What Is Your Trade Route With The World?

Several of my developer friends want to build products on their own, but struggle to turn those products into businesses.

I've been trying to find a way to explain why distribution matters so much. I'm here with another attempt that might work for the more visually-oriented thinkers.

Authors Note: Not Advice, But a Lens

Before proceeding, I want to clarify what this article is and isn't. This isn't a comprehensive business strategy or a proven formula for success. It's not even advice in the traditional sense.

Instead, think of this as trying on a new pair of glasses. For most people, these glasses won't improve your vision - you'll try them on, find they blur more than clarify, and set them aside. That's perfectly fine.

You should only read this article if you are a software engineer and it's your first time bringing a product to market. This essay is a different lens through which to view the problem of selling your product. A mental framing tool that might only create clarity for a few lucky souls. Remember you can stop reading and close this tab at any time. I don't have analytics on how many people read this, so don't worry about hurting my feelings.

The Trade Route Movie: A Visualization Tool

Here's my proposal: Imagine you're making a two-hour movie about how your product gets from you to your customers. Not a movie about building the product. I'm talking about a movie that answers the question: "What is your trade route with the world?"

This movie wouldn't be about your product's features or how it works. Instead, it would show you, the founder, physically moving through the world (this includes typing on your computer) establishing the route that connects your product to customers. It would show every concrete action you take: which websites you visit, which communities you join, which people you talk to, which emails you send, which conferences you attend.

The neat thing about this mental model is its flexibility. If you've already built an audience through a newsletter, your movie would include that as backstory. If you work in the industry your product serves, your movie might show you leveraging existing relationships. If you're starting from scratch, your movie might include a lot of learning and false starts before establishing a working trade route.

There's no single "right" ending for your trade route movie. For some businesses, the movie might convincingly end after you sign your first paying customer, showing that you've proven your route. For others, you might need to show a full year of operation to demonstrate that your trade route is sustainable and scalable.

The point is to think about your business distribution with the same level of scrutiny you'd apply to a movie you're watching. If you were watching this film about someone establishing a trade route for their product, what would you need to see to believe it works? What would make you roll your eyes at an unrealistic scene? What would make you ask, "But how did they actually do that part?"

A Concrete Example: The Solo Developer's Trade Route

Let me walk you through what a trade route movie might look like:

FADE IN:

We open with ALEX, a software developer, standing in front of a small group at a local meetup.

ALEX
"So that's the idea - a project management tool built specifically for freelance designers that helps them track client feedback alongside their time."

That's it. We've established what the product is in about 30 seconds. The audience doesn't need to see how it works, what features it has, or whether it has bugs. They just need to know what problem it solves for customers.

The real movie—all two hours of it—is about what happens next. It's entirely about the trade route.

In Act One, we see Alex trying to find potential customers:

• We see Alex researching online communities where freelance designers gather
• We see Alex creating a spreadsheet of 50 design influencers with their contact information
• We see Alex crafting personalized emails to each influencer
• We see Alex setting up a simple landing page with an email signup form
• We see Alex attending design meetups and introducing himself to strangers

In Act Two, we encounter obstacles:

• We see most influencers ignoring Alex's emails
• We see Alex posting in design forums and getting zero responses
• We see Alex checking analytics showing people visiting the landing page but not signing up
• We see Alex talking to a potential customer who says, "This looks interesting, but it's missing X"

Then we see how Alex responds to these obstacles:

• We see Alex reworking his messaging based on feedback
• We see Alex offering free consultations to get face time with potential users
• We see Alex creating valuable content to attract his target audience
• Maybe we see Alex tweaking the product (in a brief montage - the specifics don't matter)

In Act Three, we see the trade route beginning to work:

• We see influencers starting to respond to Alex's revised outreach
• We see visitors signing up on the landing page
• We see Alex's first sales call that ends with a "yes"
• We see the beginning of a repeatable pattern emerging

Notice how this movie isn't about the product itself—it's about the journey of connecting that product to customers. The product could be amazing or flawed; that's almost irrelevant to this particular story. What matters is whether Alex can establish a clear path between his creation and the people who might pay for it.

Different Starting Points, Different Movies

Your trade route movie will look dramatically different depending on your starting point. Let's consider a few scenarios:

The Industry Insider
If you already work in the industry your product serves, your movie might show you leveraging existing relationships. We'd see you casually mentioning your product to colleagues. We'd see you at an industry event, having coffee with a potential client you already know. Your movie wouldn't be about building connections from scratch—it would be about converting existing connections into customers.

