How FirstRep got its users
Eight asset types crossed with 90 coach niches: free calculators catch the search, vs and best-for pages catch the buyer, and a free forever plan is the only call to action.
Best guess. A working hypothesis. Useful to think with, not to repeat as fact.
You could start this on Monday. No budget, no audience, no permission needed.
- A traffic base that does not collapse when you stop publishing
- Acquisition that owes nothing to any social platform
- A proprietary or painful-to-assemble data source
- A template with a reason to exist page by page
- 6 to 12 months before it compounds
Programmatic SEO in 2026
Still alive, but the bar has moved. Thin pages get deindexed, so you need real data on every single page.
Everything on this channel →The play
5 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Write the niche list before writing a single page. FirstRep runs 90 coach types (crossfit, powerlifting, yoga, back pain, basketball, adaptive fitness), taken from how coaches describe themselves, not from a keyword export.
done whenYou can name 50 or more niches without repeating yourself, and each one reads like a phrase a customer would put in their own bio.
- 2
Pick asset types your buyer would use on their own, then cross them with the niches. FirstRep ships 8 calculator types (1RM, BMR/TDEE, macro, body fat, protein, pace, plate loading, workout volume) plus resources, templates, guides and checklists, one variant per niche, with a hub page linking all of them.
done whenYour hub page links one live page per niche for every asset type, and each page is useful without an account.
- 3
Build the buying-intent layer separately from the tools. FirstRep runs 4 named competitor pages (/vs/trainerize, /vs/everfit, /vs/truecoach, /vs/mypthub) plus 90 'Best software for {niche} in 2026' pages, and a blog weighted toward alternative-to posts.
done whenA visitor landing on a comparison page reaches your pricing in one click, and those pages convert at a different rate than the tool pages.
- 4
Point every generated page at a self-serve entry, not a call. FirstRep sends all 4,296 pages to Free $0 forever up to 3 clients, then Pro at $19/mo, with no demo booking, no Calendly and no sales step anywhere in the HTML.
done whenA new account gets created end to end from a generated page without you touching anything.
- 5
Crawl your own sitemap and instrument the pages before scaling the grid. FirstRep serves 90 dead /compare URLs, 404s on 5 of its 8 calculator types, a 404 on /pricing, and carries no GA4, GTM or pixel, so it cannot tell which niche pays.
done whenA scripted crawl of your sitemap returns 200 on every URL after each deploy, and your analytics attributes signups back to specific niche pages.
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
4,296 URLs in the sitemap across 9 sections, 90 niches per asset type, 4 competitor comparison pages live, apps published on both the App Store and Play Store
What else they ran
Nothing else identified. One channel carried it.
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.