Every successful serial entrepreneur has mastered exactly one distribution channel.

They look at any opportunity through this lens.

That’s their secret.

• Elon Musk has mastered PR
• Pieter Levels has mastered Twitter
• Lori Grainer has mastered TV
• Nikita Bier has mastered virality

They only tackle projects that can be distributed through their channel since they know they can make it work.

Entrepreneurship is always full of uncertainty. But if you master one distribution channel, you can at least take that part out of the equation.

That’s a huge unlock.

It also makes it much easier to say no and focus on what matters. If something doesn’t work with your channel, you don’t even have to think about it.

An interesting corollary I’m thinking about is that for most founders it makes more sense to think about the channel they want to master first and then look for opportunities that fit that channel.

If you do it the other way around, you usually end up with project after project that you can’t get off the ground.

And you never know why. Maybe the product really is not something people want? Or maybe you just didn’t distribute it right?

But if you’ve mastered a distribution channel first, you know exactly what the problem is. It’s always the product.

Knowing this, you can iterate quickly and kill projects that don’t work without wasting any time.

And what’s really cool about this approach is that you can get paid to learn how to master a distribution channel.

Just start an agency.

You’ll get paid to learn how to distribute products.

And once you’ve mastered a channel, you can start testing how the market responds to your own products.

The standard pattern is that 1st-time founders obsess about product, 2nd-time founders obsess about distribution.

But there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t obsess about distribution from day one.