The Future of Venture Building

A Manifesto for Builders Who Can't Wait for Permission

Lior Goldenberg · Founder & CEO, ProductClank · 2025

The barrier to building has collapsed. The barrier to being found has not. This is the central tension of the new economy — and it is what ProductClank was built to resolve.

Anyone can ship an app over a weekend. In some cases, over an hour. The tools exist, the infrastructure is cheap, and AI has made the technical gap almost irrelevant. We are entering an age of proliferation — of content, of products, of opportunities.

But proliferation without coordination creates a new crisis. Every builder faces the same wall: how do I get the attention of the people who need what I built? The old answers — raise capital, spend on ads, chase press — were designed for a world that no longer exists. And the new answers have not been built yet.

This manifesto is the blueprint for building them.

The venture building playbook of the last 30 years was built on a specific assumption: you need capital before you can grow. Raise funding. Spend on growth. Capture market share. Monetize later.

That world is over. Today, a solo founder can ship a product that generates revenue from day one. The cost of building has collapsed. But the playbook never updated. And this mismatch has created a trap that is blocking an entire generation of builders.

The Catch-22

If you want to promote your product, you need money. If you want money from investors, you need to show traction. If you want traction, you need distribution. If you want distribution, you need to promote your product.

You need users to get funded. You need funding to get users. The gate is locked from both sides.

This is not a marginal problem. It is the central structural failure of the current ecosystem. Talented founders with real products are blocked not by the quality of what they built, but by an infrastructure that was never designed for them.

The Old Infrastructure Is Obsolete

The tools that exist to solve distribution were designed for a different era. Paid advertising on Facebook and Google. Influencer campaigns where you rent someone's audience for a flat fee. PR agencies chasing coverage in publications with declining relevance.

Every one of these approaches shares the same flaw: you are paying for the attention of people who have no stake in your success. The conversion is weak. The retention is weak. The relationship ends when your budget does.

The solution is not a better ad platform. It is a different model entirely. One built on a simple but profound reframe.

Instead of borrowing money from investors against your future profits, you borrow distribution from creators against your future profits. Instead of buying attention from strangers, you share upside with people who already have the audience you need.

Borrow distribution, not capital. Share upside, not equity. This is the new playbook.

Creators — people with audiences in social networks, Telegram communities, WhatsApp groups, local networks — have something more valuable than most venture funds: direct access to the people you are trying to reach.

How It Works: Earning From Distribution

A builder sets aside a percentage of their revenue — say 30% — as an affiliate pool. Creators and community members earn from that pool by helping the product grow: bringing users, generating attention, driving conversions. As the product earns, the pool distributes automatically.

This is not a one-time commission. It is an ongoing revenue share that continues as long as the product succeeds. The creator is not a hired gun. They are an aligned stakeholder.

How It Works: Speculation as Information Propagation

This is where the model becomes something categorically different from a sophisticated affiliate program.

When someone who knows a creator, knows an audience, knows a product is about to break through — backs it with a share of future success — they surface a signal the market didn't have before. They embed their private knowledge into the price. The market learns. Distribution resources flow toward where they will be most effective.

“The price signal is how private knowledge becomes public coordination.”

Friedrich Hayek's mechanism, applied to startup distribution

Dispersed, private knowledge — who has real influence, which creator-audience match actually works, which product is about to grow — surfaces through this mechanism. No central authority could collect that information. The market discovers it, because the people who hold it have an incentive to act on it.

There is a second crisis running in parallel to the distribution problem. It is less discussed, but it is more existential.

The same technology that empowers anyone to build also produces fragmentation. Thousands of builders, working in isolation, solving overlapping problems, fighting for the same audience. Every builder faces the same bottleneck alone.

The Fragmentation Trap

Where builders could collaborate — building complementary products that strengthen each other, sharing distribution infrastructure, compounding on each other's momentum — they instead compete. Not because competition serves them, but because no good mechanism has existed for them to do anything else.

A builder working on a growth tool and a builder working on analytics for the same market are natural allies. They share the same audience. Their products are stronger together. But without coordination infrastructure, they fragment. And the giants win.

The Consolidation Threat

The deeper threat is not other startups. It is the companies that control distribution.

We have watched this happen with Google and big tech. They control the distribution. That control allows them to integrate any new solution, any new capability, into their own products quickly and at scale. We are watching it happen again with foundational model companies — killing startups one at a time by absorbing their capabilities into the base model.

It is not a question of whether the long tail of builders can fight this. It is a question of when their runway runs out — and when investors stop backing companies that foundational models can replicate overnight.

The rational response to this environment is not to build faster. It is to build together.

Imagine Product Hunt and Y Combinator had a baby. Product Hunt gives builders distribution. Y Combinator gives builders a network — the doors it opens, the credibility it confers, the compounding advantage of belonging to something bigger than yourself. ProductClank is building both, together, in a structure that compounds over time.

How the Network Works

A builder integrates their product into ProductClank's product suite. Revenue is split between the platform and the builder. In exchange, the platform grants the builder a token stream — giving them real skin in the success of the broader network.

The better a builder's product performs, the more revenue flows to the platform. The stronger the platform's distribution becomes. The more valuable every product within it — including the builder's.

The builder's success makes the network stronger. The network's strength makes every builder more successful. This is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism.

A Real Example

A builder developed a product that lets anyone launch an AI agent in 60 seconds. He integrated it into ProductClank in a white label model. Revenue is shared automatically. The builder gets distribution he did not have to build. ProductClank gets a capability it did not have to build. Users get a more complete product. His product doesn't compete with ProductClank — it makes ProductClank more valuable.

See it live at agents.productclank.com.

The conventional way to collaborate with another builder involves a sequence that has not changed in decades: find a co-founder, register a company, draft a founders agreement, negotiate equity splits, argue about vesting schedules. Months of process before a single line of code is shared.

That model was designed for a world where collaboration meant committing to one partnership, one company, one outcome. It locks both parties into a relationship before they know if it works. It creates legal obligations before there is anything to protect. It moves at the speed of lawyers.

The token stream is not a crypto instrument. It is a coordination primitive for the way builders actually work now.

A token stream that starts immediately, scales with real performance, and requires none of the old infrastructure is not a simplification of the founding agreement. It is a replacement for it — one that is faster, cheaper, more flexible, and more honest. Because the value it represents is tied to actual revenue, not a negotiated percentage of a hypothetical future.

It is also composable. A builder can have this relationship with ten products simultaneously, each generating a stream, each reflecting the actual value they are contributing to a shared network.