In my relatively short life, I’ve launched dozens of business projects. None of them became something I’d brag about as a phenomenal success. I haven’t earned my first million dollars. I haven’t sold a business with a huge multiplier. I haven’t built a money-printing machine that runs itself while I’m off somewhere, not needing to do anything.
Every time a project failed — and there were many — I couldn’t help asking myself: what’s going wrong? Why do others succeed while I fail? How can someone build a successful business on their first attempt when I’m on my 34th (yes, I counted my attempts) try with nothing to show for it?
I’ve been searching for answers all these years, and I think I’m finally closing in on the truth. I’ve been piecing together this puzzle for years, but a puzzle isn’t complete when even one piece is missing. And if there’s a hole, the picture isn’t ready.
After my latest failure — a project I shut down at a loss after investing $25,000, writing it off as another unsuccessful startup — I decided to act radically. I looked at the problem from a completely different angle.
During all these years, I’ve read books and listened to countless “successful” people — those who’ve built businesses and now write those books, record YouTube videos, and produce podcasts sharing their success stories.
I’ve watched people who started much later than me, from almost nothing (well, not exactly nothing — maybe $10,000), accumulate capital of half a million dollars in just a year and a half by successfully flipping a real estate property. I’ve seen startup founders who began just before me, following the same playbook from books like “Zero to One,” succeed where I failed: selling their businesses, earning enough to live on, and now traveling around India, Bali, Thailand, sharing their experiences on social media.
Yet here I still am. After another failed attempt, working at an IT company as a middle manager, using my monthly salary to close another portion of debt. Something isn’t working.
The First Missing Puzzle Piece: Partners
After exhausting seemingly every approach in the never-ending epic of self-development — reading books, listening to podcasts and lectures, including psychology — the one thing I hadn’t tried was actual therapy with a professional. Someone who could ask the right questions and guide me toward meaningful insights.
A successful acquaintance in real estate invited me to try “cinemology” — watching films followed by analysis through a psychotherapeutic lens, studying character behaviors and motivations. I was intrigued. The first film was the “Wall Street” with Michael Douglas, which excellently shows how relationships between people, childhood traumas, and mental frameworks influence final decisions.
This experience led me to therapy sessions with the professional who conducted the cinemology. I wasn’t surprised that sessions with this particular therapist cost three times more than regular ones — he works with business people and uses unconventional methods.
In our session, I laid out all examples of my ventures, explaining how my relationships with partners unfolded and where they ultimately led. One pattern — obvious to him as a professional observer but hidden from me — emerged immediately: I always start business projects with a partner, never alone.
But why? Isn’t this straight from the classic playbook? Understand your strengths, recognize your weaknesses, find someone who compensates for them, who’ll handle what you can’t. Plus, sharing responsibility is easier — the tasks and accountability get divided among multiple people.
And therein lies the main catch. Throughout my life, I’ve been looking for someone to shift responsibility onto. A second “mom” psychologically, whom I could come to with complaints, who would solve problems for me. I saw this mother figure in potential partners.
However, I needed to realize that I alone am enough to run a business. I possess sufficient qualities to make a project successful. If I’m currently lacking something, it’s exclusively my responsibility to take everything into my own hands and bring it to order.
The simplest recommendation — that I can do everything myself — wasn’t obvious to me. This is one puzzle piece I was missing. I’m not saying businesses can’t be built with partners. If you’re successful with partners, that’s wonderful.
I’m saying it depends primarily on psychology and the specific situation applicable to me. For some people, this is completely normal, and they can operate independently without transferring responsibility to others. But for me, it became a compensatory mechanism — a psychological crutch.
The Second Missing Puzzle Piece: Audience
The one area of business I kept delegating to others was finding clients. I’ve always considered myself technical, usually handling product implementation. I can create information systems, build websites, sales funnels, automate business processes, assemble teams, motivate people, and so on. Basically, most business components except marketing and sales.
