產品可複製，分發難以複製：個人開發者的 24 個渠道地圖

The uncomfortable fact first. A competitor with an agent can now rebuild most of your feature set faster than you shipped it. What they can't rebuild is the list of people who chose to follow you, opted into your emails, or bookmarked the page that answers their question.

That's the whole argument for treating distribution as the product. Below is the map I use: 24 channels, four funnel stages, four ways to acquire any one of them — plus the part most of these lists skip, which is that a solo builder can only run about ten of the 24.

Attribution. This is a rework of Shann³'s X longread How to Build Distribution When Anyone Can Clone Your Product (2026-11-02). The 24-channel matrix and the acquisition due-diligence questions are his; the solo-operator regrouping, the three tests, and the boundaries are mine. Case numbers below are his, quoted from primary posts; I did not re-audit them.

1. What counts as a channel

A channel is a repeatable route to people who could buy from you: a ranking page, a newsletter, a creator partnership, a listing in an app store.

"Repeatable" is the load-bearing word. One viral post is not a channel. A page that brings search traffic every month is.

Three things make a channel hard to copy with code:

• people who chose to follow you, and would notice if you stopped posting
• subscribers who actively opted in (and whose consent you can prove)
• pages that rank and get cited by AI assistants
• partners who stake their reputation on you
• customers who answer "who else does this?" with your name

None of that lives in a repo. A competitor can fork your code; they can't fork three thousand people choosing not to unsubscribe.

2. The map: 24 channels × 4 funnel stages

The channels are grouped by where the customer is, not by which platform is hot this quarter — the first is structure, the second expires.

Use it as a checklist, not a to-do list. The useful question is never "which channel should I do" but "which of the four stages do I have zero presence in".

3. Four ways to get any channel

Same channel, four acquisition modes, and each one leaves you with something different.

Two examples from the source that make the modes concrete:

• Build + audience → acquisition. Maor Shlomo built Base44 alone and documented it in public on LinkedIn and X; Wix bought it for \$80M in cash roughly six months after launch.
• Pay → placement. Airtel handed 12 months of Perplexity Pro to 360 million customers in July 2025; Perplexity also ships pre-installed on Galaxy S26.

The acquisition column is where people lose money, so the source's due-diligence list is worth quoting in full. Before you treat a purchase as a channel, check:

1. Do the readers, viewers or members actually match your buyer?
2. What leaves with the seller? An audience that came for one writer can follow that writer out.
3. Where does the traffic come from? A search-dependent site can lose it in one update.
4. Subscriber consent and data-transfer rules — an acquired list is not a licence to email.
5. Who stays after the sale? Team, contributors, community moderators.
6. How do you introduce your product? A publication that starts promoting its new owner loses the trust that made it worth buying.

That last one explains why "buy distribution" so often destroys the thing it bought. Trust doesn't transfer with the asset.

4. The part the list skips: a solo builder can run ten of these

Most 24-channel posts are written by agencies for companies with a budget and a team. Eight of the 24 basically require money (ads, sponsorships, bundles, acquisitions), and seven more require someone to negotiate with. Recut by "can one person actually keep this running":

Then three tests, in this order:

1. Can you measure it? A channel you can't measure is hard to keep funding while you wait.
2. Does it match how your customers buy? Self-serve signups need you to exist while they compare; demo-led sales need outreach, agencies and events.
3. Will you see a first paying customer inside 90 days? If not, park it — regardless of how good the channel looks on paper.

Fail any one and the channel waits. That is the whole prioritisation method; there is no fourth test.

One disagreement with the source, for the record: it recommends starting with "one channel you build, one you partner with or pay for." For a solo builder I'd replace pay with partner. Paid reach consumes cash continuously; partnering consumes communication, and you're already paying that cost.

5. Two channels, two stages — then measure

Pick two channels at different funnel stages. Two channels in the same stage means you cover the same moment twice and stay invisible everywhere else. Two different stages means one catches people who don't know they have the problem, and one catches people choosing between options.

Track four numbers per channel, and nothing else:

• how many people it reached
• how many of those became customers
• what it cost, including your own hours
• whether those customers stay, and what they spend over time

Two rules that save months:

• Keep engagement separate from sales. A post can pull huge engagement and zero customers; mixing them produces a channel that looks like it works and doesn't.
• Ask new customers how they found you. Podcasts, word of mouth and creator posts mostly never show up in click tracking.

For affiliates and referrals, check that the referred customers are good customers before you raise the payout.

6. Where the argument breaks

Four limits, because a 24-cell table invites false confidence:

• Specific numbers here are second-hand. \$80M, 360M, 77.5% of Klaviyo's ARR, Dropbox's +60% — I'm repeating figures the source attributes to primary posts. Treat them as claims, not audit results.
• Channels are not uncopyable, only harder to copy. Platform rules change overnight: a search update, a store delisting, a feed algorithm. That's exactly why the three tests reward measurability and a 90-day horizon over channel count.
• Scale isn't transferable. Base44, Supabase and Lovable all had someone pushing full-time. Doing the same actions alone gets you the actions, not the numbers.
• The framework is not new. Grouping channels by funnel stage is a re-skin of the channel list in Traction (Weinberg & Mares). What's new here is the fourth dimension — acquisition mode — and the admission that most of it isn't for you.

The one action worth taking today

List every channel you currently have traffic from, tag each with one of four stages, and find the stage with nothing in it. That empty stage is where a competitor is winning customers you never get to meet. Then pick one channel from the "run alone" group, give it a 90-day test, and stop adding channels until one produces a paying customer.

Originally written in Chinese at hubwiz.com (in Chinese). Based on Shann³'s article. Cover: aerial view of the Bremerhaven container terminal, Carsten Steger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.