I don't think it was easy nor cheating. Both of the founders mentioned here are smart, capable, and engineered whatever advantage they had.

Another perspective on self-promotional articles (not an inherently bad thing) like these is they downplay or omit the influence another venture had on building their current one. The SubmitHub article has a specific question about 'what have been your biggest advantages' and it surprised me that "running a high traffic blog in my target industry with a large email list" wasn't mentioned there. That seems like a huge advantage.

This is a sentiment I've seen in many of the comments here and in the HN comments about your SubmitHub writeup.

It's not meant as a personal attack at you, Jason, or Distrokid's founder. You're all doing great things! It's about breaking down what were likely the major factors in success so that information can be applied in one's own ventures.