Which distribution channel should I use for a product I just launched?

How to pick the first one

There is no best channel in general. There is the best one for your product, and it is decided by where your buyers already spend their time, not by which platform is biggest.

1. Find where the people with the problem already talk or search. A community where they ask about it, a search they type, a store they browse. If you cannot name the place, you do not yet know your ideal customer.
2. Check the page before the channel. A channel only sends people. Whether they stay is the page: what the product does, who it is for and what it costs, in the words those people use. That is positioning.
3. Start with a free channel. A post, a reply, a listing, a page that answers a search. It costs time, and it tells you whether strangers care before you pay to reach more of them.
4. Run one at a time. Two channels at once and you cannot tell which one brought the signup. How do I get customers for my app? sets the rule out from one founder who tried every channel together.
5. Pay only to test faster. A paid channel buys the same answer sooner. Should I run ads before anyone has paid? says how big a test should be and when to stop it.

What each page on this shelf gives you

• The rules in their own words. What the platform, the store or the regulator says, quoted exactly and linked to the page it was read on.
• What that means if you have just launched. What you may do, what gets you removed, banned or fined, and what it costs.
• The real numbers. Minimum budgets, fees, limits and review times, each linked to the official page that states it. No estimates and no averages from a blog.
• How Sami uses the channel. Where it sits when Sami ranks the ways to get customers for your product, and what Sami will and will not do.
• The day it was checked. Rules and prices change. Every page carries the date it was read and a list of its sources, so you can open them yourself.

What the channels have in common

Read a few of these pages and the same lines come back, whoever wrote the rules. You may not fake interest: no bought votes, no fake accounts, no friends asked to upvote. You may not hide that something is an advert. You may not send bulk messages to people who did not ask for them. And nobody will promise you a result: no platform guarantees a listing, a ranking, a citation or a sale.

So the work is the same everywhere. Say plainly what you built and that you built it, in the place where it is welcome, to the people it is for.

Which channel comes first is a go to market decision. Whether a paid one can pay for itself is customer acquisition cost set against pricing. And whether any channel is worth more of your time shows in retention and churn, not in signups. Marketing basics has each term in plain words.

How Sami uses them

Once you sign up, Sami reads your product and ranks up to ten ways to get customers for it, free methods before paid ones, one family of channels at a time. A channel that does not fit your buyers stays on the list as ruled out, with the reason, so you do not try it twice. A paid step gets one week if your product is bought on the page. AskSami never posts anywhere for you, never spends your money and never writes to your code. You do those things yourself. The numbers you bring back become dated records.

Every channel on this shelf