Growing Ventures
Everyone Is a Media Company Now. Most Just Don't Know It Yet.
a16z, one of the most renowned venture firms in the world, has its own content division. They produce podcasts, write essays, hire editors and run newsletters. They treat content as a core part of their business, not a side project.
That is not an accident.
For a long time, the moat of a software business was mostly the product. Build something hard, defend it with network effects or speed of execution, and you owned a market for years, but AI is changing this equation as we speak.
Most software products are becoming cheap to build, while distribution channels are getting more crowded every quarter. The previously defensible part – the product itself – is increasingly becoming the easy part now.
What stays defensible (but is also the hardest to get) is attention. It's the audience that trusts you and has a perception of your business, which is exactly what a media business owns.
And the software businesses that take this seriously start acting like media businesses on their own: OpenAI bought TBPN, Hubspot bought The Hustle. The line between operating a software business and a media business is blurring on purpose.
And this same logic not only applies to businesses, but to people as well.
Building a personal brand
Many founders and operators are building a personal brand and treat this is a core distribution channel. Pieter Levels (866k followers on X), Tibo (190k followers on X) or Marc Lou (42k newsletter subscribers) are just a few builders from the community who early on realized that building a personal brand can become a real moat.
My own experience is no different.
But make not mistake, building a personal brand is real work and comes down to creating high-quality content on a strict cadence. My primary channel is LinkedIn (11.6k followers) where I try to stick to two posts per week, plus this weekly newsletter.
Yet even on this scale, it started to pay off:
- Four customers proactively reached out, because they read something I wrote and it resonated with them
- My business partner Nem found me through my content. Today, we run businesses together
- I been recognized on the street twice (which still feels strange)
In a world of increasing inauthenticity, where AI content is created at zero cost and flooding channels, being authentic will only become a stronger case for founders and operators alike.
Takeaways from building a personal brand
Below are a few things that helped me get started and what I would suggest to founders and operators.
- Pick a format and a cadence you can sustain. I write because writing forces me to think clearly. I committed to two LinkedIn posts a week and the blog for more structured takeaways. The format matters less than whether you actually publish on a schedule you can defend.
- Be relatable with what you create. Every post I have published is tied to a real decision, a first-hand insight or a real mistake that I made. I don't publish opinions on things I'm not in the middle of.
- Niche beats a broad, generic approach every time. You can find your audience online even when it only represents a small niche. Don't be afraid of creating niche content.
You can keep your work invisible and hope someone notices, but that is going to get harder every year. Ultimately, you can either own your distribution or you can rent it from someone who does.
Which side do you want to be on?