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
I don't have enough experience to answer which brings more advantages. But as a user, I know I enjoy seeing #1, but only in moderation in the sense of the founders focusing their content more on the product rather than themselves. For example, if the app is about finding recipes, I strongly prefer the content is generally about food and the founder's personal experiences with it, like their favorite recipes or recipes that are deeply sentimental to them, rather than the founder's entrepreneurial journey.
In other words, I guess I prefer content that's more educational with a touch of personal.
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@christina_m_nguyen I am also this kind of person, but maybe I am biased because I have been building my own personal brand :D
In my experience, founder-first can quietly distort everything. When people are sold on the person, early traction and feedback can look healthier than they actually are. It's the halo effect in action - users overlook real product gaps because they trust the founder. You end up optimizing for the wrong signals and realizing it way too late.
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@sourav_das29 Who knows, maybe I am doing the biggest mistake of my life to showing my face while building the product, we will see :D
If nobody knows who you are yet (i.e. my personal case), the brand-first approach is IMV mostly just self-promotion with nothing behind it. Shipping something real and useful (probably quite hard nowadays, hahaha) at least gives people a reason to care about the person who built it
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@sk_uxpin Yes. The brand position and useful product can redirect the attention from the product to the founder. But you said it – it is pretty difficult to create something useful :D
@busmark_w_nika I wish I was born 50 years ago (from that perspective alone though - I'm more than happy living in the current world :D)
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@sk_uxpin If I was born 50 years ago, I could finally afford a property :DD
@busmark_w_nika too good to be true :D
It's like Apple to Orange.
Completely subjective to each founder's journey. If it's the first product and the founder's career has started. Then product will come first. If the career has been going on for a while then personal brand will help launch the product.
Subsequently working on your personal brand throughout life is advised as jobs, products, companies might change but you are the constant in each..
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@mohit_gupta138 I haven't been thinking about that this way of "timing" but for sure, for me it has always been a personal brand because I didn't have any product, only services tied to me.
@busmark_w_nika Ok, if we were to pull on the time thread a bit. Then maybe think about the balance between launching the second service that was tied to you vs the last one. and the effort that you might have put in each (did it get easier with time and your compounding efforts on personal brand). would love to know
This really comes to what you optimize for speed vs signal .Personal brand gives speed, product-first gives cleaner signal.
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@bruce_warren but would you go with both at the same time?
I'm a brand strategist and I believe both ways work but then has to be done with caution. The only solid reason for building a personal brand behind a product is to help with anticipation towards launch and also help build trust...but then what happens if there's a controversy with the product after launch? It's definitely going to drag you down the drain too. I still believe personal branding works but then it's risky when tied to products. Your personal brand should be about you, your ideologies and all that. Anonymity works because it helps you see beyond the unnecessary hype. It helps you get the facts about your product in its raw form. It's very easy to hide behind hype and it's a dangerous place to be, because you become blind to your product flaws.
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@goodman_thebrandoracle This is the only reason (and fear) why I wouldn't like to link my face with a product. Because if the scandal appears (on one of the sides), everybody will lose.
ur audience and ur icp need to overlap. building a founder brand works great if u're selling to other founders.
if u're selling to plumbers, accountants, or dtc brands, your 5k twitter followers won't buy and u spent 18 months on the wrong channel. brand-first compounds when the people watching are the people buying. otherwise it's just expensive procrastination.
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@saad_el_gueddari yeh, relevant audience is crucial. I couldn't say it better :)
Nika, great post. Honestly, I have been thinking about this for a long time for my own product.
Both approaches — personal brand first or product first — can work, but they definitely speak to different types of founders and products.
Going with the personal brand makes sense if you’re in a crowded space and real differentiation comes from trust, not features. Also, if you’ve already built an audience (and that's the key with this) you’re pretty much launching to people who know you - important!. And if your product is basically an extension of your expertise — you’re living proof that it works.
But sometimes you want the product to stand alone. Maybe it solves a specific problem so cleanly, it doesn’t need your face or story stamped on it. Or you’re building something you want to sell later, or hand off completely — then you need it to exist independently from you.
"Giving someone the keys” problem you mentioned is dead-on and, honestly, founders don’t talk about it enough. I've seen people build everything on their personal LinkedIn, their email, their following — only to wake up and realize they basically made a one-person consultancy instead of a true product. You can’t sell that. You can’t hire someone to run it for you. My opinion, of course.
With PostMine, I was super intentional from day one. I wanted the brand to stand on its own. The product has to speak for itself, without being tied to me forever.
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@sal_georgiou1 As you said, when the space is overcrowded, a personal brand can help significantly. It can help in many ways, but too much attention to personal brand can distort the perception of the product and its qualities.
I lean toward a hybrid, with the product doing the first bit of truth-testing.
For a narrow B2B product, building a personal brand too early can create the wrong feedback. People may like the founder story, but that does not prove the workflow solves a painful enough problem.
What has felt safer for me is to build enough that strangers can react to the actual workflow, then share the thinking behind the product. I would not hide the founder, but I would not make the founder the product either.
The best signal is still: can someone explain the product in one sentence without you being in the room?
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@jinji_huang I think that B2B product can be the most sensitive (as you mentioned). But B2C as well, because people still perceive you like a celebrity/influencer advocating for a product :)
@busmark_w_nika Thanks Nika, that makes sense. I’m seeing the same tension with B2B: trust matters, but over-personalizing the founder story too early can distract from the actual workflow and problem being solved.
For my current project, I’m leaning toward building useful tools and examples first, then gradually letting the brand and founder story become more visible as users understand the value.
Building an asset that stands on its own logic keeps the feedback honest and makes a future exit way cleaner. Founder hype is a fun spark, but being the "single point of failure" in your own DMs is a total scaling nightmare! Sharing the journey without merging your logins is the real power move for a smooth, sustainable launch.
Does the idea of a "faceless" success sound more peaceful to you than being the public face of the project?
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@shyunbill To be honest, I would like to see my product grow without my face because it means that the product is really good :)