Asher's Blog

Founders naturally spend a great deal of time thinking about the product. They ask whether it works, whether customers like it and which features should be built next. These questions are necessary, but a good product can remain a small business for a very long time if the company has not answered another question with equal seriousness: how will this product repeatedly reach the people who need it?

That is the distribution question, and it begins to change as soon as a company starts growing.

For many business-to-business companies, the first ten customers come through the founders’ existing relationships, personal selling and a willingness to do things that will not scale. The founder can explain the product personally, follow every implementation and call the customer whenever something goes wrong. The challenge becomes clearer somewhere around fifty customers, when the company needs a repeatable way to reach one hundred. The system that reaches one hundred will not necessarily reach one thousand, and the channel that reaches one thousand may break long before the company serves ten thousand, one hundred thousand or a million businesses.

At each stage, distribution becomes a different problem. The company is no longer asking only whether somebody wants the product. It is asking whether the product can move through a system that finds the right customers, earns their attention, explains the value, closes the sale, completes implementation and supports continued use at an economically sensible cost.

Distribution is therefore not something that happens after the product has been built. Distribution is part of the product.

The missing customer may be the distributor

One insight that continues to challenge me is that a company may solve the end customer’s problem while ignoring the person expected to take the solution to that customer.

The product may offer clear value to a business owner, but the accountant, consultant, reseller, bank, sales representative or industry association responsible for introducing it may have no reason to do so. The company has designed the experience for the final user without designing an experience for the channel through which that user will be reached.

This matters because distributors have their own problems. They need to understand the product quickly, identify the right customer, explain it convincingly and earn enough value to justify the effort. They need sales materials, training, support, predictable commissions, visibility into the status of their prospects and confidence that the company will not embarrass them after they make an introduction.

If selling your product creates too much work, too little reward or too much reputational risk, the distributor will naturally prioritise something else. The end customer may love the solution once it is adopted, but adoption will remain slow because the people standing between the company and the customer have not been given a workable product of their own.

This means a distribution partnership cannot be reduced to signing an agreement and announcing that two companies will work together. The founder must ask what the partner is expected to do every day, which obstacle will prevent that action and why the opportunity should matter to the individuals responsible for carrying it out.

I learned distribution before I fully understood its value

I first encountered the power of distribution early in my career. I was fortunate to work with NASCON, the salt company within the Dangote Group, and later worked on a consulting business that served Dangote Cement. I participated in distribution work that helped me understand how a product becomes available across a large market and how a company can develop the route through which it reaches retailers and final consumers.

Cement and salt are physical products, while much of what I build today is software and financial infrastructure, but the underlying lesson transfers. Producing the product is not enough. The company must understand where customers buy, who influences the choice, how stock or access reaches them, what margin motivates the channel and which information must move back from the market to the producer.

A strong distribution network does more than deliver a product. It gives the company market intelligence. Distributors see changes in demand, competitor behaviour, customer objections, regional differences and emerging problems before those signals appear in a quarterly report. If the relationship is designed properly, information travels in both directions: the company equips the channel to sell, and the channel helps the company understand what to build and where to go next.

I am now applying that lesson to my own business. The question is no longer only how we make the product useful to employers. It is also how we enable the people and institutions that already serve those employers to distribute the product successfully. How do we help accountants, consultants, banks, associations, technology partners and salespeople offer the solution without creating unnecessary complexity for themselves or their customers?

The answer requires product work, not just a partnership presentation.

Distribution changes at every stage of growth

The founder should expect the distribution model to evolve as the company grows. At the beginning, founder-led sales is extremely valuable because it compresses learning. The founder hears objections directly, sees which explanations create interest and discovers which customers experience the greatest urgency. Delegating this work too early can separate the person making product decisions from the information needed to make them well.

As the company approaches fifty or one hundred customers, the founder must begin turning personal ability into an organisational process. Which customer profile converts most reliably? What event causes the buyer to search for a solution? Who approves the purchase? How long does a sale take? What must happen before the customer receives value? These answers become the foundation for hiring salespeople, training them and evaluating their work.

Moving from hundreds to thousands of customers usually requires more than adding salespeople in direct proportion to the target. The company begins to need leverage through referrals, product-led adoption, channel partners, integrations, content, industry communities or a more standardised implementation process. If every new customer requires the founder to attend three meetings and approve a custom arrangement, the company has not yet built a distribution system; it has multiplied the founder’s calendar.

Reaching tens of thousands or millions of businesses requires even greater leverage. The product may need to be embedded inside banks, accounting platforms, marketplaces, payment systems or other software that customers already use. The company may need a self-service experience, application programming interfaces, certified resellers or large institutional relationships that provide access to entire categories of businesses.

Each stage requires the company to remove a different constraint. At ten customers, the constraint may be credibility. At one hundred, it may be sales capacity. At one thousand, it may be implementation and support. At ten thousand, it may be channel economics, product standardisation or infrastructure reliability. Founders get into trouble when they keep applying the solution from the previous stage to a new scale.

