Why Do Good Products Fail?

Most good products fail for a boring reason: not enough people find out they exist. It's not the code, the design or the price. It's distribution, which is just a fancy word for getting your product in front of the people who would buy it.

The good news: it's fixable, and faster than you think.

Why doesn't "build it and they will come" work?

It's the most common mistake in online business. You get an idea, spend weeks making it perfect, launch it, and then nothing. A few visits, mostly from friends. No sales.

The product wasn't the problem. Nobody knew it was there. The internet isn't a quiet street where a new shop stands out. It's a city with millions of shops, and people walk right past the ones they don't recognize.

Why do people buy what they've seen before?

In 1968, a psychologist named Robert Zajonc ran a simple experiment. He showed American students Chinese characters they couldn't read. Some characters appeared once or twice, others up to 25 times. Then he asked them to guess which ones meant something good.

The students picked the ones they had seen more often. Not because they understood them, but because they felt familiar. Zajonc called it the mere exposure effect: we tend to like things simply because we've seen them before. Dozens of studies since then have found the same thing.

That's why the brand you've seen a hundred times feels safer than a better one you've never heard of. People don't always buy the best option. They buy the one that feels familiar.

For you, it means a great product nobody has seen loses to an okay product people see everywhere.

What does distribution actually mean?

Being in front of the right people, again and again. That's it. In practice, it looks like this:

• Posting what you're building where your buyers spend time: X, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.
• Helping out in the communities where they ask questions. I go deeper on that in How to Find Clients on Reddit and Facebook.
• Writing answers to the questions they type into Google or ask an AI.

Every time someone sees you, the next time works a little better. That's the mere exposure effect working for you instead of against you.

How do you start selling before you finish building?

Flip the order. Show first, build second.

That's how Joel Gascoigne started Buffer, a tool for scheduling social media posts. Before building the product, he made a simple page that explained the idea, followed by a page with prices. When people clicked on a plan, he asked for their email and told them it wasn't ready yet. Enough people clicked, so he built the first version in 7 weeks of evenings and weekends. His first paying customer showed up 4 days after launch.

You can do the same thing in a weekend:

• Make a simple page that explains what you'll offer and how much it costs.
• Share it every day where your buyers are, while you build.
• Ask for a payment or a pre-order as early as you can. One "here's my card" is worth more than a hundred "cool idea!" comments.
• Build only what people are already asking for.

If nobody bites, you lost a weekend and learned something. If they do, you already have buyers waiting for the product.

Sources

• Mere-exposure effect (Wikipedia)
• The mere exposure effect and how well it has held up (Atticus Li)
• Idea to paying customers in 7 weeks: how we did it (Buffer)