Hi everyone, it’s day 19. it’s coming in really late, been a little under the weather, so apologies for that.
Anyway, what I want to talk about today is something that doesn’t always get the spotlight, but I think it’s really fascinating — wholesale distribution.
The first time I came across it was when I was working on a product a while ago. We needed hosting space, and a friend of mine had a startup that sold hosting. So naturally, we went through his platform, signed up, paid, and managed everything like it was any other hosting company.
Then I found out later that he wasn’t actually hosting anything himself. He was a reseller. His platform was sitting on top of another hosting company’s infrastructure.
That blew my mind a little. Because it wasn’t affiliate marketing. He wasn’t just referring people, he was reselling the product as his own, under his own brand. His customers didn’t even know who the original provider was.
And it’s not just hosting. White-labeling is one of the most popular examples, a company makes a product, another company buys the rights to rebrand it and sell it as their own.
Now, this kind of distribution model is even more powerful when you think about it in terms of infrastructure. There’s this concept called MVNOs, Mobile Virtual Network Operators. Essentially, these are companies that don’t own telecom infrastructure, such as masts or towers, but lease capacity from major telcos and then resell mobile plans to customers under their own brand name.
They’re like the middle layer between the giants and the end users, they make telecom accessible to niche markets or smaller regions that the big players don’t focus on directly.
And I think that’s one of the cool things about wholesale models ,they allow products or services to reach places the main brand might never have gone.
I once saw a startup that did something similar with Starlink. They figured out a way to take Starlink’s offering which was pretty expensive and break it down into smaller, more affordable units. So instead of paying for a full Starlink setup, you could buy a slice of the bandwidth, or use it through hostels and local hubs.
It was wild. And I’m not even sure Starlink officially knew about it, but it showed how creative people can get with distribution when there’s a barrier to access.
That’s really the power of wholesale distribution: it creates layers of accessibility.
Sometimes, it’s big companies enabling resellers. Other times, it’s small startups figuring out how to make something more reachable. But either way, it extends the reach of a product without the original company doing the heavy lifting.
And that’s what I find most interesting about it it’s not flashy. It’s not viral. But it’s smart. It’s scalable. It multiplies reach by letting others do the reselling work.
So yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk about today, wholesale distribution. One of those quiet but powerful ways large-scale products can find their way into more hands.
See you tomorrow.