Should you build a personal brand?

When I post about personal branding, replies in the comments often declare that all SaaS CEOs should be active on LinkedIn.

That's a complete misconception.

Not every CEO is right for personal branding.

I understand the clamour. Aside from a great product, a successful personal brand is one of the most valuable assets any SaaS CEO could own.

It helps you build brand awareness and attract customers, talented employees, partners, and investors.

But not everyone has the ingredients required to build that authority. That's why many SaaS CEOs try and fail to build their own brand.

And, if we have such conviction on the merits of a founder-led brand…

Why is it so hard to find CEOs who are good at it?

In preparation for this article, I was trying to come up with a list of CEOs who built a successful personal brand (before their own company became famous).

It wasn't a long list.

I asked one of the few who are, Chris Savage of Wistia, whether personal branding was over-hyped. Here's what he had to say:

"Building a personal brand is overhyped with startups and underhyped for scale-ups and established brands. But a personal brand is not enough or a real strategy. To stand out, you need to build remarkable products and experiences."

It's interesting that, whilst Wistia wasn't entirely bootstrapped, it wasn't VC-funded either. They've mostly grown on the back of profitability rather than outside investment.

That’s unusual for a SaaS.

Product certainly helped them punch above their weight, but maybe personal brand did too (as well as a great product).

It's no doubt hard to build a personal brand as a SaaS CEO. That probably explains why there’s so few. But Chris, Patrick Campbell, Nathan Barry, Nathan Latka, and others have proven that it's possible, and they’ve certainly proved the value of one.

Later in this series, I'll discuss who should and shouldn't invest time in building a personal brand.

First, let's talk about differentiation

I've spoken in previous articles about the importance of differentiation. From a positioning perspective, SaaS success comes when you find white space. Everyone is going left, you go right.

What's interesting is that personal branding completely scrambles that theory.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe in the core concepts of positioning. But when you introduce personal branding into the mix, it changes the game.

A successful personal brand enjoys an unfair advantage.

Let me explain.

When prospects compare companies, it's a transactional interaction

They're looking for data, pricing, and features. They want to understand how your product is different from the alternatives.

That's why positioning is important. As a brand, you're trying to create favourable ingredients that make your product seem different (in a desirable way) from every other option in the market.

Because businesses are commoditised

Think about Sketch - an incredibly popular product amongst designers. Then Figma came along, and within a few years, they dominated the market for UI design, pulling over a large chunk of Sketch's happy users.

Why and how did this happen?

Figma was simply a better product with superior community and collaboration features.

Sure, people liked Sketch, but users had no emotional connection with the brand. Customers jump ship, with zero remorse, when a far better alternative comes along, regardless of how long we've been with our current provider.

That doesn't happen when people are buying from people

I asked Chris Savage a second question, to give me one non-obvious upside of a personal brand from his own experience:

"Some people know you before they know your company, which is disarming. I've found that I hear different types of feedback and levels of openness in conversations when someone knows you before the company."

When a SaaS CEO builds a personal brand, they find that many customers buy the person as much as the product.

And, when a person buys from a person they effectively side step the whole comparison exercise - differentiation is no longer visible or necessary.

I'm not saying you shouldn't differentiate your brand. You want to attract as many customers as possible, and some won't come through personal brand connections. They may come through paid or search traffic, for example.

But prospects coming via a personal brand are the easiest to convert and retain…

Because a personal brand is a moat

More than that, it's an emotional connection. You can have that with companies, but it's less pronounced.

People want to work with people who share their vision and values, and that matters more than we often think.

Let's say you see an incredibly talented performance marketer on LinkedIn. Every week, he's dropping gold on building a SaaS pipeline through ads. His CV is impressive and he has testimonials from brands you know and admire.

But, as frequently as he delivers valuable marketing advice, he also shares personal opinions on Climate Change. He doesn't believe it's real and often derides on environmental campaigners.

If you're a green advocate, do you want to work with this guy?

Probably not.

But equally, this works in reverse.

Instead of being a guy who denies climate change, let's say he's someone who, every weekend, collects litter across his local natural habitat. So, weekdays he posts gold on performance marketing, weekdays he shares his work on cleaning the local neighbourhood.

Suddenly, this guy is personal branding gold, and that gold will help him punch way above his weight.

Here's an example of how powerful personal brand is in action

The post from Dave Gerhardt shows just what a leveller a personal brand is in SaaS:

What makes this even more interesting is when you add the employee count to each company:

Sparktoro are punching above their weight

And who's behind Sparktoro's marketing?

It's no coincidence at all that it's two strong personal brands: Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad.

But look at the other overachieving example. Not to the same extent, but they are punching.

It's Hockeystack.

Really, this is all about content

HockeyStack has unrivalled content developed through a database of unique insights. Their most recent, for example, showed that it takes 450 impressions to create a marketing-qualified lead. Few companies have that kind of data to find that insight and tell that story, but HockeyStack does because they have a large pool of SaaS businesses using their product.

It's a similar story for Ahrefs and Gong in their respective markets.

This is not a case of company content or personal content.

It's both.

The content you create as a personal brand differs from a company page's.

It’s about personal experiences, showcasing what you believe. Stories that you simply can’t share via a company page.

If you're consistent, over time, you build an audience that trusts, likes, and engages with you, regardless of whether your product or content is explicitly differentiated.

That's the benefit of a personal brand

Personal brand isn't about positioning and comparison. It's about personal stories and points of view, and it's that unique point of view that provides the differentiation.

But you develop a differentiated point of view because you're producing content, not the other way around.

More on that in the next article.