I started posting on X about building versus marketing, and those conversations got more attention than I expected. The question that stayed with me was simple: why do technical founders hate marketing so much?
I don't think it's always marketing they hate. Sometimes it's the uncertainty. When you're building, there's usually something concrete to do — fix the bug, connect the API, get the login working. You can spend an evening on it and see the difference. Then you ship, and the next task becomes "get customers," which is a much less obvious kind of work.
The distribution gap
I've started thinking about this as the distribution gap: the distance between having a working product and having a reliable way for the right people to discover it. You can build something with Cursor, Lovable, or Bolt. That doesn't automatically give you a clear position in the market, a reputation in a community, or a page answering a question your customer is searching for. And it doesn't mean another feature is what will help.
That said, I don't want to tell every founder with an empty analytics dashboard that their product is fine and distribution is the only issue. Sometimes the offer is unclear. Sometimes the buyer is wrong. Sometimes the product needs work. The point is to find out, rather than keep busy.
Start with the customer, then the visibility work
Before worrying about rankings or AI citations, a founder should be able to answer three questions: who is this for, what problem makes them look for something like it, and what useful thing happens when they try it. From there, we organize the visibility work around three areas — discoverability, authority, and AI visibility. It isn't a separate switch you turn on by adding an FAQ; it overlaps with the work above.
This is a big part of how I'm thinking about Chad: an audit should lead somewhere — a prioritized fix, a better page, content with a reason to exist, and a way to inspect what changed.
Originally published on Medium.