This past week I have spent some time with about a half-dozen startups, and in every case they have made progress in product design and development and are now confronting head-on the realities of getting results through their online and offline distribution channels.

Here are some of the issues:

Channel partners - What companies are selling to the same dealers or end users that you are seeking to acquire?  What's "in it for them" if they take on your line?  Margin?  Leveraging existing sales and support costs?  Do you replace anything they already carry?  Do you open up new potential customer bases for them?  Will they carry your brand message as you wish?  Do they have to modify existing products or internal systems to accommodate your line?

Dealers - So you've signed them up, now what gets them to push your product?  How do you get mind-share down to the frontline sales or service person?  Will you be allowed to offer direct incentives in the trenches - cash, prizes, trips, etc.?  Many smart dealers don't allow their suppliers to override their own objectives by allowing sales personnel to be influenced by individual vendors, so that's not an easy avenue.

Marketing Dollars - Can you spend enough to create pull-through by the end user?  Who along the chain will get the most direct benefit and be likely to ask for your product by name?  Who's really got to have it?  How can you prompt those people to act?

Franchise - Likely you can't start early with a legal franchise offering, but there are many franchise-like questions if you are selling through partners, channels, or dealers.  Do you give some territorial exclusivity?  How do you protect pricing?  How do you get unhooked from the poor performers in terms of sales or service?  How high can you set a quota for one of your channel partners to force them to deliver results or risk losing the line?

Pipeline - Are you filling up a pipeline that is not flowing out the other end?  Will you be hit with excessive returns?  What can you do to make sure the sales you make are sales ultimately to the final users and thus sales that will stick?

Chicken or Egg - With many Consumer Internet businesses, that is the crucial question.  Can you acquire a critical mass of users in bulk by partnering with others in a more traditional distribution sense?  I haven't heard anybody say you can put a cool app in the store and just sit back and let iTunes make you rich.  How do you create a brand, demand pull, PR buzz, SEO and all the other basics of marketing?  

Pricing - One of the hardest parts of building a business in a new arena is coming up with a price list.  What are the psychological aspects?  Do you want haute couture branding or haute Costco?  Can you assess the price elasticity of your product?  If things aren't moving fast enough, will a lower price help or hurt?  That's a hard question to test, since most everyone would claim to want a lower price.  Do you have enough built into your pricing to cover all who need to make a margin in the channels?

I know this is essentially all questions, but no two businesses will have the same answers.  Those who can get to the right answers are the ones that can scale and become winners.

<photo HarperCollins>