1. I've always been on the personal brand side. More and more founders are building it now (sometimes even before the product is ready while it's still in development, before seed fundraising). The CEO builds their position so the product sells more easily at the official launch.

2. But I have experience with people who built the product, scaled it, and only then did we discover who was behind it.

Honestly, with the first approach, I'd be concerned that people invest more in me as a person than in the product. People would idealise the founder and overlook the product's flaws (which could hurt development and constructive feedback).

+ I noticed the most common mistake that many people who started building a personal brand first, connected their product to their personal accounts (emails, social media, etc.) and started having a problem selling these things, because they cannot "give someone keys" to their personal profiles.

Cove has announced that they've been acquihired by Microsoft:

If you were a Cove user:

What this means for Cove

As part of this transition, the entire Cove team has accepted offers to join Microsoft, and the Cove product will be wound down on April 1. Existing users can continue using Cove until then, but we are no longer accepting new sign-ups.

We've built a data export feature so you can take your work with you. We recommend exporting as soon as possible all user data will be permanently deleted on April 1.

To export your data:

1. Sign in to your Cove account and go to your Account page.

2. Click the Export button.

3. You'll receive an email with a download link when your export is ready. The export will be a ZIP of HTML files containing all spaces you've created.

4. To export spaces created by others and shared with you, export each of those spaces individually.

Learn more in our Migration Guide.