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 think it's better to build the product first as you can base the brand off of the product. Maybe by linking the brand name to what you do etc.. or have an indicative icon.
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@soham_jain That is quite soft IMO, but really worth trying.
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I think ideal approach is somewhere in the middle. You build, but at the same time trying to create social presence as well.
"Build in public" works great in such a case. But at the same time, I agree that it is hard to handle everything at the same time. Personally, I built a good product, but have problems marketing that...
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@danshipit + you need to be on a specific platform to somehow make it "popular"... e.g. Twitter works best for buildinpublic, but it doesn't mean that your target audience is here.
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@busmark_w_nika Yeah, this is so true - IMHO most of the build in public community don't buy 😄
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@danshipit yeah, they are developers, they can build that solution themselves. It is more a moral support :D
I feel that nowadays many influential individuals create products and sell them by leveraging their personal influence. Followers tend to buy into the person's influence rather than the product itself. As a result, many good products got overlooked, while the ones being heavily promoted are often not that great.
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@new_user___1342026a42fd75c68982b4a You are not so far from the truth. They have a personal brand and the salty water they can trade :D
I lean strongly toward the product side rather than the personal brand, for the sake of value clarity.
The major risk with a personal brand is that it distorts the company's real value. If engagement relies too heavily on the affection or admiration people have for an individual, the evaluation of the product becomes subjective. This masks product flaws and slows down innovation. A product must be able to stand on its own in the market, based solely on its utility and intrinsic value.
I also agree with your point. I actually made that exact mistake with my first e-commerce store, specifically with my emails and Facebook account. Back then, it didn't cause any major issues because it was just a small e-shop that I could easily manage solo. However, I didn't make that mistake again with my current SaaS.
As Marie Curie wrote in her biography of Pierre Curie: “In science, we must be interested in things, not in people.” The same applies to entrepreneurship.
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@giuseppemessina partially agree but people need some face to trust :)
We've lived both sides of this at MRVL and the honest answer is neither approach is wrong — the mistake is conflating the two.
Here's what we learned shipping 28+ apps:
The personal brand opens the door. The product has to walk through it.
my credibility as a founder means people give our apps the benefit of the doubt on first download. That's real and it compounds. But if the product doesn't deliver, the personal brand actually accelerates the damage — people feel personally misled, not just disappointed by software.
On the concern about people overlooking flaws: we actually found the opposite. A strong personal brand attracts more direct, honest feedback because people feel a relationship with you. They tell you what's broken because they want you to succeed. Anonymous products get silent uninstalls.
On the operational point — this is the one most people get wrong and you've identified it perfectly. Every MRVL app has its own brand, its own social handles, its own identity. John's personal brand is the umbrella. The products stand alone underneath it. That separation is intentional from day one precisely because of the handover problem you described.
The framework that works:
Personal brand builds trust and audience
Product brand captures and converts that trust
They reference each other but never depend on each other
The founders who get into trouble are the ones who never drew that line. Their personal Twitter becomes the support channel. Their personal email becomes the business email. Then when they want to sell or step back, there's nothing to hand over.
Build both. Keep them separate. Let one feed the other.
I think it depends on your product. if you are building something on consumer side, you would want to build personal brand first but if its B2B space its better to build product first
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@pookisenpai But now, even building a personal brand in B2B makes sense; you can catch the investors more easily.
Like many of the comments here, the point about "starting with a personal brand causes biased feedback" is very true. However, product distribution is tough if you're not a marketing expert, and getting that initial traction, that initial boost, is genuinely valuable. I'd also argue that a personal brand is timeless: it carries whatever you're working on at any point in the future. The traffic won't always match your exact target, but it's always a considerable help.
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@azouzidesign To be honest, I would use as many marketing channels as possible :D
Built 5 Shopify apps and 5 Chrome extensions solo. Brand came after the product every time — I just shipped. In hindsight the backlink from each launch (Product Hunt, app directories) did more for brand than any pre-launch content. The founders who build personal brands first often have the luxury of time. When you're solo, you ship.
I've been on PH a while but mostly just watching. Always leaned product-first — build something solid, let it speak.
But reading this thread, I'm realizing that trust layer people talk about doesn't materialize the week before launch. You don't need a "personal brand play" — just showing up genuinely, caring about what others are building, that's already more than zero.
That's what I'm working on now.
From my startup experience, pre-branding works best for niche creator-style products, while technical hardware/complex SaaS benefits more from finished-first launches. Match your approach to your product type instead of blindly following one popular trend.