If you're building your personal brand... watch this transcript

There are five levels of personal branding for founders. And here's the part nobody tells you. The exact same [music] move that makes money on one level is the move that burns it at another. And if you're watching this, you're somewhere [music] on these five levels, whether you've got a business, a following, or just an idea. >> [music] >> So, let's find your level and the move it calls for. Level one, the audience builder.

When someone buys from a brand, who are they actually trusting? The brand or the person behind it? And there are two types of them, and almost everyone only ever talks about the first type. Type one is the creator founder. They do everything backwards. They build a personal brand first and a product brand second. A great example of this is Ryan Trahan. He spent years on YouTube, travel videos, challenges, storytelling, 40 million subscribers, no product, and he just built trust up year after year with his audience.

And then he launches Joyride, a candy brand, and it has a warm audience on day one. Not because the candy was famous already, but because he was. It's the same playbook that Mr. Beast used to turn into Feastables. Alex Earl started her audience first on TikTok, turned into real actives, and that's not a coincidence. Look at the breakout consumer brands of the last few years. The majority are first creator-led because the hardest part is attention and trust, which they've already done.

And that's where they end up launching a brand later, and because they already have the audience, the brand scales with that audience. So, the more people that are watching their videos, the more times that they plug their brand, the faster their brand grows with their audience. Now, to address the elephant in the room, Ryan Trahan and Mr. Beast and Alex Earl are arguably some of the biggest creators on the planet right now.

But here's the thing, some of you have a personal brand, and this is the exact thing you can leverage to launch your brand to be able to grow. But for the rest of you who do not have a personal brand, you'd fall into type two. And this is the one that nobody talks about. Type two is the founder turned creator. The founder turned creator starts the business first. That brand already exists. It's selling. And then they start their own personal brand later, growing an audience of their own, but making content around the business by pointing that straight back, which is fueling growth the other direction.

So, the only difference between the two types is really timing. Do you build the brand before or after you start building your personal brand? It's the same play, it's just done in different orders. That's why they're both on level one. So, if you're a founder thinking, "Well, I missed my window to be a creator." Well, it's actually the opposite because you finally have something to make content about. Your business, your product, your story, the wins, the failures.

A creator with a blank channel has to invent ideas and content to make. You've already been living it by first starting your business and later creating your personal brand. And making content gets easier the more you do it. I've been at this for a decade. When I started, I wasn't even on camera in my videos. I was just posting recordings of calls I was doing. Today, we now produce content in bulk, and it's one of the biggest levers in my entire business.

And the skills compound, and the price of learning it only goes up. So, that's level one, building an audience of your own. It's a long game, and it's not for everyone. Now, the next level on this list, almost everybody misses it, and it's the least effort of all five levels, and the most expensive one not to do. Level two, the founder story. Level two is the founder story, and everyone says you shouldn't start a founder story.

I literally had somebody just last week where I was on a call with a prospect, and they said an agency had told them that it was a complete waste of their time, and that they should only focus on their brand. But, every single brand that I've worked with that has created a founder story has reaped massive growth from this. We had Plants Basically grow from $20,000 to $600,000 per month. Kiar I Wear added seven figures in sales from this. 93 Play Street added seven figures in sales from this as well.

And here's what the founder story looks like. You've started your brand, and you're building your personal brand around the same time. But, your personal brand is actually talking about what you're doing with your brand itself. So, as you're growing your e-commerce sales for instance, maybe you're selling supplements and you're building it up, you're running Facebook ads, you're getting sales and it's growing. Well, the founder story is where you also start creating organic videos just like Plants basically.

He was a professional BMX rider and he hurt himself while riding and he had a back injury. So, he didn't want to use, you know, the typical medical route of, you know, soothing his pain. So, he came up with a product idea that was more organic, natural, herbal to solve this solution. And rather than not talking about it at all, he started sharing that story along the way where he talked about his success as a pro rider and then all of the failures that he encountered and how his back pain started prohibiting him from doing the very thing he loved and how he wanted to find an opportunity to share with others.

So, he was quite literally making Tik Tok videos after Tik Tok video after Tik Tok video along the way. And then what he did was all of those videos started to go viral and each of these begin to take off along the way. And what this does is as he goes viral sharing the story about his success, his failures, why he created the brand, why he started it and sharing his founder story, all of a sudden there's a turning point and sales begin to skyrocket because it resonates on a personal level.

