A year ago or so, someone kept DM-ing me and promising to make me “LinkedIn famous” by “building a solid personal brand”.
His approach, you ask? Well, it was a three-parter:
- Post more videos because people want to see and hear you.
- Talk about raw stuff, like your childhood trauma. Cry on camera as many times as possible.
- Rinse and repeat.
He gave me examples too: a client of his got 10K followers from a single video where they talked about their alcoholic, abusive father. Another one got 20K (!) followers by talking about the horrible se xual abuse they had been through. (I’ve never seen those videos or results; I was just told about them.)
I declined — many times, until he got so annoyed and said: “suit yourself. I only work with people who REALLY want to succeed”.
If you find this nauseating, yeah, same.
It’s not just the performative vulnerability side of it. What nauseates me the most is trivializing trauma and making light of it.
Beyond my personal feelings about it, the marketer in me revolts at the idea that this is how you build a personal brand and that personal brands are the only way to riches.
You see, when I got that DM storm from this creep, personal brands were already changing; unbundling, perhaps, because I don’t see them as dying.
And it was about time, if you ask me.
For the better part of a decade, “build a personal brand” was the answer to almost every business question on the internet:
- Need clients? → Build a personal brand
- Need an audience? → Build a personal brand
- Need authority? → Build a personal brand
- Need world peace? → Someone, somewhere, was probably about to suggest a personal brand.
The advice became so common that few people stopped to ask a fairly important question: “What exactly are we building?”
The answer seemed obvious at the time: you build an audience around yourself. People get to know you; they trust you; they follow your work. Eventually, some of them buy.
And to be fair, this worked extraordinarily well for a long time.
An entire generation of creators, consultants, coaches, founders, and experts built businesses this way. Some built audiences larger than media companies. Others turned newsletters into seven-figure businesses. A few became industries unto themselves.
But lately I’ve noticed something interesting.
The people I talk to seem increasingly exhausted by personality-driven internet culture.
They still want expertise.
They still want ideas.
They still want trusted voices.
What they’re losing patience with is the endless performance layer wrapped around all of it:
- Carefully engineered authenticity.
- Perpetual lifestyle broadcasting.
- The feeling that every moment of someone’s existence has been optimized for content extraction.
Somewhere along the way, personal branding became less about expertise and more about maintaining a character.
And characters are exhausting to play forever.
I think we’re watching the beginning of something else.
The great unbundling of the personal brand.
Not because personal brands are disappearing. Quite the opposite, in fact. Humans have always connected with humans. Trust still matters. Relationships still matter. Reputation still matters.
What’s changing is the role personal brands play inside a business: for years, people treated the personal brand as the asset itself.
I increasingly believe the personal brand was the distribution channel all along. That’s a very different thing.
A distribution channel attracts attention. → An asset compounds value.
We’ll talk about that in a second, after a quick message from today’s partner, someone who understands the business value of branding with no performative vulnerability needed.
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I’m thinking a lot about the distinction between assets and channels because attention stopped being a funnel and became a loop long ago (in internet time).
This helps explain a phenomenon that seems confusing at first glance: why do some creators accumulate enormous audiences yet struggle to translate that audience into a durable business?
At the same time, why do some experts with relatively modest audiences build extraordinarily successful companies?
Visibility matters in both cases, sure (its lack is why some amazing experts struggle), but the key difference is that one business is built around a personality and the other one is built around an ecosystem.
While pure-breed creators spend more time in front of the camera, expert-led businesses focus on something else — on things that survive when the founder logs off.
- Research
- Frameworks
- Products
- Communities
- Methodologies
- Books
- Data
- Events
- Intellectual property.
These assets continue creating value even when the creator isn’t actively performing.
A personality-driven business often faces a different reality: its growth depends heavily on continued visibility, continued content production, and continued audience attention.
The founder becomes both the engine and the fuel, which is difficult to sustain, especially because audience behavior is changing.
Familiarity alone fails to convert because younger audiences primarily value authenticity, transparency, and niche relevance. While visibility sparks discovery, long-term loyalty and purchasing decisions require genuine credibility, community-building, and consistent alignment with the consumer’s personal values. [source]
People may enjoy following someone; they may admire them; they may even trust them.
None of those automatically creates demand.
Demand exists when people believe a person can solve a specific problem or help them achieve a specific outcome.
And this is what generates the unbundling of personal brands as we know them
Expertise is finally having a moment.
For years, the internet rewarded broad appeal, so today we’re swimming in broad appeal. Every platform contains an endless supply of charismatic people sharing productivity advice, life lessons, business observations, mindset frameworks, and hot takes.
At some point, charisma becomes abundant, too and, as we know from econ 101, abundance changes markets.
Once something becomes widely available, value migrates elsewhere. In this case, value appears to be migrating toward specificity:
- Specific expertise
- Specific perspectives
- Specific intellectual property
- Specific communities
- Specific outcomes.
The creators who seem unusually resilient right now have often built businesses around ideas rather than identity.
Think about someone like Seth Godin. People certainly know Seth. But the asset isn’t Seth’s personality.
The asset is a body of intellectual property that has accumulated for decades (permission marketing, purple cow, tribes, minimum viable audience, and so on).
People might encounter Seth through the person, but they stay for the ideas.
That’s an important distinction because ideas scale differently than personalities.
Ideas can be taught, licensed, referenced, expanded, applied, shared. Entire ecosystems can develop around them. Personality alone cannot support such a system.
Entertainment vs expertise
I’ve always looked at influencers as entertainers or media persons. People don’t follow them to get advice, to learn, or to get certain outcomes.
They follow them to get entertained and, at most, to figure out what to wear to the beach this summer. And, sure, they may buy a moisturizer they recommend every once in a while.
Expert-led businesses enjoy a different level of trust, though, even if the audience is usually 1/10th of that of an entertainer. Ironically enough, real experts have more influence over their communities than…influencers.
Your next move
I advise you to ignore creeps who tell you to put all your trauma on display to get rich. Sure, post the occasional vulnerable stuff, but only reveal as much as you feel comfortable revealing.
Trauma pr0n doesn’t pay the bills and doesn’t build long-lasting businesses.
There’s a better way to do this:
- Look back at your current assets (blogs, videos, client meeting notes, newsletters, even social media posts).
- Distill methodologies and frameworks from them.
- Name your IP and distribute it heavily.
Whatever field you’re in, from cooking to rocket science, you have your own “purple cow” hiding somewhere in the thousands of docs and assets you’ve produced thus far.
Let that shine for 90% of the time and allot the remaining 10% to your personality.
Because, in the future, the best personal brands will be defined by expertise, not charisma alone.
The Council Bulletin
Speaking of expertise, one of my proudest feats is that every single member of The Council is a bona fide expert. None of them built their business by screaming into a mic or exploiting people’s inner Peeping Toms.
This is why we have such amazing member-led sessions. This week, Ricardo Brito hosted a workshop on designing services that match client maturity. Next week, Humaira Akhter will lead one on finding the Red Thread, the thing that makes YOU unique and helps you build a hard-to-refuse offer around it.
This is a great time to join us!
