Social media first development.

I've shipped projects where I spent weeks on the product, days on the landing page, and zero time thinking about how anyone would actually find it. Post it on a couple of forums, get a small spike of traffic, watch it flatline. The product worked fine. The distribution didn't exist.

It took me too long to learn this: on the modern web, how people find your thing is as important as the thing itself.

The landscape

The internet is enormous, and almost none of it gets seen.

Google's first page is ads and established players. SEO is a years-long grind with no guarantees. App stores surface incumbents. Unless you already have momentum, the store won't give it to you.

Social media platforms have discovery, but you don't control the algorithm. You're renting attention, and the landlord changes the terms whenever they want.

The web has a few massive distribution channels, and none of them owe you anything.

Distribution is a product decision

Most developers treat distribution as a step that comes after building. Ship the product, then figure out how people will find it. This is backwards.

Distribution should shape what you build. It's not marketing bolted on at the end. It's a core decision, as fundamental as your tech stack or your data model.

Before you write a line of code: How will anyone find this? Where does it show up in someone's feed? What makes a person with an audience want to talk about it?

If you don't have answers, you don't have a product problem. You have a distribution problem. No amount of polish will fix it.

Two paths

There are really only two ways to get attention on the internet.

You have your own audience. A following, a newsletter, a channel. When you launch something, you can put it directly in front of people. This is the strongest position. It's also the slowest to build.

Other people share it for you. You build something so interesting or useful that people with audiences want to post about it. Less reliable, but faster. And it has a specific requirement: your product has to be shareable.

Not just good. Shareable.

Most indie developers don't have path one. So they need path two.

What gets shared

People share things that make them look interesting, informed, or connected. They share things that spark conversation. They don't share your landing page or your feature list. They share an experience, a result, or an artifact.

Wordle understood this. The game itself is simple. But the real product is the grid of colored squares you post afterward. It says "I played today" and "here's how I did" without revealing the answer. It invites comparison. The sharing mechanic is the distribution strategy.

Spotify Wrapped does the same thing. Your listening data becomes a shareable card. People post it because it says something about them. Spotify gets millions of impressions because they built the share into the experience.

The pattern: give people something they want to show others.

Build the share in

This is what I mean by social media first development. Not that every app needs to be a social network. But that every app should answer the question: what does the user post?

If you're building a fitness tracker, what does the workout summary look like when shared? If you're building a reading app, can someone export a card of their year in books? If you're building a productivity tool, is there an artifact that shows progress in a way people want to display?

The best share artifacts are visual, personal, and low-friction. A card, a chart, a grid. Something that looks good in a feed and says something about the person posting it. One tap to generate, one tap to share. Any more friction than that and it won't happen.

Start here

Before you build something new, answer these:

1. Where will people discover this? If the answer is "I'll figure it out later," stop and figure it out now.
2. What does the user post? Design the shareable moment before you design the product.
3. Is sharing effortless? One-tap export, pre-formatted for the platforms your users actually use.
4. Would you share it yourself? If not, neither will anyone else.

The thing that spreads

The graveyard of the internet is full of well-built apps and clever tools that never found an audience. Not because they weren't good. Because they had no distribution and no shareable moment.

Building something great is necessary. It's just not sufficient. On the modern web, attention is scarce, concentrated, and controlled by a few platforms.

Think about distribution from the start. Build the share into the product. Make it easy for people to carry your work into their feeds.

The thing that spreads is the thing that wins. And spreading doesn't happen by accident.