The part of a personal brand not even the biggest authority can outsource

I've been thinking about how much personality matters in a personal brand.

Before you start thinking about the “influencer personality,” let me stop you right there.

I’m not talking about the on-camera energy or the branded aesthetic.

I mean more in the sense that makes one founder impossible to confuse with another.

- The strong opinions.

- The specific obsessions.

- The stories only you can tell.

- The things that genuinely piss you off.

- The takes you'll defend publicly.

- The way of explaining something that sounds like you.

These are variables that most founders water down, but it's the exact layer the market attaches to.

Here's what watering it down looks like in practice:

- Safe takes.

- Perfectly formatted posts.

- Snooze frameworks that could have been written by anyone in your industry.

- Language sanded down until nothing sharp is left.

- The desire to be as agreeable as possible, so nobody could ever push back on anything you said.

The output feels professional and it reads like quality content.

But it disappears on the timeline within 24 hours because nothing about it was uniquely you.

David Ogilvy figured this out in advertising 60 years before content marketing existed. His most quoted line was “the consumer isn't a moron, she's your wife.” The market can smell when someone is being sanitized for its approval, and it responds accordingly.

A quick side note before the second half. If you've been reading these emails for a while and thinking about building out your personal brand to become a dynamite presence with a reliable system underneath it, this is your reminder that we do this for 60+ founders inside Mogul. 7, 8, and 9-figure operators. You show up for 45 minutes a week and stay at the center of it, book a call here to learn more.

What people remember about you is the niche, polarizing, slightly weird things you post about that nobody else in your industry would.

This could be

- What you care about.

- What annoys you.

- What you're strangely obsessed with.

- The specific words you use to explain something that everyone else in your space explains differently.

- The story from your business.

That's the part people attach to you.

You can outsource almost everything.

- The systems.

- The writing.

- The distribution.

- The data tracking.

But if the person at the center of the machine is generic, if the source material is sanitized, if the opinions are hedged, if the obsessions have been edited out, if the whole point of the brand is to avoid saying anything anyone might disagree with then no system in the world will make it work.

The machine amplifies whatever is at the center.

If what's at the center is forgettable, the machine just amplifies forgettable content at scale.

The whole system gets stronger when the person at the center is impossible to confuse with anyone else.

Be that person first.

– Wiz

P.S. If you want to see how we build the system around founders without erasing the specific, opinionated version of them that made them worth following in the first place, book a call and I’ll walk you through it.