Build The Channel Before You Need It

From the desk of Sean Heilweil

About a year ago, I made a decision that looked, from the outside, like a founder losing focus.

I started investing real time and real money into content. Newsletters. LinkedIn. Written work that had no immediate connection to revenue, no clear ROI, and no audience waiting for it.

The reaction from people I respect was polite but clear: why are you doing this when you have actual businesses to operate?

It was a fair question. I own and operate multiple SaaS companies and service businesses. There is never a shortage of things that need attention — pricing, retention, hiring, product. The idea that I would carve out meaningful resources for something as speculative as "building an audience" struck most people around me as, at best, a distraction. At worst, a vanity project.

And for a while, it looked exactly like that.

Months of publishing into silence. Months of subscriber counts that barely moved. Months of writing essays that a few hundred people read and nobody shared. There was a stretch where the most common response I got was a version of "have you thought about just running more ads?"

I had thought about it. That was precisely the problem I was trying to solve.

Here is the thing about paid acquisition that nobody in the world talks about honestly: it works, and it is also a trap. You pay for attention today, you convert a percentage of that attention into revenue, and then tomorrow the attention is gone and you pay again. The unit economics can be great. The dependency is terrible. You are renting access to your own customer, and the landlord raises the rent every quarter.

I did not start investing in content because I wanted to be a creator. I started because I realized that every company in my portfolio had the same structural vulnerability: distribution that I did not own.

Emailable had great search rankings. But Google changes the algorithm and suddenly your traffic is someone else's decision. Sur had strong referral networks. But referrals are not a system, they are a side effect of relationships that may or may not compound. Every business I looked at had some version of this same exposure. Revenue was healthy. The channel that produced the revenue was rented.

A newsletter, and more broadly, a content engine, is not a media business. I want to be very clear about that, because a lot of founders hear "newsletter" and think "Substack side project" or "thought leadership." That is not what this is.

A content operation, done correctly, is a customer acquisition channel disguised as a media business. It is an owned audience of people who have opted in to hear from you, who trust your perspective, and who, when they have a problem you solve, think of you first. Not because you bought a Google ad at the right moment. Because you have been showing up in their inbox for six months with useful thinking.

That is a fundamentally different kind of distribution. And it compounds in a way that paid channels never will.

Here is what started happening, quietly, after about six months:

Inbound deal flow appeared. People who had read something I wrote reached out about partnerships, acquisitions, and opportunities that I would never have found through cold outreach or paid channels.

Recruiting got easier. Candidates who applied already understood how I think, what I value, and what the operating culture looks like. The filtering that usually takes three interviews happened before the first one.

Existing customers engaged differently. People who subscribe to your thinking treat you differently than people who found you through a search ad. The trust floor is higher. The sales cycle is shorter. The retention is better.

Partnerships opened. Other operators and founders forwarded editions to people in their network. That is not something you can buy. That is earned distribution, the kind that scales without a budget line.

None of these outcomes showed up on a dashboard for months. All of them showed up on the P&L eventually.

Now, I am not suggesting that every founder needs to become a writer. That would be absurd. Some of the best operators I know have zero public presence and their businesses are excellent. There is no universal rule here.

But I do believe this: if you run multiple businesses, or if you plan to acquire more over time, the single highest-leverage investment you can make is in a distribution channel you own. One that does not depend on an algorithm, a platform, or a paid budget to function. One that compounds quietly in the background while you do the operational work.

The operators who figured this out five or ten years ago have an almost unfair advantage now. They do not launch products into silence. They launch into an audience that already trusts them. They do not scramble for deal flow. It comes to them. They do not compete on ad spend. They compete on attention they have already earned.

The ones who dismissed content as a distraction are the same ones paying $50 CPMs to reach the audience someone else built for free.

I spent a year building something that looked like nothing. It is starting to look like the most valuable thing in the portfolio.

I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between patience and proof.

When I started this content investment, the hardest part was not the writing. It was not the consistency. It was the silence. Publishing into a void and having no external evidence that it mattered. Every week, someone would ask how the newsletter was going, and every week I would say "fine" while privately wondering if I was wasting time I could not afford.

What I have learned is that the silence is not absence of progress. It is the lag between input and evidence. Almost every meaningful thing I have built had a period like that — months or years where the work was real but the results were not yet visible to anyone but me.

I think a lot of founders quit things during the silence. Not because the idea was wrong. Because the feedback loop was too slow for their anxiety.

I am glad I did not quit this one.

Run a Distribution Dependency Audit this week.

Here is how:

The question worth sitting with: if every rented channel you depend on raised its price by 40% tomorrow, what would you do?

The most overlooked asset in any portfolio is not a product, a team, or a technology. It is the ability to reach the right person without asking permission.

The bottom line: build the channel before you need it. Because by the time you need it, you cannot afford the time it takes to build it.

— Sean, Cache CEO