Should You Create a Personal or Business Brand?

I think every creator might need to make a core decision of whether they're doing:

1. A PERSONAL brand on which you post pretty much everything, including possibly having a business aspect.

2. A PROFESSIONAL brand where you mostly only talk about one topic.

I think a lot of people take significant damage in their content efforts by not being clear about which of these they are. 

Let me give two examples of professional brands:

• TL;DRSec by @Clint Gibler

• Return on Security by @Mike Privette

These are brilliant brands because the output when you sign up is expected. It's niched to a very specific field and people aren't really turned off by surprises outside that field.

A personal brand would be someone like myself, where Unsupervised Learning is a container for everything I do, which also includes membership, community, products, etc. There's a theme, and that's similar to a professional brand, but it's not really the same because you might talk about anything in your feed, vs. just things in a specific lane. The reason I'm sharing this is to say the following:

1. I think Personal brands are like 10x harder to grow, and if you are trying to do a career around a business, you might want to go with a Business brand first, or completely.

2. I think Personal brands might be deeper and stickier over time, with your TRUE FANS, but you will have to grind for a decade or more to start gaining speed in most cases.

3. Be very careful and deliberate about your choice to do one or the other. I saw @0livia Gallucci - 2 ✨⛵ asking about this recently as well here, and we've talked about it directly too. Which is why I'm thinking through this and capturing it here.

4. There is also nuance about the name of the brand. If the name of the brand is your name, it's almost by default a Personal brand, so one thing to watch out for is if it's your name but you have trained your audience to expect only one thing. So if they only expect SQL Injection content from you, and you're now turning 35 and you want to branch out...well that can be difficult.

5. The reason it can be difficult is because of a concept called Audience Capture, where a creator finds themselves backed into a corner and only allowed to make one type of content, e.g., SQL Injection. Don't let this happen to you. 

6. One way to avoid this is to have separate product or brand offerings that are distinct and similar to a Business brand, but that focus on that particular area. So for example, @jhaddix has Arcanum Security now, and people expect that to be infosec content. And he presumably won't be posting tons of stuff about Comics or Cosplay stuff there. But he's still more free to be his full self on X.

7. I have a close friend in security who's thinking about doing relationship content, and I used to think he should just merge that in with his current output, but now I think I was wrong about that. Now I think he should break that out into a separate brand--still losely under his own name of course--but not really have any cross-posted content between them. This way he Personally can be the umbrella, with the infosec stuff in one brand and the relationship in another.

Summary and recommendations

1. Ask yourself if your brand is fundamentally a business or fundamentally a life passion.

2. If it's a business, go niche. If it's a life passion, consider a Personal brand—and remember you can always do a separate product or service under that main brand.

3. If you ever plan on selling your brand, don’t have it be your name, or a unified Personal brand.

4. Remember that it’s 10x harder (I made up the multiple, but it’s somewhere between 2x and 20x harder) to grow a Personal/Unified brand than a niched business one.

Bottom line: Consider This Carefully. 

It's much harder to go back once you've moved forward.