It starts when you start pushing your point of view. Most founders get this backwards — and pay for it at launch.
The default plan looks sensible: finish the product, then "do marketing." So launch day arrives, you post the announcement, and nothing happens — because nobody was waiting. Attention compounds the same way product does, and the announcement was day zero.
The founders who launch into demand do one thing differently: they publish their point of view while they build. Why the standard way of solving this problem is broken. What they're doing differently, and why. Not a content calendar, not SEO, not ads — a point of view, in the founder's own voice, in the places their future buyers already spend time. By the time the product ships, the argument for it already exists, and so does the audience that agrees with it.
And your first asset costs nothing, needs no marketing team, and can't be copied by a competitor: the story of why you're building this at all. You hit the problem. You watched the standard fix fail. You decided to build something better. That's a disruption story — and you can write it today.
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Further along than this? If you're at Series A/B and your story now lives in AI answers, review sites, and buyer communities — coherently or not — that's what our Discovery Coherence Audit is for. Request a free audit.