Build your brand before your product, or launch first and reveal yourself later?
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.
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.
Which opens the question:
Which approach brings more advantages in your opinion?
Replies
Product first gives a cleaner signal, brand first gives faster distribution. The risk is choosing speed over truth.
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@reid_anderson3 invest in both and you have marketing + product on steroids (when it is done correctly) :)
@reid_anderson3 Spot on Reid. Choosing speed over truth is the biggest risk of brand first distribution. As I'm building on my own tool, I find that a cleaner signal (product first) is harder to get but much more reliable for long term PMF. How do you decide when the signal is strong enough to start scaling the brand?
@reid_anderson3 This resonates deeply. For B2B retail specifically, I've found that the signal from product-first is cleaner but slower — store owners want to see the product working before they'll even take a call. But without the founder brand, you can't get in the door to show them. The two aren't sequential, they're parallel tracks that reinforce each other.
@reid_anderson3 agree with you, The product is key, but without marketing, even the best product will be forgotten
The hybrid approach seems safest. Build quietly, then share once there is something real to react to.
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@ian_maxwell1 or do it simultaneously :) People live authenticity and sharing in real time, because it feels more current to them!
Visla
It truly depends on what you're trying to build, "personal brand" is overrated when it comes to business and technology. Not unimportant, but overrated. You build a brand, great, but your business sucks, or the tech is useless. Your brand just became useless.
The truth is that the brand won't matter if you don't have substance behind it. You will still need to be more than just a brand name.
SBF got as far as he did until the checks started to bounce. Theranos, and Elizabeth Holmes were a good brand, until it wasn't. Charlie Javice, and Frank were a great brand name for a while, until the JPM acquisition, and debacle. Heck we can go back to the DeLorean car in the 80s, John DeLorean was the brand, he was the company, Back to the Future made it seem like it was a great idea...but the reality was something completely different.
When you build your business, you are essentially building your brand.
Now if you are an influencer, or a pure marketer, then the rules are different. You are the brand, you are the business, go all in and build that brand.
@mogabr Makes sense, feels like brand without substance just accelerates the fall but the opposite problem exists too. Great products that never get attention because no one’s telling the story. Especially now, distribution is almost part of the product. The real challenge seems to be making both evolve together without one masking the other. How are you thinking about this at an early stage?
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@mogabr @kabirsalunkhe That's a good point and partially why I asked. Because now, everybody is a developer with AI, and we can make as many products as possible, and the real differentiator is becoming distribution and personal brand.
@mogabr @kabirsalunkhe @busmark_w_nika sometimes i feel a hybrid approach makes more sense. I would start building the product, then slowly share the journey once there is something concrete to show.
@mogabr @kabirsalunkhe @busmark_w_nika @deangelo_hinkle I am curious how people separate identity from product in the long run 🤔 especially if the brand grows around the founder’s personality.
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@mogabr Yes, but the thing is that when I am a marketer, I will be (most of the time) dependent on selling my time traded on social media (being consistent, engaging more to feed the algorithm, etc.). I think it is a good asset to have when I launch my product later, but I need to be very cautious about the quality of the product, not to harm my personal brand.
@mogabr Being recognizable helps to reach a wider audience, but in the end, the product has to speak for itself. I am new here, so I'm grateful for all your tips! :)
Strong personal brands can unintentionally bias feedback loops, which is dangerous in early product stages.
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@trevor_nicholas1 so the suggestion is to keep it some time separate and then announce that you stood behind the product?
I used to think product was everything but seeing how community driven launches succeed on PH changed my mind. A personal brand acts like a trust layer before the user even clicks the landing page. It's definitely harder but the conversion floor is much higher.
@emre_yilmaz_easyparser Really interesting angle.
Feels like this is moving search from “retrieval” to “interpretation.”
The hard part will be making sure better UX doesn’t come at the cost of weaker signal quality , curious how you're thinking about that tradeoff.
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@emre_yilmaz_easyparser Now more and more people (founders) invest in their personal brand than in theri product page (esp. on LI) :)
@emre_yilmaz_easyparser @busmark_w_nika you are right. In this era, distribution is the king and it starts with your personal branding. However, as you mentioned, sharing your personal keys, from the account where you built your whole empire, creates real security concerns over time.
@emre_yilmaz_easyparser Exactly this — especially in B2B where the buyer is trusting you as much as the product. In retail tech, store owners aren't buying software, they're buying a relationship with someone who understands their store. The personal brand isn't vanity, it's the first sales call you never had to take.
The founders who scale fastest aren't always the ones with the best product, they're the ones who made it easiest for someone else to explain what they do. If your pitch only lands when you're in the room delivering it, you've built a founder-dependent business, not a brand.
The real test is whether a happy customer can sell it for you in one sentence without you coaching them.
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@verticomply They are just good storytellers (marketers) :)
@verticomply so true, see that a lot these days
I think starting with the brand is usually a great way to build trust and an audience early—but hey, what do I know! 🤷♂️
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@shivyadavus You need to try both ;)
Build the brand first I would say, especially if you are cash strapped to start (like my company is). It helps gain a loyal following base which you can then use to encourage adoption once you launch.
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@milescward We belong to the same team! 😁
@milescward What are the most effective free or low-cost ways to build a brand audience before a product launch, specifically for a solo founder without time for community management or live chat engagement?
It's funny you bring it up because a lot of founders who do have established personal brands before a product forget that the personal brand is the journey and the product, well, it's the product. The product in my head has a bigger problem to solve. They can be 2 different ecosystems and co-exist. Also, the point of a personal brand is not to sell, it's to position. That differentiator matters. That alone must explain that your product must have a space of its own and not connect its entirety to the personal. Have its own domain, its own space, its own social media all from scratch. That's what gives space for both to simultaneously exist and grow.
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@dayal_punjabi Maybe a good thing. I was looking at these two separately, it should go hand in hand :)
I've done both across three apps. Built a faceless branded social presence on Instagram for two of them a meal planning app, hybrid training app had to keep it faceless because of work life balance conflicts (work for a gym and PT). Months of content creation, consistent posting, and it still barely moved the needle.
That burnout from pumping out content across platforms is actually what led me to build my latest product which I am happy to put my face behind but also got branding done.
For this one I went product-first. Shipped it, site is live, free tier open. Getting anyone to see it is a completely different problem. Reddit is hostile to anything that looks like marketing even after months of organic participation. Twitter automation gets zero engagement. Every channel assumes you already have an audience.
Honestly I don't think either approach worked well for me. Brand first burned me out creating content nobody saw. Product first left me with something that works and no way to show people. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle but I haven't found it yet.
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@splitpostio and haven't you seen in those 2 options that one of them was doing better?
@busmark_w_nika The hybrid training app on Instagram had 15 signups globally, consistent likes, people were saving posts. The meal planning app got nothing from the same strategy. So even brand-first was inconsistent across two app the hybrid training niche had a more engaged community on Instagram, the meal planning space is saturated.
I will use posthog to verify where users are being pulled from over the next few months until then I don't have enough data to say either way was better.
P.S. just realised you created the app I've been using for nearly a year.
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@splitpostio Do you mean minimalist phone? :D I am not a developer, just the marketing part.
Regarding the conversions – yeah, it would require a bigger sample to have some "general" conclusions.