Cause of Death · 1 exhibit
Channel Failure
A channel failure is when a product has no viable, sustainable route to the buyer — the distribution model is mismatched to how the category actually gets purchased. This includes going direct in a category where a trusted intermediary (a carrier, a reseller, an IT department) is how buyers actually decide, going through a partner channel that has no incentive to sell the product over its own alternatives, or alienating the exact partners a product depends on by competing with them directly. Channel failures are often invisible from the product side: the product can score well in every review and still die, because reviews do not buy anything — distributors, carriers, and resellers do, and if their incentives are not aligned, the best product in the category never reaches the shelf, the app store ranking, or the sales rep's pitch.
How to recognize it early
- The product depends on a partner (carrier, reseller, platform) whose commercial interest is not clearly aligned with pushing it
- The go-to-market plan has no answer for who benefits, commercially, from recommending this over the incumbent
- The category has historically been sold through an intermediary and this launch skips it, or vice versa
- Distribution deals are struck late, as an afterthought to the product build rather than as a co-equal workstream
How to avoid it
Before your channel strategy becomes an exhibit — see how we build partner and channel programs.
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Exhibits with this cause of death