The channel needs a complete product

To build effective distribution, founders should think of the distributor as a separate customer with a separate journey.

The journey begins with selection. Which type of partner already has access to the customer you want, and is the relationship strong enough for the customer to accept a recommendation? A large institution with millions of users may appear attractive, but access on paper is not the same as influence. The partner may have many products competing for attention, slow internal processes or employees who receive no benefit from promoting yours.

The next stage is enablement. The partner needs a simple explanation of the problem, the ideal customer, the product’s value and the situations in which it should not be sold. Training should be designed for the person actually having the conversation, not only the executive who signed the agreement. The channel also needs demonstrations, proposal templates, objection handling, pricing rules and a clear route for obtaining help.

Incentives must then align with the work. A commission may be appropriate, but money is not the only incentive. A partner may value higher retention of its own customers, access to new data, a stronger service offering or the ability to earn revenue without building the technology. The arrangement should make the partner more useful to its customers, not simply turn it into outsourced labour for the product company.

Finally, the operating experience must be reliable. Partners need to know what happened to every referral, when they will be paid and who owns the customer relationship. If prospects disappear into the company’s sales process and nobody provides an update, the distributor loses motivation. If the product fails after the partner recommended it, the partner’s reputation suffers alongside the company’s.

These requirements mean the partner programme may need its own portal, reporting, onboarding, support and product roadmap. Distribution becomes scalable when the distributor can succeed without depending on informal access to someone inside the company.

Do not confuse a famous partner with a working channel

Partnership announcements can create excitement because they suggest immediate access to a large customer base. However, a recognisable logo does not guarantee distribution. The real test is whether the relationship changes customer behaviour.

Founders should measure how many qualified prospects the partner produces, how many activate, how quickly they receive value, how much revenue the channel generates, what it costs to support and whether those customers remain. A partnership that creates publicity without usage may still have branding value, but it should not be described internally as a successful distribution channel.

The company should also avoid channel conflict. If direct salespeople and partners compete for the same customer without clear rules, both sides may protect information and undermine one another. Pricing, account ownership, territories, commissions and renewal responsibilities need to be defined before a valuable prospect becomes the subject of a dispute.

A good distribution system should make the company easier to buy from, not create more confusion for the customer.

Distribution should influence product decisions

When distribution is treated as part of the product, the company begins building features that make adoption easier across the channel. It may create guided onboarding so that a partner does not need an implementation specialist for every customer. It may introduce permissions that allow an accountant to manage several client organisations securely. It may build an API so that a bank or another software provider can embed the service directly. It may standardise reports, billing and support so that the distributor can explain the product without negotiating a new process each time.

The product team should therefore speak with distributors as well as end users. What prevents partners from selling more? Where do customers become confused? Which setup step requires manual intervention? What information does the channel lack? These questions reveal product constraints that may never appear in a conventional feature request.

The company must still protect the experience of the final customer. A distributor may ask for features that make selling easier but make the product worse to use, or may push the product towards customers it cannot serve properly. The best channel strategy aligns the interests of the company, distributor and customer rather than allowing one party to benefit by creating problems for another.

Distribution is where ambition meets arithmetic

A distribution strategy must eventually make economic sense. The company should understand the cost of acquiring customers through each channel, the margin shared with partners, the cost of onboarding and supporting accounts, the time required to recover acquisition expenses and the revenue those customers generate over their lifetime.

A channel that produces many customers can still be harmful if those customers are poorly matched, expensive to support or unlikely to remain. A smaller channel can be more valuable when it brings customers who understand the product, activate quickly and expand over time.

This is especially important in Africa, where markets can be fragmented by geography, language, regulation, trust and purchasing power. A company may need local partners to enter a region, but every additional layer can increase cost and weaken control of the customer experience. The model must create enough value for each participant without making the final price unattractive.

The arithmetic also reveals when technology should replace manual distribution work. If training, onboarding or support consumes most of the revenue from a segment, the company can simplify the product, change the package, serve that segment through partners or decide that it is not yet the right market.

A good product deserves a route to the customer

Founders sometimes interpret slow growth as a product problem and begin adding features. The product may indeed need improvement, but the real issue may be that too few suitable customers know it exists, understand why it matters or can adopt it without friction. Building more features will not automatically solve a broken route to market.

Distribution deserves the same creativity and attention that founders give engineering. The company should experiment with direct sales, referrals, partners, embedded products, communities and other channels, while learning which model fits the customer and the economics. It should design for the people who carry the product into the market and reward them for creating lasting value rather than merely passing along names.

The first customers prove that somebody wants the product. Distribution proves that the company can repeatedly find and serve enough of those people to become important.

The product is not truly finished when it works in the hands of the customer. It is finished when there is a dependable way for the right customer to discover it, trust it, buy it, implement it and continue receiving value from it.

That is why distribution is not a department added after the company begins to grow. Distribution is part of what the company is building from the beginning.