Why I'm building dist0
Tao Wu
Founder of dist0
I used to be a database engineer and product manager. In 2024, I spent two months shipping a small bilingual subtitle tool. I thought distribution would be the easy part: post on YouTube, share on Twitter, write a few SEO articles, wait for people to find it. It didn't work.
I tried AI writing plugins for WordPress. Pure AI output is exactly what Google's helpful content updates were built to demote. I tried Ahrefs and Semrush for keyword research. The long-tail questions I could actually answer from product knowledge all came back as zero-volume. Turns out keyword databases only cover 15–35% of real searches, so the tools couldn't tell me which queries to skip and which to write for.
The usual SEO playbook breaks down when you start from zero. "Keyword research -> SERP gap analysis -> content -> internal linking" sounds complete, but it hides the real constraint: Google now weights site-wide quality over individual page quality. If your domain has no authority, publishing only on your own site goes nowhere. You need to publish across channels from day one.
dist0 turns those lessons into a marketing OS for lean SaaS teams. It starts with the work early brands skip: the bottom-of-funnel pages they should have written, the Reddit threads where their buyers actually ask questions, and a plan for how each piece travels beyond the company site. Multi-channel repurposing and content writing come next.
Why build a marketing tool as a startup?
Because distribution is the defensible part of a SaaS company now. AI lets anyone clone your features and UI in a weekend. It can't clone the trust, citations, community mentions, and search visibility a brand builds over time.
As of May 2026, no SEO tool gives founders a playbook they can just follow. They give you dashboards or AI blog output and leave the strategy to you. dist0 takes the opposite approach: tell a small team what to do next, in what order, and on which channels.
What does "dist0" mean?
dist0 means distribution from zero. It's for lean teams starting without an audience, search authority, or a marketing team.
a16z calls distribution one of the key moats for SaaS in the AI era. dist0 helps founders build it step by step, starting from the first overlooked page and the first real community question.
For now it covers SaaS. We'll expand to e-commerce and local services — the methodology is the same.