I never meant to build personal brands

A lot of entrepreneurs start the same way.

They see a large market.
They see a path to make money.
And they go build.

It works for a while.

But often, it is not deeply aligned. It is just effective.

And then, for the ones who figure it out, a second question emerges:

What do I actually want to build?

That is the second mountain.

A place where money still matters, but meaning matters more.

Where impact, identity, and curiosity start to take the lead.

For whatever reason, I did not wait.

In my mid-20s, I went straight into that second mountain.

Less certainty.
More ambiguity.
An industry that was still forming in real time.

And the truth is, I never set out to build in personal branding.

But I did know two things about myself:

1. I valued self-expression.
   I believed it was how you find your people and your path.

2. I found deep fulfillment in helping others unlock their potential.

So instead of chasing a category, I chased what felt aligned.

That took shape in ways that, on the surface, looked disconnected:

• Building a writing platform in college, Wish Dish, to bring people together through content and community

• Creating a six-figure ticket sales program for the Atlanta Hawks and Braves across hundreds of student organizations

• Building a founder community inside a venture ecosystem

• Running a book launch for a CEO in transition, helping him activate his voice, his message, and his next chapter

Individually, those experiences do not look related.

But they were all driven by the same thread:

Helping people express who they are and connect that expression to real opportunity.

On the Personal Brand Industry

Personal branding (to me) was never about:

A LinkedIn post.
A newsletter.
A podcast.
Short-form video.
Outbound campaigns.

Those are just artifacts.

What matters is the connective tissue. The system that ties identity to visibility, and visibility to opportunity.

That realization clicked for me during a book launch project.

It opened my eyes to adjacent worlds like speaking, publishing, and PR, and I saw something clearly:

Personal branding sat at the center of it all.

Not as a tactic.
But as infrastructure.

On the Opportunity

What is interesting is this:

Personal branding might be one of the largest total addressable markets because it applies to everyone.

Every up and coming leader and professional.
Every executive.
Every founder.
Every operator navigating what is next.

And yet, despite its scale, there has not been a truly scalable system to help people:

• Understand who they are

• Express it clearly across platforms

• And translate that into real-world outcomes

That is the gap.

For the past eight years, we have been deep in it.

Learning how these fragmented pieces of brand, content, distribution, reputation, and relationships, actually work together.

And more importantly, how to make that system:

• More accessible

• More structured

• And far less manual

What’s Ahead

Next week, we will start sharing what we have been building and the consumer level.
We’ve also been building at the enterprise level.

The goal is simple:

Make personal brand infrastructure scalable.

To reduce friction.
To increase clarity.
To help more people turn who they are into something that works for them.

Looking back, none of this was obvious.

It only happened because I trusted the pull toward what interested me and stayed in it long enough for the dots to connect, without realizing I was swimming in a world, with tons of opportunity, problems to solve, and a market made up of billions of people.

Community Note

A few years ago, I sat next to Andy Hilger, one of the most thoughtful leaders I have met.

He helped build Allegis Group into one of the largest recruiting companies in the country.

He also recently released a TEDx Talk on career development, especially relevant in a world shaped by AI.

His message is simple, but important:

Do not over-index on what you do today.
Focus on how you position yourself for what is next.

Worth the watch.