--- title: Distribution Planning Tool @ Varstatt Discovery url: https://varstatt.com/discovery/market-distribution description: Free AI tool for distribution planning: willingness-to-pay band, ranked channels, first tests, trip-wires. Practical reach planning, no TAM SAM SOM theater. section: AI Discovery Tools (https://varstatt.com/discovery) step: 4 of 8 previous: User Personas (https://varstatt.com/discovery/user-personas) next: Feature Priorities (https://varstatt.com/discovery/feature-priorities) --- # Plan Pricing and Distribution Free AI tool for distribution planning: willingness-to-pay band, ranked channels, first tests, trip-wires. Practical reach planning, no TAM SAM SOM theater. ## Why Use This Tool ### Channels Beat TAM Slides A $50B TAM doesn't help you ship anything next week. Three named distribution channels with one test each does. This is a go-to-market strategy tool that maps the reach you'll actually attempt — not the market you'd theoretically own if everything went perfectly. That's the Three-channels-ranked rule, applied by name. ### Pricing as a Band, With Evidence "$29/mo" without a comparable anchor is wishful thinking. A band like $15-30/mo, anchored against two named competitors, survives a real conversation. The agent refuses single-point pricing without evidence, the same way I do on a call. ### Ruling Channels Out Is the Real Output Most go-to-market plans die from spreading thin across ten "maybe" channels. The reject-list is as valuable as the chosen three — it's what lets you stop second-guessing and run the test you committed to. ## How It Works 1. **Describe Product and Buyer** — A few sentences on what you're building and who pays for it. Not the user — the buyer. The two are often different, and the agent will press on the gap. 2. **Set a Willingness-to-Pay Band** — A price band and one comparable product you're anchoring against. If you don't have an anchor yet, the agent helps you find one before moving on. 3. **Pick Three Ranked Channels** — Specific places — subreddits, newsletters, Slack/Discord communities, partner products, content niches — where your first 50 buyers already hang out. "Ads" and "social media" get refused by name. 4. **Define One First Test Per Channel** — For each channel, the smallest concrete action that produces a real signal in 1-2 weeks. Plus trip-wires — what would have to be true for the channel to work — and a reject-list for the channels you ruled out. ## FAQ ### What is a go-to-market strategy? A go-to-market strategy is a concrete answer to "how will the first 50 buyers find out you exist and decide to pay you?" — not a TAM slide, not a positioning deck. The actionable version is a go-to-market plan with three pieces: a willingness-to-pay band anchored against named competitors, three ranked distribution channels where the buyer already gathers, and one specific first test per channel that produces a real signal in 1-2 weeks. This tool is a free go-to-market strategy assistant that produces all three in 3 minutes — pricing strategy, channels, and first tests, with the channels you ruled out and why. ### How do you choose distribution channels for a startup? Specific places, not categories. "r/devtools", "Bytes.dev newsletter", "Vercel community Discord", "the SaaS Marketing Slack" — those are channels. "Reddit", "newsletters", "Discord", "social", "ads" are not. The picking rule: where does the buyer already spend time, in groups of 50+, talking about the problem you solve. Three of those, ranked by how cheap each one is to test, beats ten "maybe" channels you'll never run. The reject-list — what you're explicitly not doing — is part of the output. ### Why no TAM, SAM, SOM? Because for a pre-revenue founder it's theatre. The math is downstream of channel reality — if you can't name the three places your first 50 buyers live, the TAM number is decorative. I'd rather you leave with a willingness-to-pay band, three ranked channels, and a first test per channel. That's a plan you can ship next week. If an investor asks for TAM later, you can build it from the bottom-up evidence you collected here. Pair the channel plan with [Competitive Analysis](/discovery/competitive-analysis) to argue why those buyers will pick you. ### What counts as a real channel? A specific place where your buyer already spends time. "r/devtools", "Bytes.dev newsletter", "Vercel community Discord", "the SaaS Marketing Slack" — those are channels. "Reddit", "newsletters", "Discord", "social" are not. The agent applies the Run-ads-is-not-a-channel rule and refuses the generic version until you name the actual community, list, or partner. ### Why a band for willingness-to-pay, not a number? A band like "$15-30/mo, anchored against [competitor A] at $19 and [competitor B] at $39" is defensible. A single point — "$29/mo" — is a guess until a buyer pays. The band keeps you honest about what you actually know. Treat willingness to pay as a hypothesis with a range, not a target with a decimal — once you have ten paying customers, the band collapses to a number and you're done with this exercise. ### How do you do market sizing without TAM, SAM, SOM? Bottom-up. Start with the price band you arrived at above, then count the buyers in your three named distribution channels — how many people are in r/devtools, on the Bytes.dev list, in the SaaS Marketing Slack. Multiply realistic conversion rates against your band. That's a defensible market size grounded in reach you can actually attempt this quarter, not a $50B industry number scraped from a research report. If an investor later asks for TAM, you build it from this floor up rather than from an industry ceiling down — the ceiling is decorative, the floor is real. ### What's a trip-wire? A condition that has to be true for a channel to actually work. "r/SaaS allows self-promo on Saturdays", "the newsletter author replies within a week", "we can produce one teardown per week without breaking shipping". Trip-wires turn vague "we'll try X" plans into specific verify-this-first checks. If a trip-wire fails, you swap the channel before burning a month on it. ### Why only three channels? Because you can't run ten well, and pretending you can is how go-to-market plans die. Three ranked channels with one focused test each beats ten unranked. The other seven go on the reject-list with a one-line reason — that list is part of the output, not a failure mode. ### How does this connect to build cost? The willingness-to-pay band sets the unit economics. If your band is $15-30/mo and your first channel costs $4K to test, you need ~150 paying customers from that channel for it to clear. The math has to survive a 3-minute napkin sanity check before you write code. From here you can move to [Build Cost](/discovery/build-cost) and see if the development investment matches the realistic year-1 reach. ### What if I don't have a community in mind for my niche? That's a signal worth taking seriously. If the buyer doesn't gather anywhere — no subreddit, no newsletter, no Discord, no industry list — you're fighting distance, and the channel plan becomes "find them one at a time" through cold outbound or partnerships. That's a valid plan, but it changes the math and the unit economics. Sometimes the right move is [reconsidering the segment](/discovery/user-personas) before reconsidering the channel — picking a buyer who does cluster somewhere reachable. ## Usage This tool is an AI-guided chat — it requires a browser to use. Prefill the conversation with your project context via URL: - `https://varstatt.com/discovery/market-distribution?context=I+am+building+...` (max 2000 chars) Context carries forward across all discovery steps automatically once set.