Greg Isenberg said something that's been echoing around founder circles for the past two weeks: distribution is the new moat. AI can build the product. It cannot build your audience. It cannot build trust in your niche. It cannot make 10,000 people bookmark your tool because you showed up in their feed every day for six months. That's a human job — and it's the only job that gets harder to replicate as AI gets cheaper.

His seven-strategy playbook covers MCP servers, programmatic SEO, free tools as top-of-funnel, answer engine optimization, viral artifacts, niche newsletters, and AI content repurposing engines. Most of the coverage of this framework assumes you can spin up a Python environment. You can't — and you don't need to. Here's every strategy rebuilt for the operator who runs on n8n, Make, and a credit card.

Man working at desk with computer monitor, notebooks, lamp, and coffee mug in home office

Why 'Build First' Is the Trap (And What Distribution-First Actually Means)

Isenberg's core argument lands differently when you're an operator instead of an engineer. Engineers hear "distribution first" and think marketing before shipping. Operators should hear something more precise: own the audience before you own the product.

In a world where Claude Code or Cursor can scaffold an MVP in a weekend, the bottleneck is never the build. It's whether anyone notices when you launch. The operators winning right now in 2026 aren't the ones with the most sophisticated automations — they're the ones who spent six months becoming the trusted voice in a niche before they ever sold a workflow. When they finally ship something, they don't need to cold DM. Their audience is already waiting.

That's the lens for everything below. Each strategy is a distribution asset — something that compounds attention over time, runs mostly on autopilot, and makes your next launch cheaper than your last one.

Strategy 1: MCP Servers as Your Always-On Sales Team

MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers let AI assistants — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor — pull live data from your tool or content library when users ask questions. Think of it as SEO for the AI layer: instead of ranking on Google, you're ranking inside the model's answer.

Isenberg frames MCP servers as "automated sales reps that work 24/7." The technical barrier used to be real — you needed a Node.js or Python environment to expose endpoints. That's changed.

The no-code entry point: Tools like Pipedream and n8n now support MCP server creation through webhook-based architectures. You define what data your server exposes (pricing tables, comparison matrices, how-to guides), set up a structured JSON response via an n8n webhook node, and register it with MCP directories. When someone asks Claude "what's the best workflow tool for real estate follow-ups," your server can feed the answer — with your brand attached.

Action this week: Pick the single question your ideal client asks an AI assistant most often. Build one n8n webhook that returns a structured, genuinely useful answer. Register it on an MCP directory like mcp.so. You now have a distribution node that works while you sleep.

Strategy 2: Programmatic SEO at Scale With AI Workflows

Programmatic SEO is the practice of generating hundreds or thousands of templated pages targeting long-tail keywords — "AI automation for [industry]" × "in [city]" gives you 5,000 pages from two lists.

The workflow: In n8n or Make, connect a Google Sheets node (your keyword matrix) to an AI node (Claude or GPT-4o for content generation) to a CMS node (Webflow, WordPress, or Ghost). Add a review step — a human-in-the-loop approval column in the sheet — so nothing publishes without a quality check. One operator in the home services niche generated 1,200 location pages in three days using this exact pattern and tripled organic traffic within six weeks.

Key detail Isenberg emphasizes: the pages must be genuinely useful. Google's helpful content signals are aggressive now. Template the structure, but let the AI generate unique, specific insights per page. Thin content at scale is a penalty — rich content at scale is a moat.

Strategy 3: The Free Tool Funnel — Building a Lead Magnet That Runs Itself

Isenberg's third strategy is deceptively simple: build a free tool that solves one small problem for your target customer, gate it with an email, and let it feed your pipeline forever.

Examples that work right now: an AI-powered ROI calculator for agencies, a "grade my workflow" audit tool, a niche-specific proposal generator. These aren't apps — they're smart forms connected to AI processing.

How to build it without a dev team: Use Typeform or Tally for the input layer. Send submissions to an n8n or Make scenario that hits an LLM API with a carefully structured prompt. Return the output as a formatted PDF or email using a document generation node. Total build time: an afternoon. Total cost: under $50/month in API calls for most operators.

The compounding effect is what matters. Every user who runs the tool gives you data about what your market actually needs — and an email address you can nurture.

Laptop displaying email subscriber form on wooden desk with plants, notebooks, pastry and analytics document

Strategy 4: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — Showing Up in AI Search

AEO is the practice of structuring your content so that AI search tools — ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — cite you as a source. This is not traditional SEO. The ranking factors are different.

What AI search engines reward:

Direct, structured answers. Use clear H2/H3 headers that mirror natural questions. Start paragraphs with the answer, then expand.
First-party data and specifics. "We tested this across 14 client accounts" beats "many businesses find that..." every time. AI models prioritize content with original claims.
Entity clarity. Mention your brand, your tool name, and your niche explicitly. AI models need to associate your content with a retrievable entity.

Action this week: Rewrite your three highest-traffic blog posts using the question-first, answer-immediately structure. Add a FAQ schema block to each. Monitor Perplexity for your target queries and track when your content starts appearing as a cited source.

Strategies 5–7: Viral Artifacts, Niche Newsletters, and the AI Repurposing Engine

These three strategies are most powerful when stacked together into a single flywheel.

Viral Artifacts

An artifact is a shareable output — a scorecard, a benchmark report, a visual framework — that carries your brand when it spreads. Isenberg's insight: don't create content that gets consumed; create content that gets forwarded. Design one artifact per month. A "2026 AI Ops Maturity Scorecard" for your niche. A comparison table that your target buyer screenshots and sends to their partner. The format matters more than the depth.

Building a newsletter from zero is slow. Buying one is fast. Platforms like Duuce, Newsletter Launchpad, and even Twitter DMs let you acquire small, niche newsletters (500–5,000 subscribers) for a few hundred dollars. You're not buying subscribers — you're buying a distribution channel with existing trust. Isenberg calls this "the cheapest attention arbitrage left."

The AI Repurposing Engine

This is the glue. Build an n8n or Make workflow that takes one long-form piece (like this article), breaks it into platform-native chunks — a LinkedIn post, three tweets, a newsletter segment, a short-form video script — and queues them across your publishing tools. One input, seven outputs, zero manual reformatting. Connect your CMS via RSS trigger, pipe through Claude for rewriting, output to Buffer or Typefully via API. The entire pipeline runs on a single scenario.

Building Your Distribution Stack on StickyFlow: A Starter Configuration

If you're deploying this on StickyFlow's workflow infrastructure, here's the sequence that avoids overwhelm:

Week 1: Build the AI repurposing engine. This multiplies everything else you do, so it goes first. One workflow, one trigger, seven output channels.
Week 2: Launch your free tool funnel. Pick the smallest useful tool for your niche, connect form → AI → delivery. Start collecting emails on day one.
Week 3: Deploy your first programmatic SEO batch. 50 pages minimum. Quality-checked, published, indexed.
Week 4: Set up your MCP server endpoint and register it. Restructure your top content for AEO. Acquire or launch your niche newsletter.

By the end of 30 days, you have five distribution assets running in parallel — each one compounding, each one feeding the others. That's not a marketing plan. That's a moat that gets deeper every week while your competitors are still tweaking their chatbot demos.

The operators who win in 2026 aren't the best builders. They're the ones who are impossible to ignore.