The Content Creator
If you've spent years building an audience through a blog, YouTube channel, or newsletter, your movie would look different. We don't see you hunting for attention. You already have it. We'd see you crafting a drip series of announcements to your existing audience. We'd see you analyzing which segments of your audience need different messaging. Your movie would be about transitioning from content to product.

The Complete Beginner
If you're starting without industry connections or an audience, your movie might begin with learning. We'd see you researching where potential customers gather online. We'd see you joining conversations, providing value before pitching. We'd see trial and error, with calendar pages flipping to show the passage of time. Your movie would be about building credibility from zero.

The Networker
This movie is all about conversations. We open with our protagonist making a list of everyone they know who might be interested in their product or know someone who would be. We see you scheduling coffee meetings, attending events, and following up diligently. The rhythm of this film is different—it's a series of social interactions rather than online marketing efforts.

The specific scenes in your movie will vary, but what matters is that you can visualize them with enough detail that someone could actually film them. "I'll reach out to my network" isn't a filmable scene. "I'll spend Thursday morning making a list of 20 former colleagues, prioritize the 5 most relevant, and craft personalized messages to each by the end of the day" is something a director could actually shoot.

Using Your Trade Route Movie to Find Gaps

The real power of this mental model comes when you start storyboarding your own trade route movie and hit a scene you can't visualize.

Generic advice like "get your first users" isn't specific enough for your movie script. Your script needs detailed scenes that a director could actually film:

SCENE 42: Alex types "freelance designer communities" into Google. Alex makes a spreadsheet of the top five communities, noting their size, rules, and culture. Alex creates an account on each platform, spending an hour browsing top posts to understand what resonates.

That's a scene with enough detail to film. Compare it to:

SCENE 42: Alex posts about the product online and people discover it.

The second "scene" isn't filmable—it's too vague. It's missing all the specific actions that make up a real trade route.

When you're writing your movie script, you'll inevitably hit scenes you can't visualize clearly. Maybe you can't picture exactly how you'd start a conversation about your product in an online community without coming across as spammy. Maybe you can't visualize what words you'd use in a cold email to get someone to actually respond.

These blank scenes are gold—they reveal precisely what you need to learn next. And the beauty of the movie metaphor is that it puts everything in perspective. If your product doesn't work perfectly, that's just one brief montage in your movie—a 30-second sequence of you making improvements. The same goes for taking meetings, sending emails, or any other activity. In a movie, all these things take roughly the same amount of screen time to establish.

The key insight is that your movie isn't about the product—it's about the actions you take to connect that product to customers. Those actions either form a complete, believable trade route or they don't.

A Simple Exercise: Storyboard Your Trade Route

Here's what I want you to do:

1. Take out a piece of paper and label it "My Trade Route Movie"
2. Start from the moment your product is built and ready to go
3. Write out the first scene in detail: What exactly do you do next?
4. Continue scene by scene until you've mapped a complete journey to your first handful of customers
5. When you hit a scene you can't clearly visualize, circle it and write "LEARNING NEEDED HERE"

Be extremely specific. Don't write vague statements like "I'll use content marketing" or "I'll find my audience online." Instead, write detailed scenes like:

"I've identified three subreddits where my target users gather: r/freelance, r/webdev, and r/userexperience. Starting Monday, I'll spend 2 hours each morning writing detailed, helpful responses to questions in these communities. I won't mention my product at all for the first 3 weeks. Instead, I'll focus on building a reputation as someone helpful. I'll save contact information for anyone I help substantially, and by week 4, I'll have have put 40 hours in and have a list of at least 20 people I've directly helped. I'll then send each one a personal message explaining my product and offering a free 3-month subscription in exchange for feedback. My goal is to convert 1 of these 20 into a paying customer by the end of month 3. If by the end of month 2 I haven't been able to build meaningful relationships in these communities, I'll abandon this approach and try cold outreach to design agencies instead."

That's a scene with enough detail to actually film. It includes:

• Exactly where you'll go (specific communities)
• Exactly what you'll do (write helpful responses)
• How much time you'll invest (2 hours daily)
• What success looks like (list of 20 contacts)
• What failure looks like (no relationships after 2 months)
• What your pivot plan is (switch to cold outreach)
• Timeline for evaluation (2-3 months)

Compare that to:

"I'll use content marketing to attract my target audience and convert them to customers."

The second "scene" isn't filmable—it's too vague. There's no location, no specific actions, no timeline, no success metrics, and no contingency plan.

Your circled scenes—the ones you couldn't visualize clearly—are your immediate learning opportunities. These are the specific areas where you need to gain knowledge or skills to complete your trade route.

Remember that the trade route movie is specifically about going from zero to your first handful of customers. We're not talking about operations, retention, or scaling to thousands. We're just focusing on establishing that initial path from you to your first paying customers.