My business ventures typically ended exactly when they reached that point. Marketing requires money already spent on product development, teams, and other things I enjoy doing that come naturally. Either that, or we needed to find customers, and here I hit a brick wall. I didn’t quite understand how to do this, where to look, why people should buy my products or services. Should I walk the streets? Network? Attend trade shows? The connection wasn’t clicking.
How do all these startups that sell for trillions of dollars operate? I highly doubt Mark Zuckerberg travels to trade shows finding customers one by one for his social network. Somehow it works differently, right? I doubt Travis Kalanick walks the streets meeting people to convince them to install Uber. Something else must be happening.
The only method that made sense was online advertising, which isn’t free. Yes, there are growth hacks many startups used, but that’s usually a story of luck. It might work once but won’t work for your business. It could work, of course, but it’s more like a legend or a one-off case you can’t reliably count on when building a business, because you need consistent customer growth, not just a one-time spike.
And I kept going in circles. The only approach that seemed reasonable and controllable was marketing — buying traffic and advertising the business and product — but that requires money the business isn’t earning yet. How to break this vicious cycle? I didn’t understand until recently. There was something else I successfully ignored all these years.
The solution that’s now my main focus at this stage of my life is the principle: “clients come first.” First the client, then the product.
I won’t build or create any products until I have a customer base that can and will buy this product. And this shouldn’t be a customer base I acquire somehow. It needs to be more reliable, something I don’t have to worry about, something that doesn’t depend on another business. Something I can count on independently.
This approach is called by different names but is widely known as building a personal brand. Because any sale — whether service, product, application, or anything else — ultimately ends with a person making the purchase. Some specific person either transfers money, installs an application, subscribes to your service, or clicks “buy” in an online store. It’s always a human.
Where are people in today’s world? They’re online. Online is the most accessible place almost anyone can reach, with no barriers to entry except perhaps in countries where internet access is restricted.
How can I find these people? The same way audiences are earned by those already doing it: creating something useful with your own hands, creating content. You might roll your eyes and say, “Oh God, more advice about being on social media, building a personal brand, growing an audience.” But think for a moment about what I just said…
People — you need eyes and ears to sell anything. First, there’s no business without people. Business is essentially creating value and convincing others your value is worth their money. That’s any business in very crude terms.
According to a survey, the top reason startups fail is “no market need” (42%), meaning they built something without an audience demanding it. Another 14% failed due to poor marketing (inability to reach customers). This aligns perfectly with what I’ve experienced — building products before establishing who would actually want them.
Accordingly, value relates to specific people — actual individuals to whom your business provides value. And convincing means dialogue with a person in some form, after which they decide to give you money for what you’re offering. This happens with any business.
Trust Is the Ultimate Currency
If you simply buy a product in a store, it convinced you to purchase either by sitting on the shelf or because you automatically buy your favorite brand — Diet Coke, for example — without looking at other products. That is, you already understand some brand, already trust it, have a certain attitude toward it, and it’s very easy to make you spend money on it because all that’s needed is to see the product itself. Something clicks inside, and you make the purchase.
Nielsen finds that 89% of people trust recommendations from people they know most. Even in retail, having a trusted brand dramatically eases the sale: consumers often grab their “go-to brand” on the shelf without reconsidering. That reflects brand familiarity and loyalty reducing friction in purchasing.
If we’re talking about a service business, you need to find someone with a specific unresolved problem they’re willing to pay money for because it will be easier, faster, and in some cases even cheaper than doing it themselves, finding someone, or trying to figure out the problem on their own. Again, this person may be a business owner (for small businesses handling such issues themselves), a middle manager looking for contractors to solve particular tasks (in corporations), or perhaps a beginning entrepreneur seeking freelancers for tasks they don’t want to handle themselves.
“Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business.”
This is the quote from Steve Forbes, who know something about both business and brands.
Now, if I want to build a business that doesn’t depend on social networks — because obviously no platform belongs to me, and I can’t be independent from them, and any social network could ban or block me at any moment, cease working, or become prohibited in a country for whatever reason — then I need mechanisms that allow first, diversification (having backup landing spots, preferably several), and second, audience gathering that maintains contact even if all social networks suddenly disappear.
