The Personal Brand.

Startup success is more dependent on the founder's Instagram content than it is on the product they are selling.

I believe in the product. I believe that by building something genuinely incredible, people will buy it, tell their friends, the company will gain a following, and find success along the way. This is the model that I was taught, but I think it has changed. You can succeed by doing the exact opposite.

You can market yourself, gain a following, and then deliver a product, any product. We see it everywhere with influencer merchandise, digital products, and corporate giants built entirely around an individual. Gaining the following does not have to be through pretending to be successful though. Some people are talented entertainers and gain a following by getting a pet duck and playing pranks on their mother until an entire generation knows their name. I actually respect this method so much more than the solopreneur coaches and digital product pyramid schemers who copy and paste ChatGPT into twitter all day. For the purpose of argument though, let's bring this back to the 'scalable company' or 'startup' world. These are companies with a real vision, product, and team. They have the chance to change the world, but they can only focus on so many things, and in 2024 at the top of that list is - The Personal Brand.

I am the founder and CEO of a tech startup in 2024. The absolute worst part of my week is Friday because it is my personal brand day, in which I write content for the following week, schedule posts, and write thought provoking content that gets people to look at me. In some ways, this is really beneficial for my company. It strikes conversation, it helps us get advice, it forces me to research the market, and it leads to valuable partnerships and connections. Yet, it feels fundamentally so wrong, and a lot of other founders feel the same way. We all agree that it is crucial to build a personal brand and there is nothing more valuable to the scalability or identity of a startup, but we also all agree that it feels like snake oil. Why?

Well, let's start with one of these 6 common sayings.

“You have two ears and one mouth for a reason.” -Epictetus

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear” -Ram Dass

“Pride comes before a fall” -Proverbs 16:18

“A humble heart is the vessel of wisdom” -Origin unclear

“The brighter the picture, the darker the negative” -Origin unclear

“Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.” Francis Bacon

I could go on and on forever. We are taught from a young age to be humble, quiet, diligent, private, and focused on whatever it is that we are doing – to mind our own business. Unfortunately, in 2024, thanks to the creator economy, it is nearly impossible to abide by these principles, AND build a venture backable company.

Part of this goes beyond entertainment and branding, it's the simple fact that there are fewer differentiating factors in product & brand in 2024. With AI dominating the advertising language, and a world of tools that streamline almost every company operation, there is less identity around every startup. So we are left with the only unique thing behind a company: Its founders. Consumers turn to more personal channels like Instagram & TikTok, to get a genuine look and understanding at a product or brand, via its founders. Companies know this and they push the founders to do personal brand marketing, a lot.

It makes perfect sense; the sheer exposure possible through social media is crazy. Imagine it's 1975 and all of a sudden people began spending 6-8 hours a day looking at billboards. Well, every company in the world would pour their resources into billboard ads. It's not 1975, and most of us ignore billboards, along with Instagram ads, but we do spend 6-8 hours a day scrolling through personal content. Most of us are swiping past the billboards, but getting hooked into the 'my morning routine as a CEO.' Meaning brands can advertise direct to consumer in this hyper-personal manner, as if the CEO is speaking face to face with every customer in the world.

The result of this is a bias towards doing the talk a lot more than doing the walk and we are left in a world of founders forced to focus more on their personal brand than the product itself. I cant bring myself to do this, but I do understand that every minute I invest in building my product, instead of my following, makes me less immune to the pivots and failures of entrepreneurship.