(2024-11-08) Verna You Dont Need To Build A Personal Brand

Elena Verna: You don't need to build a personal brand. Trying to build your personal brand early in your career is pointless. Instead, focus on doing the best work of your life, and your brand will follow.

When people talk about what you’ve accomplished, your personal brand will grow organically. Chase the brand first, and you’re putting the cart before the horse.

*Another way to look at this is to compare personal brand efforts to any given company’s brand work. Andrew Chen wrote an amazing post about branding for early-stage startups:
“Brand marketing is mostly useless. Startups build a great brand by being successful, finding product market fit and scaling traction, etc.
A great brand is the lagging indicator of success

“Wait, but Elena… YOU have a personal brand!?”
Does it feel a bit odd hearing this hot take from me? It might look like I’ve intentionally ‘built’ my brand. But honestly, that’s never been the goal—even today.

Sure, I’ve invested in public speaking, posting on LinkedIn, this newsletter, and creating courses for Reforge—but that came later in my career and alongside meaningful operator work that I was actively engaged in.
And my primary aim was always to democratize knowledge

Personal Branding ≠ Content Creation

While I frown upon personal brand building, I do encourage people to share content from the insights they’ve collected

creating really good content is a valuable thing.

Story time: How I did it.

My journey into sharing knowledge began with public speaking. And let me tell you… it was rough

My big break was a unique situation—I met Brian Balfour at Reforge. This was the real turning point for me, and was the first step-function change: He put me in front of relevant audiences. This allowed me to find the people who actually were interested in what I had to say! Plus, Brian straight up told me: ‘Don’t just talk about one dashboard for your keynote. That is boring. You need to give people the right context, tell them a story, and help them see why it matters to them.’

Getting to create courses for Reforge was an amazing feedback loop.

The only reason that I set out on my own was when I decided that I wanted to explore solopreneurship. Again, this wasn’t out of the interest of ‘building a brand,’ but to diversify my acquisition channels for my solopreneurship business. I initially started with LinkedIn to increase my reach, but I later added Substack to have ownership of my audience.

Side note: The memes.

If I do have a brand, I would say my memes are a big part of it. Was that some sort of clever strategy to craft a unique brand for myself?
No. I just like memes

So, again: The choice to spend more time creating content and posting more than just the occasional insight was directly related to my decision to leave full-time roles.

This is also related to how much ‘market demand’ I was experiencing. After a certain amount of time, people were asking me to post more!