How Investors Watch Your Movie

This mental model also explains how investors evaluate pitches.

When you pitch to an investor, they're not just running numbers or checking boxes. They're mentally directing a movie based on your pitch. As you speak, they're visualizing scenes from your trade route movie, looking for continuity, checking for plot holes.

This explains a common frustration many solo developers have: "Why did that other developer's product get funded when mine didn't? Our ideas seem similar, and their execution isn't clearly better than mine."

The answer often lies not in the visible metrics or the quality of the product, but in the completeness of the trade route movie the investor can visualize. Let me be blunt: if you're struggling to get traction or funding, this mental model can help you understand why.

If you say, "We're going to target enterprise customers," the investor is mentally filming that scene. They're thinking: "Okay, can I see the founder making a list of potential companies... can I see them finding the right decision-makers on LinkedIn... can I see them crafting personalized outreach messages... can I see them handling objections during sales calls..."

If your pitch doesn't translate into a complete, believable movie in their head, they'll pass—even if they can't articulate exactly why. When an investor says, "I'm not convinced about your go-to-market strategy," what they're really saying is, "There's a 20-minute section in this movie where I can't see how you actually get your product to customers. The trade route has a gap."

This explains why experienced investors can make decisions so quickly. They've mentally directed thousands of trade route movies, and they can tell within minutes if yours has major scenes missing.

Consider these two pitches:

Pitch 1: "We've built an amazing tool for developers. Developers need this tool. We'll put it online, and developers will find it because it's so good."

Pitch 2: "We've built a tool that solves this specific problem for Ruby developers. These developers gather in three main online communities: r/rails, the Ruby on Rails Discord, and DEV.to's Ruby tag. We've already been active in these communities for six months. We'll launch with a detailed tutorial showing exactly how our tool solves their most common pain point. We'll share this tutorial in each community, leveraging the reputation we've built. Based on our existing engagement metrics, we expect to convert 2% of readers into free users and 5% of those into paying customers."

The first pitch creates a movie with huge gaps in the trade route. The second creates a continuous film where each scene logically follows from the last—the investor can clearly visualize your path to those first customers.

This explains why some pitches fail to raise money. Usually because they don't correspond to a complete movie. The investor watches the mental film and sees it ending with:

• "...and then somehow customers find us" (fade to black)
• "...and then we'll figure out sales later" (roll credits too early)
• "...and then we'll hire someone who knows how to do this part" (movie switches to a different protagonist)

Let me address a fear you might have about this mental movie screening:

First, some reassurance: Investors aren't looking for a perfect, flawless trade route movie. They're not expecting your protagonist to march confidently from scene to scene without obstacles.

Consider our "Complete Beginner" example. Their movie might show:

• Months of failed marketing attempts
• Multiple pivots in targeting strategy
• Lots of rejected cold emails
• A complete rethinking of their approach
• Finally finding a community that responds
• Gradually building traction through persistence

This is a messy movie full of failures and restarts. But it's still a complete movie with a successful third act. Many founders have raised millions on stories exactly like this.

Here I will make a bold claim: if you sit down and try to write out the movie script for both your business theory and a similar one that got funded, the difference will likely become obvious. You'll probably find that you can write a complete script for the funded business, but your own script has scenes you can't sell to an audience clearly.

The beauty of this exercise is that it's not about having the perfect skills or background from the start. It's about identifying exactly which scenes in your movie you need to develop skills for. If you can't write the scene where you convince someone to pay for your product, that's your focus area—not adding more features or polishing your landing page.

The Bottom Line

Thinking about business distribution through the lens of a trade route movie helps in several ways:

1. It forces specificity: Vague plans like "we'll market it online" get exposed immediately when you try to turn them into filmable scenes.

2. It accounts for your starting point: There's no one-size-fits-all distribution strategy. Your existing skills and connections dramatically shape what your trade route looks like.

3. It isolates learning needs: Instead of feeling overwhelmed by everything you don't know about business, you can focus specifically on the scenes you can't visualize.

4. It provides a clear metric: You can judge your business readiness by how completely you can visualize your trade route movie from start to finish.

The simple truth is that every successful business has a clear trade route connecting products to customers. Technical founders often struggle not because their products are bad, but because they haven't established this route.

So next time you're working on a product, take a step back and ask: "What is my trade route with the world? Could I make a compelling two-hour movie showing how my product gets from me to my customers?"

If large sections of that movie are blank or vague, that's your signal to stop coding for 6 months and start learning how to fill in the next scene instead.

You don't need to know everything about business to succeed. You just need to write next 20 second scene in your trade route movie.