Distribution and defaults
Passport
- Rock
- Position
- Depth
- 3 · Drill rig
- Time to dig
- 3–10 years
- Capital
- ● · high
- Solo
- ~ partly
- AI
- → eroding
- Rent
- ~ partly
Essence
Owning the channel through which the product reaches the user: default slots, bundles, pre-installs, app-store shelves, armies of salespeople. The product can be worse and still win, because it is already where the user is. The biggest genuine gap in the thirteen sampled tags — a sizeable share of SaaS lives on distribution alone.
How it is built
Google and Apple — the default, bought
Google pays Apple something like $20 billion a year for the default search position in Safari. Defaults capture the indifferent majority: almost nobody changes a preset choice, and that inertia is enough to control a market. The United States antitrust case against Google, decided in 2024, showed how central this mechanism was — the court found monopoly, even if the remedies ended up mild.
Microsoft Teams — the bundle against the better product
Slack was loved and growing; Teams was the app thrown in with Office 365, free across tens of millions of seats that were already paid for. Teams passed Slack on users within a couple of years: when the distribution channel is an existing corporate contract, a competitor's product superiority never gets the chance to work. Slack complained in Brussels and eventually sold to Salesforce — that is, it bought somebody else's distribution.
Salesforce and Oracle — the sales machine as the channel
Thousands of salespeople, relationships with CIOs, integrator partners, decades of account management: enterprise deals are closed in those relationships, not in the product. Such a channel is built with years and money, and whole market segments are simply shut to a competitor without one — not a single demo reaches them.
How it is bypassed
From below, around the channel: product-led growth
Slack, Dropbox, Figma and Notion came in through end users — free, viral, no purchasing committee — and appeared inside the company before the incumbent's salesperson could call. PLG is the creation of your own channel where the incumbent has none: inside people's daily work. The limit is known: against a contract-level bundle like Teams, PLG alone may not be enough.
A new channel while the old one gets expensive
HubSpot built distribution on inbound content and SEO when cold calling was the norm; the DTC wave grew on cheap social advertising; today's equivalent is creators, communities and AI assistants as the new shelf — being what the model recommends is the new default. Channels get expensive cyclically as they saturate, and the attacker wins by finding the next one while it is still cheap.
Regulatory and platform resets
Europe's DMA forced browser and search choice screens; Microsoft, under the pressure of Slack's complaint, unbundled Teams from Office. Every platform shift — desktop to web to mobile to voice and agents — deals the default slots again. Distribution moats belong to the era of their platform, and a change of platform redistributes them; that is the newcomer's main chance.
Verdict
Distribution decides outcomes more often than brands or features. It is built with defaults, bundles and sales machines; it is bypassed by entering from below, by taking the next cheap channel, and by platform resets.