Twelve years of writing articles, growing an email list that’s now at 27,000 subscribers, and another that's at 9,000 subscribers. That's also twelve years of building relationships with affiliates and partners and other creators in the space.
Twelve years of just showing up.
When I hit send on an email, people click. When I mention a product, it moves. The distribution engine is already running and I just drop things into it.
But when I build anything outside of photography, I’m starting from scratch. No list, no partners, no compounding years of content working in my favor. Just me and a product, hoping someone notices. Same builder, same work ethic, completely different starting positions.
The Lie We Tell Ourselves
We’ve all internalized this idea that good products find their audience, that quality rises to the top, that if you just make something genuinely useful, word will spread.
It’s not fucking true.
For every product that “went viral” or “grew organically,” there are thousands of equally good products that launched into silence and died in silence. You never hear about them because there’s nothing to hear. They just stopped existing.
The products that won weren’t necessarily better. They were louder, or earlier, or built by someone who already had an audience, or promoted by someone who did.
Building is the easy part now. In 2026, anyone with an idea and a weekend can ship something functional. AI writes your code, generates your copy, designs your landing page.
The Gap
I have a watch site called OversizedHour. Built it because I genuinely love watches. The tech is solid and I’m proud of what I built there. The content is good, the design is clean.
Traffic? Not much. It’s a labor of love, not a business.
DailyPhotoTips has been running for years and generates real revenue. Same quality standards, same level of effort. The difference is that DailyPhotoTips sits on top of a distribution engine my co-founder and I spent over a decade building. Partners, affiliates, an email list, relationships with other photography sites, years of content compounding in search results. When we publish something there, it reaches people.
OversizedHour has none of that. It’s just a website on the internet, waiting.
The gap between a great product and a successful product is distribution. That’s it. That’s the whole damn game.
You can have the best solution to a real problem with beautiful design and flawless code, and it doesn’t matter if nobody knows it exists.
Why Builders Hate This
Most of us got into building because we wanted to build, not sell.
Selling feels gross and marketing feels like begging. Promoting your own work feels needy and annoying. We’ve all been on the receiving end of bad marketing, the cold DMs, the desperate pitches, the “just following up” emails, and we don’t want to be that person.
So we retreat to what’s comfortable. We add another feature, refactor the codebase, tweak the landing page copy for the fifteenth time. We tell ourselves we’re “improving the product” when really we’re just avoiding the hard part.
Building is safe. Distribution is scary.
I’m a relatively shy person. That might not come through in my writing, but it’s true. Cold outreach makes me uncomfortable and asking people to share my stuff feels awkward. I’d rather spend four hours coding than thirty minutes promoting.
But that preference is exactly why I have strong distribution in photography and almost none anywhere else. I did the work in one place and avoided it everywhere else.
What Actually Worked
When I think about what built Contrastly into something real, it wasn’t one viral moment. Nope. It was years of unglamorous grind.
I wrote and published an insane amount of content. Articles, tutorials, guides, anything photographers might search for. I networked with other photography sites, did guest posts, newsletter swaps, built relationships. I showed up in communities and tried to be genuinely helpful without constantly pitching.
For years, it felt like nothing was happening.
Then around 2015, it started compounding. The SEO kicked in, the email list hit critical mass, we launched an online store and got affiliates on board, ran a lot of ads. But that acceleration only happened because of the foundation I’d spent years building before it.
Distribution is a long game and the people who win aren’t the ones who found a shortcut. You need to do the boring work long enough for it to work.
Content, relationships, email lists, communities, showing up consistently until you become a known entity in your space. That's essentially just time and effort pointed in the right direction.
Good Marketing vs. Gross Marketing
Not all marketing makes you want to shower afterward.
Gross marketing is shady, sketchy, or cringe. It’s the fake urgency, the manufactured scarcity, the “only 3 copies left” when there are unlimited spots. It’s trying too hard and treating people like marks instead of humans.
Good marketing just connects the right product with the right people. It’s clear about what you’re offering and who it’s for. It informs without manipulating.
When I email my photography lists about a new preset pack, that’s not gross. Those people signed up because they want photography tools and I’m telling them about a photography tool.
The transaction is honest.
When someone cold DMs me a pitch for something I never asked about and clearly don’t need? That’s gross. The transaction is one-sided.
The difference is consent and relevance. Are you reaching people who want to hear from you about something they actually care about? That’s marketing. Are you interrupting strangers with something they didn’t ask for? That’s spam. And spam is gross.
Most builders avoid marketing because they’re picturing the spam version. But you can promote your work without becoming the person you hate.
Distribution as Product
Distribution is something you build. And you better start building it early.
Your email list is a product, your audience is a product, your relationships with other creators, your reputation in communities, your SEO presence, these are all assets you’re building, just like features in your app.
When I started in photography, I was building a distribution engine. I just didn't know it at first.
The content, the email list, the partnerships, that infrastructure is what made everything else possible. Every product I’ve launched since then has benefited from that same engine.
Starting something new outside that ecosystem means building a new engine from scratch. The product might take a month. The distribution takes years.
That’s the real work. The product is the easy part.
The Compounding Problem
Distribution compounds, but so does the lack of it.
Every day you have an audience, it grows a little. Every email you send, some percentage shares it. Every piece of content you publish, some of it gets indexed and found. The flywheel spins faster over time.
But if you’re starting from zero, day one looks exactly like day thirty. You publish something, crickets. You publish again, crickets. The feedback loop is broken because there’s no loop yet.
This is where most people quit, too. Not because their product failed necessarily, but because they couldn’t tolerate the silence long enough for the compounding to kick in.
The first 1,000 subscribers are absolutely brutal. The next 10,000 are a bit easier. The next 25,000 are then slightly easier. But you have to survive the brutal part first, and the brutal part can last years.
The Long Game Is The Only Game
I wish I had a hack to share, some trick that shortcuts the whole thing and gets you distribution without the years of grinding.
I don’t. Because it doesn’t exist (yet!)
What I have is over a decade of proof that the long game works. Showing up consistently, building relationships, growing an email list, creating content that helps people.
It works. Eventually. If you don’t quit.
The photography distribution I have today isn’t because I’m smarter or more talented than anyone else. It’s because I started in 2012 and didn’t stop.
Anything I build outside that space, I’m starting over. Same grind, same timeline, same patience required. The only difference is now I know what the path looks like.
Build the product, build the distribution, and understand that the second part takes longer than the first. Nobody’s coming to find your thing. You have to go find them, and then keep showing up until they remember your name.