Welcome back 🤝
Meet Cody Schneider, a “multipreneur” with 20+ profitable businesses and a Chrome extension that still pays his rent years after launch.
Cody’s approach is simple: spot the wave, ride it, and double down.
In the next 5 minutes, you’ll learn:
Why you don’t need to invent a brand-new market
How to make a bunch of small bets and find the 3% that work
The contrarian reason distribution beats product
Why the wrong sales channel can sink even the best product
Let’s dive in.
Small bets, big waves
Most founders want to invent something brand new (y’know…to “disrupt” ✨).
Cody says that’s a mistake.
“The best thing you can do is pick a play that’s already been run before and execute on that.”
Look for demand signals backed by data:
Post publicly. Cody’s internal SEO content tool, Drafthorse AI, became a product only after people on Twitter asked to buy it.
Listen for customer pain points. “I hate X software because Y” = opportunity.
Cody’s system: Try 100 things, expect ~3% to work, then pile on resources.
That’s how he scaled LandingCat from zero to $100K ARR in four weeks—by spotting the SEO wave around Shopify category pages and quickly launching an ecommerce solution.
Try it yourself: Start by writing down 3–5 “waves” you see in your niche. Then validate that demand with search data from SEO tools. Once you spot something promising, launch the simplest version you can: a landing page, a Chrome extension, or even just a demo.
Distribution > product
You’ve probably heard the phrase “product is king.”
Well, Cody disagrees.
“Often you have great products that never get into orbit because they just have terrible distribution. But companies that have good distribution but an okay product, they can survive.”
So what’s good distribution look like to Cody?
Cold email at scale → Scrape leads (try tools like Outscraper, Hunter.io, or PhantomBuster), validate with ZeroBounce, then send via Instantly or Smartlead.
App store plays → Chrome extensions, WordPress plugins, QuickBooks apps = built-in distribution. Tap into huge existing user bases already searching for integrations and plugins so you don’t have to build traffic from scratch.
Exact-match domains → Buy domains that match search phrases and funnel that traffic into your product.
Crowded markets don’t mean zero opportunity.
“There are 100 window-washing companies in my city, and they’re all making money.”
So before you start polishing features, ask yourself: How will I get this in front of 1,000 people every week?
👉 Check out Cody’s full interview with Mitchell here.
The channel formula
Ben Horowitz, cofounder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, makes a similar case about the importance of distribution: your sales channel should match your product type and your target market.
A viral tool like Dropbox (online, no assistance needed) can spread almost instantly, while a complex enterprise product (online, but requires a ton of assistance) will flop without a real sales force. Great products still fail if they pick the wrong channel.
At the end of the day, you want to lean into the channels that fit your product (cold email for agencies, app stores for extensions, SEO for SaaS, etc.).
Don’t force a model just because you like it. Work your distribution to fit the wave you’re riding.
Bonus stack
Here are a few tools to uncover trends:
Exploding Topics: Spot rising trends before they go mainstream.
Google Trends: Free, easy way to track interest over time and compare terms.
GummySearch: Audience research tool for Reddit.
AnswerThePublic: See the exact questions people are Googling about your topic
Get building.
❤️ & 🌮,
The AppSumo Team
P.S. Speaking of distribution, what if you sent Mind Your Business to a fellow entrepreneur? (Just shooting our shot.)