Distribution for small teams: ship where the audience already is

The standard advice is to be everywhere: a presence on every platform, content adapted per channel, paid amplification behind the best performers. For a small team that advice is close to actively harmful, and we have run the alternative long enough to describe it.

Why everywhere fails for small teams

Every platform is a separate craft. The format, the pacing, what gets rewarded, what gets buried, the unwritten rules of each community. Learning one properly takes months of doing it badly in public.

Spread across five, you do not get five channels. You get five channels of mediocre output, which the algorithms correctly identify as mediocre and decline to distribute. The failure is not effort. It is that the effort was divided below the threshold where any of it works.

What we did instead

We build games on Reddit. Not games advertised on Reddit, games that run inside it: you play in the feed, in the subreddit, without leaving. We have shipped seven. One of them, Stonefall, peaked at 42,000 daily players. MarbleMazes is live and has been featured by Reddit.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Advertising on a platform means paying to interrupt what someone is doing. Building on a platform means becoming the thing they are doing. The second has a far shorter path from seeing to trying, because there is no path: it is the same surface.

It also changes what a good launch looks like. There is no funnel to optimise from an ad to a store page to an install. There is a post, and either people play it or they do not, and you find out in hours rather than weeks.

Choosing the one channel

The usual method is to ask where your audience is. That gives you a demographic answer and demographics are on every platform. The better question is where the behaviour you need already exists.

• 
  Where does the thing you make already get discussed? Not where your customers are, where your category is. A community that already argues about your subject has done the hard part for you.
• 
  Can you participate as yourself? Some platforms reward being a person or a studio. Others only reward being a media company. Pick the ones you can sustain without a content team you do not have.
• 
  Is there a route from attention to the actual product? Reach that cannot convert is a vanity metric with a marketing budget attached.
• 
  Would you use it if it were not your job? Unfashionable but reliable. Nobody makes good work for a platform they privately find tedious.

When paid is the right call

None of this is an argument that advertising does not work. It is an argument about sequence. Paid media multiplies whatever you already have. Multiplying zero is still zero, and it is where most small budgets die.

Spend when you can answer all three:

1. 01
   Something is already working organically. You are amplifying a signal, not manufacturing one.
2. 02
   You know what a customer is worth to you. Without that number you cannot tell a good campaign from a bad one, and you will optimise toward whatever is cheap to measure.
3. 03
   You can absorb the traffic. Sending paid visitors to a page that is not ready is buying a bad first impression at retail price.

A launch is a loop, not a day

The thing that surprised us most is how little launch day matters. It is a data point. Everything that mattered on our games happened after it: what people did in the first session, where they stopped, what they said in the comments, what we changed that week.

That is also the argument for shipping where your audience already is. On a platform with a live community you get the loop for free, immediately, from people who will tell you exactly what is wrong. Bought attention does not come with that. It arrives, it forms an opinion, and it leaves without telling you.

We still operate every game we have shipped. That is not a service commitment, it is where the information is.