discoverability vs demand

Which comes first when growing a small brand?

When you take your brand or service to market, you've likely spent months, or probably years, building something you truly love and believe in, and you think everyone else will too. But then launch day comes, and the sales don't follow.

In my experience, this isn't because the product isn't great. It's more likely that consumers simply haven't found you yet.

It's a chicken and egg moment

Bringing a new product to market is tough. You can't get meaningful retail distribution without proven demand, and if you can, the gate fees and minimum commitments involved can be eye-watering. But if you're not on shelf, or showing up in search results (and now add AI overviews and agents to that mix), people can't discover you in the first place. So which comes first?

Rather than trying to solve both problems simultaneously with limited resource, the wiser move is to pick the ground where you can win first, build real evidence of demand there, and use that evidence to open the next door. That means being very deliberate about where you put your energy before you spend anything on driving people toward you.

What is discoverability?

If someone decided today that they wanted to buy what you're selling, could they find you without already knowing your name?

For a D2C brand, that means organic search visibility for the terms your customers are using, paid search coverage for high-intent keywords, and a site that converts once someone arrives. For a product going into retail, it means enough distribution in the right locations, with the shelf presence and point of sale to get noticed in a competitive fixture. For a service business or venue, it means showing up in the places people look when they have the problem you solve such as Google Business, local search, the right communities (online and off).

Getting this right doesn't have to require a huge budget, though in some channels, retail in particular, the investment needed to create real standout is significant and worth going in with eyes open. What it does require is being honest about whether your current setup allows someone to find you without prior knowledge that you exist. If it doesn't, that's where the thinking needs to start.

Byron Sharp's work on how brands grow makes a useful distinction between mental availability (your brand coming to mind in a buying situation), and physical availability (the ease with which a motivated buyer can find and purchase your product.) Most early-stage businesses invest heavily in the former before they've properly secured the latter.

Depth or breadth?

The instinct when launching is to go broad. National distribution, wide targeting, and a campaign that reaches as many people as possible. It feels like the momentum you need to properly grow, and when you've waited this long to get to market, the temptation to go all-in is completely understandable.

But broad and thin rarely works when resource is constrained, because you end up not being visible enough anywhere to convert the people you're reaching. A better approach is to own one segment completely before you expand to the next.

Take a protein snack brand entering a crowded category. Rather than going head-to-head with established players across all of sports nutrition, you could own a single community first - Hyrox athletes, for example. Optimise your site for that specific search term, build a landing page that speaks directly to that athlete's needs, sponsor a regional event, sample aggressively, and show up consistently for that specific segment. Become the snack that Hyrox athletes recommend to each other without being prompted. Then take what you've built with that segment and do exactly the same in the next one. Post-marathon recovery, cycling nutrition, or whatever makes sense for the brand.

By year three, you'll have proof points across multiple communities, a loyal customer base, retention data, and evidence that makes a retail buyer take your call seriously. The national listing follows the grassroots foundation, going the other way round is a much harder, and much more expensive, road.

The right order of operations

Make sure a motivated consumer can find you before you invest heavily in creating the motivation to buy. Before you scale paid media, check that your site converts and ranks for the terms that matter. Before you go broad with distribution, build enough presence in one place to generate real brand recognition. Before you invest in above-the-line activity, make sure the demand it creates can convert into sales because your product is easy to find, otherwise you will end up increasing your competitor’s market share!

Get the discovery layer right first. Everything else builds on it.