getting it in front of the right people is the other 70%. AI products have unique distribution advantages — if you know how to use them.
What you'll learn
- The three-wave launch strategy for AI products
- Why "show the output" is the best marketing strategy
- Channels that work for AI product distribution
- Building in public as a distribution engine
The Three-Wave Launch
Wave 1 — Inner circle (Week -2): Give your product to 20-50 people you know. Friends, colleagues, Twitter mutuals. Ask them to break it. This isn't about growth — it's about catching embarrassing failures before strangers see them.
Wave 2 — Community seeding (Week 0): Post in the communities where your target users already gather. Product Hunt, Hacker News, relevant subreddits, Discord servers, LinkedIn groups. Don't post "check out my AI tool." Post the output. Show the magic trick.
Wave 3 — Content flywheel (Week 1+): Turn your product's outputs into content. Screenshots of results, before/after comparisons, user testimonials, use case breakdowns. Every piece of content demonstrates the product without being an ad.
Show the Output, Not the Tool
AI products have a superpower that traditional SaaS doesn't: the output is inherently shareable. A beautifully generated design, a perfectly structured summary, a surprisingly accurate analysis — these are their own marketing.
Add a subtle watermark or "made with [your product]" tag on outputs. Make sharing frictionless — one-click export to social media, email-ready formats, embeddable widgets. Every output your user shares is a free ad that demonstrates value instead of claiming it.
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