this small team of 12 invented the like button, had ex-Google engineers from Gmail & Maps built a much superior product, yet twitter killed it in just one summer. it was called friendfeed - and in 2008, tech insiders believed it would beat twitter real-time feeds, threaded comments, powerful search - everything twitter didn’t have 11 of their 12 employees were engineers, and they just kept building meanwhile, twitter spent $11k at SXSW putting live tweets on plasma screens they brought Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, Shaq, and many more celebs who brought millions with them and twitter went from just another startup to a global phenomenon friendfeed kept shipping features but twitter kept shipping distribution and won facebook later acquired friendfeed for $50M - mostly for the team. big lesson for founders who feel they’re stuck: you probably don’t have a product problem - you have a distribution problem. distribution is everything the best product doesn’t win, the one that reaches people first does you can invent the like button and still lose if nobody ever clicks it