Personal Branding for Founders: How I Built Mine From Zero

Personal branding is the reason you know who I am. In January 2021, five boxes arrived at my house holding 500 copies of a marketing book I had written in three months while pregnant with my third child. There was one problem. I had just sold my first business, the Instagram account went with the sale, and I had no audience to sell a single copy to. Everything I know about building a personal brand comes from digging out of that hole.

How I started from zero

Scrolling TikTok one night, I watched a low-production video of a woman describing how she got fired and started a business. It had 20,000 views and job offers in the comments. That was my signal. I committed to a minimum of three videos a day, seven days a week. Most of them were me opening my book at a random page and delivering the tip straight to camera. No lighting rig, no editor.

Three months later I had 70,000 followers and had sold more than 1,000 books before the launch event even happened. Then the opportunities started compounding: paid brand videos, podcasts, panels. My policy was say yes and think later, and I filmed behind-the-scenes content about every gig, which attracted the next wave of inbound. Hero Packaging's awareness lifted with it.

Founder content is what made Hero Packaging a household name for businesses. Not an influencer campaign. Me, showing up on camera as the founder, over and over, for nine years. Plenty of founders feel like imposters because they compare their content to polished influencer brands, which is like a beginner tennis player comparing themselves to Federer. The comparison is the problem, because the whole point of a founder brand is the humanisation, and nobody can out-you you.

What is personal branding, really

Strip the buzzwords and personal branding is being known for specific things by people who can act on that knowledge. Customers who buy, organisers who book you to speak, producers who invite you on podcasts, founders who join your community. Your face and your experiences become a channel your business can never lose in an acquisition, an algorithm change or a platform ban. I learned that the hard way when my first business's Instagram left with the sale.

Know where you want to go

Oprah once told Trevor Noah that people arrive because they know the destination. Ask yourself what you actually want from a personal brand. A new income stream. Stage time. Coaching clients. Teaching at scale. Clear goals tell you which opportunities to chase and which to decline. Without them you end up optimising for follower counts, which is a vanity treadmill with no exit.

Build your channels like a business

Treat the brand as a business whose product is your skills. Choose one name and keep it identical everywhere. Mine is Sell Anything Online. Register every social handle now, even the platforms you have no intention of using yet. Stand up a simple website with your bio, your expertise, your services and your awards, so anyone who wants to book you can find the receipts.

Then start on exactly two channels. One inside your comfort zone, one outside it. Two is enough to build momentum without the burnout of trying to feed five platforms from day one.

The layering method beats finding your niche

At a conference I was once asked to name my single 'genius zone'. I hated the question. Picking one niche pigeonholes you and throws away most of what makes you interesting. My alternative is the layering method: treat every significant experience you have lived as expertise, and write them all down.

• Big personal experiences. For me: immigrating to Australia, never quite belonging at school, raising three kids, choosing the right partner in life and business.
• Big business experiences. Quitting jobs, starting a copycat business, scaling B2B ecommerce, growing too fast, expensive financial mistakes, writing a book.
• Topics you genuinely love talking about.
• Things that helped you get here: quotes, people, rituals, tools.
• Your goals, stated out loud.

Each layer is bookable. Create content across all of them, repeatedly, and list them on your website and LinkedIn where event organisers and podcast producers can find them. The person who can speak on resilience, ecommerce growth and immigrant ambition gets booked three times as often as the person who filed themselves under one keyword.

Over-prepare, because confidence is manufactured

When I was booked on The Mentor with Mark Bouris, I was warned he goes off script. So I wrote out answers to the questions his team supplied, then wrote answers to the questions I predicted he would actually ask. I played ten of his old episodes and paused after each question to answer it aloud. I read one of his books, mined his press coverage and memorised his Wikipedia page. That is not perfectionism. It is deep research so nothing catches you off guard, and it is the difference between surviving an opportunity and converting it.

Make your story about the audience

The worst speakers narrate their own story for 55 minutes and hand over one tip at the end. The best ones convert every story into a takeaway: here is what happened to me, and here is what I want you to take from it. People do not follow you to admire your life. They follow you to improve theirs. Every piece of content should pass that test.

Personal branding advice from Mark Bouris

Bouris sold Wizard Home Loans for $500 million, hosted The Apprentice, and runs The Mentor podcast. When I interviewed him for my book, his advice went far beyond content tactics. A few of his principles stuck with me.

Profile your audiences properly, plural. He can describe exactly why 18-year-olds follow him: private-school kids of hard-working parents who know nobody is gifting them a house deposit, so they research property and saving, which is his territory. Go that deep on each segment. Then speak only to the people who like you. Trying to convert critics is wasted energy, and broadening your message to please everyone loses the people who followed you for your original ideas.

“Time builds familiarity, familiarity builds trust, and trust builds relevancy. The people you trust most earned it over years, and a personal brand works exactly the same way.”

He also taught me the idea of currency: attaching your stable core beliefs to wherever attention currently sits. Health and longevity hold attention right now, so he created Project 100, his plan to live to 100 as an active grandfather, which fuses the trend with what he genuinely cares about. And he punctuates consistent expertise with surprise, like 20-minute ice baths, because where attention goes, money flows. Expertise alone plateaus.

His reframe on comparison might be the most useful thing in the whole interview. Entrepreneurs who take real risks are perhaps 2 per cent of people. Stop measuring yourself against the top of that 2 per cent. Measure against the 98 per cent who never tried. Your true peers respect your mistakes because they understand the risks behind them.

And then there is readiness. Bouris keeps outfit changes in his office and learned to do his own TV makeup, because when a network calls for a finance expert at short notice, the person who can walk on set in an hour gets the slot. He goes further and manufactures opportunity: his PR agent connects him with executive producers, and he once noted that writing a $10,000 cheque to a struggling business earns him exposure that would cost a brand more than $500,000 in advertising. You do not need his budget to copy the principle. Research what event organisers and podcast producers actually need, position yourself as the obvious answer, and ask. Say yes especially when everyone else would say no.

Personal branding examples worth studying

Flex Mami is my favourite case study. She stacked niche but powerful intersections, going from club DJ to beauty DJ, and became the best at a category she partly invented. She shot her shot relentlessly, asking for the MTV contact and becoming a presenter within 12 months of starting DJing. Her content style is what she calls bids for connection: made to start conversations with real people, never bait for sponsors. And she holds conviction. If you keep insisting there is nothing interesting about you, she would tell you a personal brand is not your path.

Study Bouris for durability, Flex Mami for audacity, and any founder in your own industry who shows up daily for humanity. Then stop studying and post.

Your first week of personal branding

• Write down why you want a personal brand and what it should produce in two years.
• Choose one name, register the handle on every platform, and pick your two starting channels.
• Map your layers: personal experiences, business experiences, favourite topics, the things that helped you, and your goals.
• Film one piece of content from each layer, straight to camera, no production.
• Post daily and say yes to the first opportunity that arrives, then film the behind-the-scenes of it.

I wrote a full chapter on building a personal brand near the end of How to Sell Anything Online, followed by the complete Mark Bouris interview. If you want the layering method worksheets and the whole system, it is all in the book.