Unscripted SaaS · Growth & go-to-market
Distribution Is The Only Moat You Have Left
with Nick Eubanks — global CMO at Digistore24, founder of Traffic Think Tank
There is a line of Nick Eubanks’ that has been travelling around SaaS and marketing circles for months, usually stripped of the sentence that follows it. On the Unscripted podcast he said both halves to host Jeremy Rivera, and the second half is the one that should change what you do on Monday.
When Execution Becomes Infinite
“Yeah, the expertise layer is, the, you know, I like to say in something I’ve been talking a lot about recently is, you know, distribution is the only remaining moat when execution becomes infinite. But at the same time, I think that’s not entirely true. Cause I think expertise does still allow for some layer of defensibility, at least for now.”
— Nick EubanksThat is the full quote, verbal stumbles and all, because the walk-back is doing real work. He says the thing, and then within the same breath tells you it is overstated. Anyone quoting him with the first clause only is selling you a cleaner idea than he actually holds.
An honest note on our own headline: we have used the punchy half, because that is the phrase in circulation. Nick’s actual position is that distribution is the dominant moat and expertise is a real but time-limited second one — “at least for now.”
“Execution becomes infinite” is the premise worth examining. It is not a claim that software gets easier to write. It is a claim that the cost of a competent copy is collapsing — that the gap between your feature shipping and an adequate version of it existing elsewhere is now measured in weeks. If that is true, then anything you can build is, definitionally, not a moat.
Why Features Stopped Being Defensible
Nick’s own examples are not about product quality at all. Asked about what actually drove outcomes, he keeps landing on reach.
One of the sharpest is a company that, by his account, was doing around fifty million a year in revenue on an SEO product he was frankly sceptical of: “it was a checkbox on your checkout. When you’re signing up for your hosting provider, you know, for $5 a month, add SEO services. I don’t think they actually did anything, but the company was doing like 50 million a year because the distribution network was just so big.”
That is the argument in its most uncomfortable form. Product quality was, on his reading, close to irrelevant to that outcome. Placement did all the work. You do not have to like the example to take the lesson from it.
He is similarly unsentimental about a competitor’s idea — a content-rewards distribution network built into their platform — which he calls “a really, really cool idea” and notes they “executed really fast,” while questioning whether they will do the deep, unglamorous work to run it well. Which is the expertise half of his own quote reappearing: the idea is copyable in weeks, the operational competence to run it is not.
The Three Distribution Assets Worth Owning
This section is our practitioner guidance, not Nick’s. He names the principle and gives examples of distribution at work; he does not prescribe a three-asset list.
If distribution is the moat, the useful question is which distribution you can actually own rather than rent. Three categories pass that test for a SaaS business:
A list you can reach without permission from a platform. Email remains the only channel where reaching your existing audience does not require winning an auction or an algorithm. Its unglamorousness is the point — nobody can reprice it against you overnight.
A place where your buyers already talk to each other. Not a community you build from zero, which is a multi-year project most teams abandon. A community that exists, where sustained useful presence over quarters buys you the right to be the answer when someone asks. Slower than ads and considerably more durable.
A recurring reason to appear. A show, a newsletter, a data release — anything that creates a standing appointment rather than a series of interruptions. This is the one most SaaS teams under-invest in, because its payback period is embarrassing for the first six months and then stops being embarrassing.
Nick’s affiliate history is instructive here too. He was a large SEMrush affiliate in 2012 and is blunt that the same play has “gotten way harder” — a reminder that any distribution channel someone else controls is on a depreciation schedule.
Building Distribution Before You Need It
Also our guidance rather than reported claims.
The awkward property of distribution as a moat is that it cannot be bought at the moment you discover you need it. A team that decides in month thirty-six that it needs an audience is starting a two-year project with twelve months of runway.
Which produces a genuinely difficult allocation question, because building distribution early means spending on reach before you are certain what you are reaching people about. The resolution is to build distribution around the problem rather than the product. The problem is stable; your product is not. Malith Gamage’s Zapdigits launched at entrepreneurs and found its market in agencies — an audience assembled around the reporting problem survives that pivot, an audience assembled around a specific feature set does not.
Nick’s own operation at Digistore24 shows what the mature version looks like: an always-on internal AI system trained on company voice, product mix, competitors and compliance requirements, with regional and channel layers in front of it and persona layers for individual executives — all of it feeding a human review queue. The output is volume, but the design goal is relevance. That is a distribution machine, and it took building.
The most useful thing to take from Nick is the qualification rather than the slogan. Distribution is the moat that compounds; expertise is a moat with a shelf life you cannot see the end of. Both are worth building, and only one of them can be bought quickly — which tells you which to start on first.
Full recap: Nick Eubanks on SEO, Digistore24 and the moats that still matter. More in SaaS growth and go-to-market and SaaS marketing and demand gen.