If you’re short on time, here’s the one thing to take away:

Brand and distribution are only becoming more important for startups.

The best way to get to both?

Build for a community.

Why community over an ICP?

Communities come with inherent connection points. This means if you can break in, you’ll spread quicker, and be more likely to stay given the network effects.

If you consume any business or startup content (a bit of a silly question to ask considering you’re reading this, but alas). You’ve probably heard that you need to build for a specific ICP. “If you target everyone, you target no one.” (even I’ve been guilty of saying this).

Now I’m not saying this is wrong by any means. You don’t want to target everyone. That’s a recipe for disaster. But it’s the ICP part that I (and Arc) want to challenge.

We live in a world where you can spin up a pretty robust app in a few hours (or less).

And the exciting/scary/willievenhaveajobinthefuture part of this is that it’s only getting better. And rapidly. Now all this is just a roundabout way to say that product building is becoming homogenized. Everything is getting more and more similar by the day.

Product is not going to be a strong moat anymore (unless you are pushing the boundaries of technology) when I can screenshot your web app, and get Claude, v0, and Cursor to replicate it in a day.

Okay that’s great, but then what will be important?

I’m glad you asked.

Brand and distribution.

And at the center of this lies community.

Community comes with inherent distribution and if you position it right, a brand that becomes a part of people’s identity.

It is the single best way to get your idea from Zero to One (hmmm, that would be a great name for a newsletter).

Communities beat ICPs because the people in them are connected. Once you’re in, you’re in. And you can bulldoze your way through fast.

And this is exactly what Arc did.

Founders Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal went straight to their network of fellow tech nerds to get onboarded with Arc.

There’s this great concept called ACP that I’ve come across from Greg Isenberg. Audience. Community. Product (in this order).

It’s a model Greg has used multiple times to launch 7-figure businesses (without any venture funding). The premise is simple: Your audience is your MVP. It’s the market telling you that people are interested in this topic or problem.

Then you turn that audience into a community (discord, WhatsApp, Skool). And use that community to ideate through problems they need solving and products to solve them.

Take Boring Marketing for example. Greg and the other founders first started a Twitter page The Boring Marketer. Where they just posted unsexy ways people were growing their businesses. Think FB ads, SEO, the real unsexy stuff.

This unsexy page got 10k (now over 38k) followers. They knew there was something here.

So from here they started a community who they could speak to, find out what problems they needed solving, and what products could solve them.

And when they did launch BoringMarketing.com, guess what? Well they had a community of people interested in paying for it.

To bring this back to Arc. Rather than build for an ICP, Arc built for a community. And what they’ve done better than most products is make users feel like this product is for them.

And that’s because it is.

The users it attracts are part of the community that it’s built for. You feel connected to everyone else using Arc because you know in some way they’re like you - getting excited to go through a weekly product release note like the nerds we are.

3 actionable insights from the tactic.

When I started using Arc I was often left thinking: “I did not know I needed this. But now I can never go back”. In fact that’s one of the ways I would describe Arc as a whole. I didn’t know I even wanted, let alone needed a better browser experience.

But now that I have it. I can’t go back.

And it’s difficult to explain why. I’ve mentioned some of the reasons in parts one & two of this Arc series. For example, the moments of delight, attaching names and faces to the team, the beautiful UI, and the onboarding.

But even know these, I’m still left asking myself how they got all of this right. It feels like this product was built specifically for me.

And it’s that last part that happens when you build for a community that you’re a part of.

You intuitively know what belongs and what doesn’t. Especially for a product like Arc, where you can’t always rely on what your users say, because if you asked a user what they wanted from their browsing experience would’ve probably just thought of ways to improve Chrome rather than something radically different. In other words the faster horse vs car problem.

This is why Arc’s GTM worked so well. Josh and Hursh went to their immediate circle. I.e. the community they were building for and got them on the product. They were people like them.

And I can only imagine they had the same reaction as I did. And so what did they do? Well the same thing everyone I know who uses Arc does - share it with their fellow techies (specifically the type who love tools like Notion and Miro - beautifully designed, open canvas masterpieces).

But this is when Arc stepped in to make this even more powerful:

When Arc first launched, you had to sign up on a waitlist to someday get access to the product.

The FOMO was real. Arc was becoming a product that was making a name for itself inside the startup world (remember the above point on community). You were hearing about it at drinks, on Twitter, on Reddit, and even YouTubers were talking about it. Arc was everywhere you cared about.

Now this wasn’t a coincidence.

Part of it was because the first users were part of this community. Friends of the founders. But from everything I’ve seen (and this hasn’t been confirmed by Arc), Arc was highly selective about who they let in from the waitlist.

The founding PM at the hottest SF startup? In.

A designer at Figma? In.

Now this is f*cking smart.

They knew who the key people of influence were in their community and they leveraged this to create more hype around the product. Creating this air of exclusivity around Arc. If you were in, you were part of something bigger than you. And if you weren’t? Well you were dying to get in.

It reminded me of this phrase I recently heard from Greg Isenberg (Do I get all my ideas from Greg? Possibly. Is it sippin’ time baby? Definitely): “You want your community to be a dictatorship at the door, but a disco on the dancefloor.”

You want the bar to get in to be high. It helps your community to be worth being part of. But once you’re in, everyone is just having a good time.

Now even after the product became open to everyone, Arc have still captured this feeling. It almost feels illegal to know about Arc (okay I need to stop fangirling).

But I would be lying if I said that using Arc wasn’t made cooler by the fact that I know everyone in here is getting down to this sick beat, and those outside? Well they don’t even know what they’re missing. They just hear the noise blasting outside.

Now you might be thinking how can Arc take on Chrome? They’ll lose.

Well they’re not taking on Chrome. They don’t want to beat Chrome. They just want to be different. To provide people an option on how they browse the internet (something we spend most of our waking days doing).

Arc want to give a small subset of Chrome users the option to have a more active web experience. They will always be niche. They know this.

And that’s a beautiful thing about Arc. It will never be copyable by Google. They have counter-positioned themselves so well that Google can’t afford the risk to try to compete (nor does it fit their business model in this case - Arc minimizes the amount of searches needed, but that’s the core Google business model).

Pracitcally what did Arc do and how can you do something similar?

Arc picked a relatively untouched space: Browsers. And not just untouched, but a space which most people would consider boring. On the surface there doesn’t seem like much to do with a browser.

Arc: “Aight bet”.

And completely went past everything we’ve come to believe a browser needs to be. Real first-principles thinking. Radically challenging the incumbents. But not to beat them. Just to take a few of their niche users.

And that’s how Arc became a master in counter-positioning.

For the Zero to One, it’s been your host, Sheldon.

Speak soon and stay awesome!