The founder story is quite literally one of the most powerful ways to skyrocket sales. 93 Play Street, she talked about how the swimwear industry was against her and how her designs were no good and how her manufacturing products had gone wrong and people connect with that on a personal level and because they connect with the founder, it ends up resulting in more sales for the brand because they want to support small business.

So, I highly recommend making content around your business, talking about that and sharing it with your audience because it can allow you to scale the business even faster. And this isn't just an organic content play. This is a paid ads play. You can take paid ads and launch them in your ad account from your founder story. Literally, we have images of people sitting in their warehouse on a bunch of boxes, and the copywriting is just their story as a founder, and it gets the best ROAS compared to any other ad out there.

You can also put this on your website. Literally, if you go to plansthatbasically.com, it's a face of John with his brand, because he is part of the story behind his brand, which is the founder story. You can put this in email content. This resonates at scale everywhere, which is why it has such a profound impact on your sales. And this also helps with hiring as you scale. It helps with gaining affiliates, because they feel personally connected with you.

It allows you to humanize the aspect of your brand and brings all roads back to the business. And this is the one thing that other people can't copy, is your founder story. There's so many other ways you can copy brands out there, but the founder story is the one thing that you just cannot replicate, which brings up the question every founder eventually ask. If I become the face, can I ever stop? That fear is the next level.

And what's actually up there is not what you think. Level three is the face of the brand. And at level three, the founder isn't just the backstory anymore. Their face, their content, and their personality is attached to the brand. And here's what people get wrong about this level. It's not that the brand needs the founder. Rhode is a real business with real products, real reviews, and real retail. And they run it like a normal company, and it grows like a normal company.

But with Hailey Bieber attached, it doesn't just grow like a normal business. Every product drop she's on, TikTok's doing the demos, her face is the campaigns, her posts pulled millions of views, earned distribution, which no ad budget can buy that. The personal brand isn't the engine, it's the accelerant. And before you say, "Well, she's a celebrity," understand what that base was worth. In 2025, Elf Beauty bought Rhode for a billion dollars.

Three years old, a billion dollars. And here's the detail everybody misses. Even after the sale, Hailey didn't leave. She stayed on as a chief creative officer because the buyers knew exactly what they were paying for. And it wasn't just the milk toner. Huda Kattan built one of the biggest beauty brands on earth the same way. Her face attached to everything. To this day, the majority of Huda Beauty's ad account has her face on it.

Not because the brand can't run without her, but because it runs faster with her. And this isn't just a beauty thing. Will Ahmed built Whoop, a high-ticket fitness wearable, with his face and his story doing the heavy lifting. The Harvard athlete who kept overtraining with zero data on his own recovery. So, he built the thing that measures it. And when you're asking someone to pay hundreds of dollars a year for a strap with no screen, trust is the product.

Fitbit, Garmin, and the Apple Watch can outspend him, but they can't outstory him. But, keep your eye on what's happening at Huda Beauty right now. The brand is building a massive base of affiliates to fill its content pipeline. Reviews are carrying weight. Her videos used to carry alone. People talk about the products now, not just about her. We have Hailey Bieber, who was already known in her space from her personal brand even before she started her company.

But, whenever she launched her business, her personal brand was the growth accelerant. Now, Rhode as a company already had good business fundamentals. They'd already done the research on their products. They crafted compelling offers. And the business acumen alone would allow that brand to scale even without Hailey Bieber. But, because her name is attached to the brand and she's the face of the company, it allows it to accelerate at a rapid pace.

But, there's a turning point in this where most people before this point associate Rhode with Hailey Bieber. But, because the brand is so well structured and the products are now taking a life of their own and the brand is beginning to grow on its own. Rhode, the business, is becoming associated just as Rhode, and not just with Hailey Bieber. And this is where the gap begins to close, where the business can now start to grow on its own as just Rhode, even without Hailey Bieber, the personal brand.

For years, the fastest growth for Rhode came from the red line, Hailey Bieber's personal brand accelerating everything. But the blue line has quietly been rising on its own this whole time, and the brand is developing an image of its own, independent of the person who built it. Level four is the forgotten founder. Now, level four, the level I'd labeled forgotten, because I have to be honest with you about this one. When I started putting this video together, level four was going to be a trap.

Founders stuck as the face of their brand, unable to step back, grinding through burnout. That's the story everyone tells about personal branding. So, I went looking for them, the trapped founders, and I couldn't find them. What I found instead is stranger, and more important for you, because here's what actually happens when a founder's story works. It erases the founder. Think about the machine you watched get built over the last three levels.