This is called a client base. Today, one of the most reliable ways to do this is to build an email list — a list of user email addresses that becomes your property, not controlled by any other social networks. You can export it, save it, it’s your database, you can do whatever you want with it, and it’s controlled only by you.
Because you can’t directly manage subscriptions on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and so on. You can only rely on these platforms’ mechanisms, which work either for or against you.
There is substantial evidence that a trusted brand (personal or corporate) yields a ready customer base and can lend success to new offerings. In marketing, this is akin to brand equity – the built-in advantage a known name has when launching products.
Consider that recommendations from influencers (a form of personal brand) are trusted by 71% of consumers globally, and 57% of consumers have made a purchase based on an influencer’s recommendation. When someone with a strong personal brand releases a product, a significant portion of their loyal followers will try it.
Look at YouTube creator MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson), who leveraged his strong personal brand to launch a chocolate bar line “Feastables” that sold over 1 million bars in its first 72 hours, exceeding $10 million in sales. Within its first year, Feastables generated $251 million in sales, outpacing the revenue of MrBeast’s own media business, thanks to the millions of devoted fans he amassed on YouTube.
Building Your Personal Brand Is Evolution-Proof
So we’ve arrived at that moment when I understand that to build any business, I need an audience. And practically the only way to do this in today’s world is to gather followers, which means social media.
To accomplish this, there are several methods. All these methods ultimately come down to creating content and publishing it. What you choose depends on what’s closer, more interesting, aligned with your internal values, and corresponds to your personal brand, but the essence doesn’t change. You need to create something, I need to create something, and share it with others.
Then the herd effect works: if this information is necessary, interesting, useful to people, they’ll share it, forward it to others, influence the algorithm to distribute this information with their likes, subscriptions, “share” functions, and so on. This tells the algorithm the information and content will generate new views, readings, generally engage users to use social networks and their mechanisms. So they’ll stimulate this content to appear in other people’s feeds.
And at this point, the circle, oddly enough, closed. Those same things I identified above as my weaknesses — marketing, sales, and my psychological dependence on others, placing responsibility on them and trying to build partnerships first, then business — all perfectly translate into building a personal brand, which is the quintessence of precisely these skills.
First, building my personal brand means I can’t rely on anyone. It’s exclusively my task, and no other person will do it as I need because they don’t have my experience, knowledge, or information I want to share. Because I build it myself, it’s the result of my thinking, my brain function, my consciousness, processing all this information in my subconscious. So it’s inherently not something that can be transferred to another person or delegated if we’re talking about the ideological part, when I share knowledge, as now, or my observations or experiences. This can’t be delegated or responsibility transferred to someone else.
According to Tom Peters, a management expert:
“We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”
A LinkedIn analysis found employees with strong personal brands (via content, thought leadership, etc.) not only helped their companies but also insulated their own careers against layoffs by having external networks and followings. Additionally, 80% of recruiters say a personal brand can help a candidate get new opportunities.
Finally, the sales I successfully avoided for so long, staying in IT trenches, constructing websites, information systems, developing, managing teams, and so on. Yes, sales bypassed me. And now I can and must engage in this myself. I simply have no other option here, and the basis of these sales is precisely people — the audience I earn by developing my personal brand.
The Personal Brand Ecosystem: Getting Started
Know Yourself First
The simplest recommendation that wasn’t obvious to me: I can do everything myself. This applies to both business partnerships and the essential skills needed. Understanding your own psychology is crucial. For some, partnerships are perfectly normal and don’t serve as a psychological crutch, but for me, they became exactly that — a way to avoid taking full responsibility.
Through therapy, I discovered that my pattern of always finding partners wasn’t just about complementary skills — it was about offloading the most uncomfortable aspects of business building. If your pattern resembles mine, consider whether this is serving you or holding you back.
