Don't Quit your Job With Zero Distribution

Build it and they're unlikely to come.

Before starting Shoes of Prey in 2009, we were heavily inspired by Seth Godin’s book, the Purple Cow.

Design a unique business people will love to talk about – a purple cow – and your chance of success will dramatically improve.

So we brainstormed a long list of potential cows, as varied as a lingerie business, a dating app and a scuba diving community. But we kept coming back to the same idea: it would be cool to design your own women’s dress shoes on the internet. Sitting on a beach one afternoon and looking at our Google Doc, we decided that would be our purple cow.

Plans were made and jobs were quit. Family members were bemused.

In the end, we were correct! Though not without problems, Shoes of Prey was a purple cow. Upon launching we received oodles of free distribution. Women loved our concept and would tweet, blog and tell their friends about us. TechCrunch wrote a story, and so did fashion magazines. We encouraged customers to get their shoes delivered to their workplace. Their colleagues would crowd around to watch the unboxing and learn where they came from. It was almost too easy! In the early years, we did very little paid marketing.

Yet, the world has changed since 2009. There are so many well funded startups now, all murderously jostling for attention. The signal to noise ratio is super low. Therefore, without a scalable distribution channel, you need to be an unhealthy shade of radioactive purple to make it. Even then, good luck!

Last August, perhaps a little overconfident from my prior experience, I quit my job at Google again. Though my new business is still a work in progress, it’s been a humbling experience.

The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that distribution is more important than product. More to the point, you'd be crazy to only start thinking about distribution after your launch.

Today I was talking to a former colleague who was thinking of one day quitting her job to pursue a startup. I encouraged her to try to build out her distribution channels well in advance.

She loves to dance, and one day would like to start a company related to that. Why not build a dance related newsletter now, or a YouTube channel, or a TikTok profile? If she publishes once a week, on a topic she loves, pretty soon she’s attract many people who also love dance. When she’s ready to quit, she’s got a great distribution channel ready to roll.¹

Building the product is the easy part. Finding your first 1,000 paying customers is much harder. As Gail Goodman calls it, “a slow ramp of death”.

I’ve come to appreciate that I’m terrible at social media. In the past I would “do a drive by” on Twitter to link to something I wanted to promote.² It was naïve to think anyone would find that compelling. Social media is meant to be social! This is something I want to start to work on.

In short, by all means quit your job to pursue your startup dreams. But, don’t be like me, scrambling to build distribution 10 months in. Start working on your distribution channel now, so that you’re ready to go, purple cow in hand or not.

1. Recently I took Louie Bacaj and Chris Wong’s newsletter course as part of the Small Bets community. It was their course that inspired me to start this newsletter. In particular, I loved their ideas about how to “lower the lift” of writing your newsletter each week.

2. I also recently took Daniel Vassallo’s excellent mini course on Twitter where he explains the difference between using Twitter as a ‘giver’ and using Twitter as a ‘taker’.