TL;DR:
In our interview with Parthi Loganathan, founder of Letterdrop, his advice to people looking to start their own startup was that he wouldn’t recommend getting involved in a project unless the distribution plan was figured out upfront. In his opinion, distribution is increasingly becoming more important than product. Code is now becoming a commodity.
A few weeks prior I had interviewed Chris Blauvelt of Launchgood and I was a bit taken aback when he described his company as a tech startup. Launchgood is a crowdfunding platform, and since there are so many crowdfunding options now I didn’t put much thought into the underlying technology that made it possible. When the company was launched in 2014, the crowdfunding space was a lot smaller and the tech itself was valuable. Since then, there have been a number of crowdfunding platforms that have come out. What makes Launchgood valuable is not the technology itself, the technology has now become commoditized. What makes his company valuable is the network of people that are consistently checking the platform with the intent to support projects. It’s the community they’ve built.
Media is one of those forms of distribution. With media you can put your product/service in front of eyeballs that will then do business with you.
As Gary Vaynerchuk says, “every company is a media company.”
But not all forms of media are equal. There are four types of media: paid, earned, owned, and rented. Understanding these different media channels will allow you to not waste your resources on the wrong channel. Here’s an overview of the different channels.
Paid media is a channel where you have to pay for eyeballs. This is essentially all the different types of advertising. This channel is good for businesses that have big budgets and need to get in front of a lot of people.