Start Creating Content Consistently
The way to build an audience is straightforward but requires consistency: create content. Choose platforms that align with your strengths and preferences, whether that’s writing, video, audio, or visual content.
On Instagram, 83% of users report discovering new products or services on the platform (often via influencers or brand pages). Meanwhile on YouTube, 70% of viewers say they bought a product after seeing it recommended by a creator.
Decide what value you can provide based on your experience and knowledge. In my case, I’m building my personal brand not based on my butt, abs, or dancing in front of the camera, but on my experience, expertise, knowledge, and what I learn on this journey of gaining that expertise, knowledge, and experience.
Build Platform Independence
While social media platforms are essential for growth, remember that they don’t belong to you. Any platform could ban your account or become irrelevant overnight.
Because social platforms eventually change or could ban accounts, diversify your audience channels to maintain independence.
The most reliable approach is to develop an email list — the digital equivalent of owning your audience. This becomes your property, independent of algorithm changes or platform policies.
According to MailBakery email lists have a 4200% ROI (return of $42 for every $1 spent), far higher than the average ROI of social media ads (~28% or $0.28 per $1). This is because emails go to an already-warm audience who knows and trusts you.
Developing Your Authentic Voice
Your voice must be authentically yours. You can also try to mimic others or create a persona, but remember not to add something that doesn’t align with who you are. Authenticity builds trust, and trust converts to sales.
A study by Stackla noted 86% of consumers say authenticity influences which brands they support; personal brands usually rank high in perceived authenticity.
As Zig Ziglar famously said,
“If people like you they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.”
A personal brand builds that trust at scale.
Creating Value With Instant Monetization
Contrary to popular advice, you don’t need to wait months or years before monetizing your audience. If you’re providing genuine value, it’s perfectly acceptable to offer products or services immediately.
Building a personal brand is portrayed as empowering: leveraging your own experience and knowledge (which “no one else can do” in the same way) instead of relying on partners or others. This path also forces you to embrace sales and marketing, skills previously avoided, by directly engaging with your audience.
Having an audience via personal brand makes sales almost inevitable — if you’ve got an audience, you’ve got people you can pitch your product to. All that’s left is to put it out there.
Designing Products That Extend Your Brand
Your product should be a natural extension of your personal brand. If your brand is built on your expertise and knowledge, then your product should deliver that expertise in a structured, valuable format.
This could take many forms beyond just courses and books — software tools, communities, events, consulting services, or physical products that solve problems you’ve identified for your audience. As Simon Sinek noted,
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.”
In essence, personal branding is not vanity, but a foundational business strategy for sustainable success. We see this in countless creator-led product launches — from authors selling courses to gamers selling merch — where an existing fan base converts into customers overnight.
The Evolution-Proof Approach
Building a personal brand isn’t just a current trend — it’s an evolution-proof strategy that safeguards against technological disruption, including AI.
Personal branding is an obvious evolutionary step to not get left behind by AI in a few years, because your unique experience and expertise baked into brand-building.
While this claim may be somewhat speculative, it makes intuitive sense. As AI becomes more capable of producing generic content and performing routine tasks, the unique human elements — your personal experience, perspective, and connection — become increasingly valuable.
I believe that my knowledge and personality are “locked in” and only growing over time. This human capital appreciates while AI struggles to replicate the authentic journey and trust relationship developed through consistent personal branding.
The circle has closed for me. I now understand that to create a business and the lifestyle I want, I need a personal brand. This brings me an audience — people who will potentially become my customers.
If you’re still reading, I invite you to join me on this journey of discovery. I’ll be sharing what I learn along the way, helping you while helping myself navigate this fascinating, still unexplored, but absolutely captivating — and profitable — adventure.
As Henry Ford insightfully noted,
“It is not the employer who pays the wages… It is the customer who pays the wages.”
This underpins why focusing on an audience first is wise — because ultimately, cultivating customers’ goodwill through personal connection is the real key to business survival.
The puzzle is finally coming together. Personal branding is not just another marketing tactic — it’s the foundation upon which sustainable businesses are built in the digital age.