Learn & iterate

The post-mortem flow

Every shipped post gets a structured post-mortem. Here's how to read it and what to do with it.

7 minUpdated 2026-04-19

When you move a post to Published, paste the live URL. 48 hours later, distro runs a post-mortem: a structured analysis of how it performed and what the data says about next steps.

What gets analyzed

  • Platform metrics (views, engagement rate, clicks, bookmarks where available)
  • Comparison to your app's median for this platform
  • Comparison to the evaluation prediction — did it beat or miss the composite score?
  • A virality score (0–100) relative to your baseline

The report sections

Three parts:

  1. Summary — 2–3 sentences on what happened. "Tuesday's LinkedIn post did 3.4× your median — hook landed harder than expected."
  2. Learnings — bullet list of specific things to repeat or avoid. "Numeric hooks on LinkedIn Tuesday mornings consistently outperform." "Over-specifying the CTA suppresses engagement."
  3. Next actions — 2–3 experiments worth running. "Test a second numeric-hook LinkedIn post next Tuesday." These flow back into your Inbox as pre-seeded ideas.

Why 48 hours

Engagement on most platforms settles by 48 hours. Running the analysis earlier produces reports that change when numbers settle; running later delays the learning loop. We chose 48h as the compromise.

When the engagement is zero

Posts that flop get post-mortems too. Often they're more useful than winners — a flop with a strong composite evaluation score tells you something about the evaluation (or the platform) that a 3× winner doesn't. The report handles this case with a different framing ("why it didn't land").