Fish where the fish already are
Instead of building an audience from zero, plug into the giant platform your users already hang out on.
Your future users are already hanging out somewhere big. In 2012, Andrew Chen dissected one of the cleverest examples he’d seen: Airbnb let hosts post their listing to Craigslist straight from Airbnb, without retyping a thing. Craigslist had no public API for posting, so Chen’s teardown suggests it took some clever scripting to pull off.
Why it was smart: in Chen’s words, it tapped “a low-competition, huge-volume marketing channel.” Every cross-posted listing put a nicer Airbnb page in front of people already shopping for a place to stay. Hosts got more demand and renters got better listings. Chen’s broader point: distribution increasingly comes from clever integrations with big platforms, not just from ad budgets and PR.
Find your Craigslist. It might be a marketplace, a Slack or Discord app directory, a Notion template gallery, a Shopify app store or a WordPress plugin repo. Build the smallest bridge that lets users carry your product’s output there. Read the platform’s rules first, though. Borrowed audiences come with a landlord.
The example
- Instead of
- “Launch plan: write blog posts and wait for Google to notice us.”
- Try
- “Launch plan: ship a one-click “Share to Notion” button so every shared doc links back to us.”
Before you flush
Name the one big platform where your users already spend time, then sketch the smallest integration that lets them share your output there.