The 50% Rule

Spend half your time on product and half on traction, starting now, not after launch. This feels wrong to most founders, especially technical ones, because building feels like progress and marketing feels like a distraction.

The payoff of running them in parallel: traction work feeds the product. Real conversations with the market tell you what to build, and early channel tests tell you whether anyone will show up when you ship. Product-only founders launch into silence and only then discover their positioning is off or their market is unreachable.

It also compounds. Channels take time to learn. SEO takes months. Communities take months. If you start studying distribution the day you launch, you're a beginner exactly when you need to be good.