Demand Curve - Growth Newsletter #227

The Growth Newsletter #227

Company brand or personal brand? How to choose.

There's been insane hype about personal brands over the past couple of years.

Today, I'm giving honest advice after building up a company brand (Demand Curve's content and newsletter) and my personal LinkedIn.

It's time to cut through the noise 🔪

– Neal

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Company brand or personal brand? How to choose.

Insight from us.

You’ve all been shouted at that you must have a personal brand.

If not AI will replace you, and your business will fail.

But do you really though?

Or is that just something ghostwriters and personal branding experts say?

I want to give you my perspective after creating and growing both a company and a personal brand, and having helped over 1,000 people grow their personal brands with UNIGNORABLE.

First, what am I talking about?

This all falls under the bucket of “content marketing.”

Whether for a newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, or posting on channels like Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and TikTok.

It’s just creating content to grow a business.

The core question is whether you post it personally or with your company.

Company brand content marketing was the standard for years. In the last few years, however, personal branding has exploded across all the channels.

People now love to cherry pick examples like:

• Elon Musk: more people follow him than follow X, Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink combined.
• Donald Trump: used his notoriety as a businessman & TV host to become president twice.
• The Rock & George Clooney: both created billion-dollar Tequila brands.
• Ryan Reynolds: bought a Mint Mobile and used his fame to promote it.

People love to claim that company brands are dead and personal brands are the way of the future.

Of course, nothing is ever one-sided, and there is a lot of nuance.

Let’s dive into the pros and cons to help you decide which is right for you.

Personal brands

The pros of personal-branded content

• Increases your personal optionality
  • If one day you’d like to do something other than what you’re doing, you have a platform to assist you with what’s next. You can promote whatever you launch next.
• Increases your ability to network and meet people you want to meet
  • You’ll attract cool people to you, and people will be more likely to reply to your DMs
• Increases your “market value”
  • This could be for the job market (easier to get a job and increase your compensation for it)
  • This could be your ability to raise money
• Your opportunities increase
  • Since posting on LinkedIn I’ve had significantly more requests for consulting, advisory, and even podcast appearances and speaking engagements.
• You can increase your personal revenue
  • Speaking engagements, sponsorships, premium subs, and consulting

• Increases your company's visibility and hopefully attracts leads

The cons of personal-branded content:

• Exiting the business can be hard
  • If you want to sell your business, and its lead flow depends on you and your personal accounts, then:
    • You might not be able to sell,
    • It might be at a bad valuation, or
    • You gotta remain working there after you sell
• You have to worry about your personal image and any haters
• It’s hard to outsource given 👆. And it’s a lot of work.
• It can be challenging for the company to justify paying for something that benefits you.
• If you stop, then generally it stops. It’s hard to pass it off.
• The company has a risk if you ever leave

I love many of the benefits of growing my LinkedIn following to ~75k followers. It’s allowed me to meet some incredible entrepreneurs. And it’s helped generate more attention and customers for Demand Curve.

Company brands

The pros of company-branded content:

• The content more directly generates awareness and desire for the product/service.
• The content engine and notoriety can make it attractive in an acquisition.
• You can hire a team and outsource all aspects of it.
• You’re distanced from it, so you don’t take hate personally.
• If your company gets well known, you can still benefit in ways when you tell people you founded it or you worked there.

The cons of company-branded content:

• You don’t get the personal life benefits—unless your company gets really big and well known.
• Engagement rates can be lower since people generally prefer engaging with and following other people.
• If you leave the business, you lose the audience

I’m very thankful we built up the content and newsletter under DC. It's allowed for the brand to have its own reputation and get its own organic leads. And it's allowed for other people to work on the content. 

How to decide which one to do

Ultimately it could pay off to do both. Then you get the benefits of both. And you can also use both accounts to amplify each other:

• You grow as the company grows.
• The company grows as you grow.

But if you have to choose just one, it really depends on a few things:

• Are you planning to sell the business?
  • Then you probably want to build up the company’s own marketing engine since you don’t want to be tangled up in.
• Do you want the personal benefits above like the optionality, networkability, opportunities, and market value? Are you highly motivated to do it for those benefits alone?
  • Then you should build up your personal accounts—and you can post about stuff related to your company to get leads in the door.
• Are you the type of person who would be anxious about what people think of you and get upset if people said things mean in comments?
  • Then you should probably do it on company accounts.
• Do you want to be doing and overseeing the content yourself for an extended period? Or would you rather someone else do it?
  • If you want others to do it, it’s probably better to do it via company.

There’s no real right answer. It’s very personal.

I’m glad I’ve done both since I get the best of both worlds.

But I spent years building the company one before I started with the personal one—and I had a leg up due to both the notoriety of DC and the bank of content I could repurpose on my personal account. For example:

It’s easier to do one at a time than to boot both up simultaneously.

And if you need help building up your audience

Then join the best (and last) cohort of UNIGNORABLE starting on January 20th.

We’re doing a Cyber FUNday deal on December 2nd at 9 AM Pacific.

Be there if you want $300 off and access to a free masterclass on starting and growing newsletters. Join the waitlist.

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Thanks y'all!

Neal O'Grady

Justin Setzer