Your story fuels the brand. The brand picks up its own momentum, the reviews, repeat customers, people telling their friends, and at some point that brand matures past you. It doesn't need your story anymore. So, you pull back, not because you're trapped, but because you finally can. The content machine now runs without you. And strangest of all, eventually, the audience forgets you were ever there. You've already seen this pattern three times in this video, and maybe you didn't notice.

Ask someone under 30 who Charlotte Tilbury, the person, is. They know the makeup brand, not the woman. Same with Gymshark. Ben Francis started the business and is still everywhere, yet you think of Gymshark. You picture their product, their fits, the athletes, and the the wearing it that they've built. It's a billion and a half dollars of reputation that belongs to the product and brand now. And Huda is filling her own content pipeline with affiliates in her own community and is beginning that same entry point.

But let me show you what this looks like at scale closer to home. Parker Godfrey Kyari Eyewear, a former client of mine, went through this exact stage. He started as a level two founder where his founder story and his brand were being built together. He was sharing all of the things that he was doing, how he quit his job and started this business for his sunglasses. And he talked about how he was getting products. He was sharing the results and he was the face of his founder story.

And his brand was growing from that. But eventually he hit a turning point where all of a sudden he no longer needed to be doing the content to fuel the brand. It had taken on a life of its own and the business was growing at a pace to where he no longer really needed to do content. He had onboarded thousands of affiliates promoting his messaging for him. He wasn't making videos anymore. He had effectively replaced himself with thousands of others who built his business for him from this point on.

And the result of that is his brand keeps growing. And now anywhere I go to this day, whether it's in Europe, whether I'm running on a trail or walking or going to a networking event or even a wedding, I see his sunglasses everywhere. And that's because he made it to this level where he's finally taken a step back as a founder. His team has taken over. His affiliates and his growth has continued onward. So his brand just keeps growing and Parker now just runs it in the background.

The reason I'm telling you this is because level four is not a failure state. It's what winning looks like at the end of the founder story play. If you run level two well, this is where you'll eventually land and that's the plan working. But here's what almost no founder realizes when they get there. Standing at that moment, the brand is matured. The face is no longer needed. You're at the fork, but you can't fully see what's next because one of the two paths is invisible.

Path one is where you step back, run the company quietly, and disappear from the content, and the brand keeps compounding. You keep getting wealthier, and the audience forgets your name. That's the path almost everyone eventually takes. And honestly, most founders are glad to. They wanted to get away from the camera anyways. What they never found out though is what the second path was really worth. Level five, the re-entry.

Level five is the second path at the fork. The move almost nobody sees until it's already been made. I told you at the start we'd end here. At level two, your story fueled the brand. Your personal brand fed your business brand. Red and the blue. At level five, the brand fuels you. The arrows reverse. So, here's the play. Your brand is now matured past you. Level four, most founders disappear somewhere in here, but a few of them will re-enter.

Not as the face of the brand that's needed. The brand doesn't need anyone now. They come back as the founder that the brand made credible. The brand success becomes their proof, and every milestone that brand is hitting is only a receipt that they can claim, which allows them to grow their personal brand significantly. And that's exactly what Greg is doing. He just recently launched his content and is absolutely taking off alongside of Bloom that is exploding.

And it's growing because Bloom is winning, and he's piggybacking off of that very thing that he built. Fred is also doing this with Sernucci. Hudson's doing this with Comfort. Christian Guzman with Alpha Lion, Allison Ellsworth off of Poppy. The pattern is identical every time. The brand becomes the launchpad, and the founder becomes the asset. But why would a founder like Greg even bother if he's already won? Because at this level, founders are thinking about what's next, an exit, the next company, the next chapter after this one.

And your business brand doesn't come with you after that. Your personal brand does. When you let your brand success build your name, all of that equity becomes portable into the next chapter. And there's one last piece. You've already built something worth remembering. The business did that. Now, the personal brand decides whether anyone remembers it was you. And here's the part most people get wrong, the timing of this.

If you re-enter while the brand is winning, the founder of that brand that's everywhere right now opens every door. But if you don't enter, a founder of that brand from a few years back opens almost no doors in the future. Miss that window and the world will keep the brand and forget the founder. That's level four, permanently. So, level one, we build the audience before the brand or after it. Level two, we build a founder story.

Level three, that becomes the accelerant. And level four, we let the brand outgrow you. And level five, we make it all portable into the next chapter. Now, this whole video was about the red line. But if you want to grow the blue one, the business itself, watch this next. We break down exactly how Greg, the level five founder you just met, built Bloom into the kind of business worth piggybacking on. I'll see you there.