The Playbook I’d Follow If I Were Broke, Unknown, and Starting Over

This email is a bit longer than my usual ones. But if you even take 1% of the information I share here and apply it to your personal brand, you can expect to see results in DAYS.

If I were sitting where you are today without any followers, systems, leads and had to rebuild my personal brand.

There’s only ONE blueprint I’d follow and I’ve tested it across dozens of operators, agency owners, creators, and SaaS founders… and I’ve seen what works under pressure.

But let’s start with what doesn’t work:

→ Copying the tone of whoever’s trending that week

→ Spending 3 hours writing a thread that no one asked for

→ Posting recycled advice with no narrative, no proof, and no hook

→ Switching from X to LinkedIn to YouTube and back again with no consistency

→ Building “content” before clarifying what your personal brand is for

People start with tactics or think they can outsmart their audience. But the high-value audience you’re trying to attract, the audience with prospects that will buy from you, won’t reward tactics.

It rewards identity.

And if you build your personal brand right, it can be your most reliable acquisition engine.

So if I were you, here’s exactly what I’d do:

Step 1: Pick a platform

X (Twitter) is still the fastest platform to master. The algorithm favors short-form depth, velocity, and curiosity-based interactions. If you know how to speak, you will grow.

How the X algo works in 2025:

• Replies drive visibility → Reply to 25+ tweets daily with insight

• Content earns followers → Post 2–3 original takes/day (text, images, video)

• Engagement builds virality → 50+ likes, 15+ replies, 5+ bookmarks = lift

• Micro-networks matter → Comment on the same 10–15 accounts daily to get amplified in their timelines

Do this for 30 days, and you’ll start seeing traction.

Do it for 90, and you’ll have a real audience.

But without structure? You’ll burn out, confuse people, or disappear mid-game. So we keep going…

Step 2: Choose your Archetype

This is where most business owners quietly sabotage their growth. They try to sound like someone else. They copy the tone of a viral account, force a voice that isn’t theirs, and wonder why nothing sticks. You don’t need to manufacture a persona. You need to magnify the one that’s already there.

After building hundreds of personal brands, I’ve noticed that most successful founders fall into one of four archetypes. They’re patterns of proven tones of voice that resonate because they reflect how someone already sees the world.

1. The Newsman: This founder curates the future. They’re always plugged in with surfacing trends, highlighting shifts, and delivering sharp insights before the rest of the market catches up. People follow them because they don’t want to miss what’s next. They grow through velocity by being the first voice in the room.

2. The Builder: This one lives in the trenches. They don’t pretend to have it all figured out, they show the process, what they’re building, what’s breaking, what’s working. They let people in behind the curtain. And in doing so, they grow through transparency. Their content becomes a mirror for others walking the same path.

3. The Contrarian: This is the founder who doesn’t care about ruffling feathers. They’re bold, question the status quo, and say the things others are afraid to say because they’ve earned their perspective. They grow through polarity. And in a world of sameness, they’re impossible to ignore.

4. The Flexor: This one gets a bad rep but when done right, it works. The Flexor leads with receipts. They post screenshots, dashboards, lifestyle shots, and success signals. Their brand is built on dominance. They’re the ones who can say “I did it” and back it up.

Now the important thing is to pick the one that reflects your reality. If you’re in the early stages of your business, lead as the Builder. If you naturally see patterns others miss, be the Newsman. If you’ve always felt allergic to conventional wisdom, then Contrarian’s for you. If you want a quick cash grab for your offer and want to attract a young audience, commit to the Flexor persona.

Misalignment here is fatal because you won’t stick a persona long enough for your audience to find out who you really are.

Step 3: Define 3 Content Pillars

If your content is all over the place, so is your audience’s perception of you. That’s why you need to pick 3–5 recurring topics that directly relate to:

• What you solve

• What you’ve done

• What your market cares about

For me, it’s:

→ Personal branding

→ Founder psychology

→ Systems + scaling

Once your audience can anticipate what you talk about, you become followable.

Step 4: Build a Content Vault

Build a vault of assets that you can pull from

→ Screenshots from client DMs

→ Frameworks you teach behind the scenes

→ Slack messages that show transformations

→ Mistakes that became lessons

→ Pricing breakdowns, funnels, before/after shots

Then organize these into folders so you never run out of content again.

This is how you start to compound trust.

Step 5: Master the Content Flywheel 

The real secret isn’t “cracking” one platform. It’s about learning to stack trust across all of them rhythmically so you don’t burn out. We call this cross-platform trust stacking. And once it clicks, every piece of content you make starts pulling more weight than before. Here’s the flow we use:

→ X (formerly Twitter) is your testing ground. This is where your raw ideas go to live or die. You use it to sharpen your takes, test new angles, and see what cuts through the noise. It's where you move fast, post often, and collect trust.

→ LinkedIn is your polish layer. Once something works on X, you bring it here, cleaned up, expanded, and paired with proof. Think screenshots, client wins, process breakdowns. This is where your authority starts to take shape.

→ Email is your trust bank. It’s where you stop broadcasting and start building intimacy. You share the behind-the-scenes, the lessons, the frameworks, the stories that can’t be shared in long-forms or value tweets. It’s where your audience stops scrolling and intentionally checks in to listen

→ YouTube (Miro breakdowns, face-to-camera storytelling, or longform teardown videos) is where you deepen the moat. It’s slow to build, but incredibly sticky. If someone watches you talk for 20 minutes and walks away with a new worldview, you’ve just earned real equity in their mind.

This system creates rhythm by turning short-form engagement into long-form trust. It lets you reuse your ideas without repeating yourself. And most importantly, it builds a personal brand that compounds. This is the infrastructure that makes content feel easy. Because once you understand how it all fits together, you start showing proof.

And if you don’t show proof, people assume you have none. If people assume you have none then you have no trust and without trust, you’ll always be stuck running after leads instead of attracting them.

The only way to rise above the internet noise is to craft a brand that communicates substance with style, clarity with conviction.

— Wiz

P.S. If you’re ready to build a brand people trust before they ever hop on a call with you, I’ve got two options:

→ Utopia: Our DIY system where I give you all the frameworks and playbooks

→ Mogul Media: Our DFY agency where we do it for you, start to finish

Just reply to this email and I’ll point you in the right direction.