stage-11-agentics/c11/distribution

Distribution

You are designing how a real thing reaches real users — with the same rigor the build got, because distribution left to hope is the most common way a good build dies. The plan is an artifact, not a vibe: DISTRIBUTION.md at the project root (or the candidate's resolution-book entry, in a Chord portfolio), with every claim carrying a channel, an owner class, and a metric.

The skill's one structural insight: the binding budget is operator attention, and channels differ wildly in how much of it they burn. So the core move is classification — making distribution agent-executable wherever it can be, and honest about where it cannot.

The spine

1. Audience. Borrow venture-partner's currency: specificity. Name the person-shaped profile who needs this most — title, what gets them promoted, what keeps them up at night — and where they already gather. Channels are places populated by the audience, not tactics in the abstract; a channel nobody in the audience reads is theater.

2. Channels, classified by delegability. Enumerate candidate channels, then tag each:

• agent-executable — agents produce and publish end-to-end: content and SEO, landing pages, docs, directories and listings, launch posts, comparison pages, scheduled updates. Accounts and credentials are operator-granted; platform terms are respected; anything that goes public still clears the operator first (publishing is inherently a public act — Stage 11's privacy-by-default rule applies until the operator says ship).
• operator-assisted — agents prepare everything, the operator approves and sends: outreach drafts under the operator's name, community posts, partnership pitches, replies. The agent's job is to make the human's ten minutes count.
• operator-only — personal credibility, warm intros, conference hallways, human-only channels (Signal and personal DMs stay human; agents scaffold facts, never ghostwrite the relationship). Irreducibly human reach — the plan budgets it, batched and scarce.

The tags are the attention budget made visible. A plan whose every channel is operator-only is a plan to drown — flag it and redesign toward channels agents can carry, or descope the reach claim honestly. In a Chord portfolio, re-run the distribution-decorrelation check across all K plans: candidates all drawing on the operator's one network and reputation are correlated bets no matter how different their kill-conditions look.

3. Credibility assets. What must exist before any outreach lands: a real site, a demo that works, proof (numbers, testimonials, a public artifact), a pricing page that answers the first question. Almost all agent-buildable; each is ship-blocking for the channels that need it — outreach pointing at a hollow front costs the audience permanently.

4. Instrumented funnels. Every channel gets a measurable entry — UTM, signup source, referral code — wired into the project's instrumentation before the channel goes live, and a pre-registered bar: what this channel must show, by when, to keep receiving effort. A channel with no metric is a belief; pre-registering the bar is what lets you kill it without an argument later.

5. Cadence. The execution rhythm: agents run the agent-executable lanes continuously; operator lanes batch into scheduled sittings that respect attention; the funnel numbers get read on a stated cadence and channels get killed or doubled per their pre-registered bars. Where a resolution book exists (Chord), the cadence and thresholds land there; where it doesn't (Tone, retrofits), DISTRIBUTION.md carries its own review section.

Composition

• In Tone: invoke from the architect stage onward — the plan's agent-executable items become build-plan tickets like any other work, and credibility assets join the walking-skeleton sequencing.
• In Chord: each champion authors its candidate's plan; the conductor runs the cross-candidate decorrelation check; plans live in the resolution book.
• Retrofit: for anything already shipped and languishing, run the spine as an audit — the gap is usually a missing tag-2/tag-3 honesty (everything was implicitly operator-only, so nothing happened).

Honesty clauses

Some reach is irreducibly human, and the skill classifies rather than pretends — an agent-executable lane never launders an operator-only relationship. And distribution work is publishing: nothing goes public, gets posted, or sends outbound without the operator having said so for that surface — the confirmation is part of the plan, not friction on it.