Bootstrapper.com - Confessions of Serial Entrepreneurs

I’ve got a friend, let’s call him Bob. Bob is a successful entrepreneur with a recent exit of a company he owned 100% of under his belt. Bob is also an engineer. Bob doesn’t properly value relationships. He values building shit. Now building shit is very valuable but after the product is live, relationships (distribution) is worth many times product. Why? You can always hire a firm to build a product. It’s really friggin hard to line up marketing partners that can put serious firepower behind something without having to spend any money. Really really hard. Ask most startups how many large distribution partners they have. Most will say Zero. Bob calls me all the time asking for advice and what I would do, I tell him, line up distribution and you have users and likely acquirers and you can create excitement as well.

My policy these days is to only build companies where we line up distribution (large biz dev deals) in advance so we know we can get the product out and essentially eliminate marketing risk and expense. Yes, this is very hard but it’s far more productive to spend time in advance lining up partners than raising money. If you have the right distribution raising money will become easy as will recruiting management. Start with distribution and the rest will fall into place.