Build your brand before your product, or launch first and reveal yourself later?
I've always been on the personal brand side. More and more founders are building it now (sometimes even before the product is ready – while it's still in development, before seed fundraising). The CEO builds their position so the product sells more easily at the official launch.
But I have experience with people who built the product, scaled it, and only then did we discover who was behind it.
Honestly, with the first approach, I'd be concerned that people invest more in me as a person than in the product. People would idealise the founder and overlook the product's flaws (which could hurt development and constructive feedback).
+ I noticed the most common mistake that many people who started building a personal brand first, connected their product to their personal accounts (emails, social media, etc.) and started having a problem selling these things, because they cannot "give someone keys" to their personal profiles.
Which opens the question:
Which approach brings more advantages in your opinion?
Replies
ur audience and ur icp need to overlap. building a founder brand works great if u're selling to other founders.
if u're selling to plumbers, accountants, or dtc brands, your 5k twitter followers won't buy and u spent 18 months on the wrong channel. brand-first compounds when the people watching are the people buying. otherwise it's just expensive procrastination.
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@saad_el_gueddari yeh, relevant audience is crucial. I couldn't say it better :)
Nika, great post. Honestly, I have been thinking about this for a long time for my own product.
Both approaches — personal brand first or product first — can work, but they definitely speak to different types of founders and products.
Going with the personal brand makes sense if you’re in a crowded space and real differentiation comes from trust, not features. Also, if you’ve already built an audience (and that's the key with this) you’re pretty much launching to people who know you - important!. And if your product is basically an extension of your expertise — you’re living proof that it works.
But sometimes you want the product to stand alone. Maybe it solves a specific problem so cleanly, it doesn’t need your face or story stamped on it. Or you’re building something you want to sell later, or hand off completely — then you need it to exist independently from you.
"Giving someone the keys” problem you mentioned is dead-on and, honestly, founders don’t talk about it enough. I've seen people build everything on their personal LinkedIn, their email, their following — only to wake up and realize they basically made a one-person consultancy instead of a true product. You can’t sell that. You can’t hire someone to run it for you. My opinion, of course.
With PostMine, I was super intentional from day one. I wanted the brand to stand on its own. The product has to speak for itself, without being tied to me forever.
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@sal_georgiou1 As you said, when the space is overcrowded, a personal brand can help significantly. It can help in many ways, but too much attention to personal brand can distort the perception of the product and its qualities.
I lean toward a hybrid, with the product doing the first bit of truth-testing.
For a narrow B2B product, building a personal brand too early can create the wrong feedback. People may like the founder story, but that does not prove the workflow solves a painful enough problem.
What has felt safer for me is to build enough that strangers can react to the actual workflow, then share the thinking behind the product. I would not hide the founder, but I would not make the founder the product either.
The best signal is still: can someone explain the product in one sentence without you being in the room?
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@jinji_huang I think that B2B product can be the most sensitive (as you mentioned). But B2C as well, because people still perceive you like a celebrity/influencer advocating for a product :)
@busmark_w_nika Thanks Nika, that makes sense. I’m seeing the same tension with B2B: trust matters, but over-personalizing the founder story too early can distract from the actual workflow and problem being solved.
For my current project, I’m leaning toward building useful tools and examples first, then gradually letting the brand and founder story become more visible as users understand the value.
Building an asset that stands on its own logic keeps the feedback honest and makes a future exit way cleaner. Founder hype is a fun spark, but being the "single point of failure" in your own DMs is a total scaling nightmare! Sharing the journey without merging your logins is the real power move for a smooth, sustainable launch.
Does the idea of a "faceless" success sound more peaceful to you than being the public face of the project?
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@shyunbill To be honest, I would like to see my product grow without my face because it means that the product is really good :)
I think it's better to build the product first as you can base the brand off of the product. Maybe by linking the brand name to what you do etc.. or have an indicative icon.
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@soham_jain That is quite soft IMO, but really worth trying.
I'd say it really depends on the product and the team behind it. In our case, Product Hunt and Reddit did more than enough to help us get traction for @CoreSight , but other startups I know didn't have the same experience with these 2 channels and had to rely more on pushing the founder's personal brand.
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@andreitudor14 So you went just purely with product (story around that) instead of the "founder story"?
@busmark_w_nika yep! But if we were to start again now, maybe I'd test more with the founder story approach, just to compare.
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@andreitudor14 maybe next time, when you will launch a new product! :D
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@gaurav_singh91 Good point, and one thing came to my mind: It would be great if the personal brand that is already established (and the topics you are talking about) are related to the product and the industry you operate in. If you are a marketer, build a tool for marketing because nobody knows about the topic/the problem more than you.
Great question — and one I've had to sit with.
I'm a builder at heart. I can write, I can code, I can architect a system from scratch. Social media is where I'm still finding my footing. I'm not the guy everyone follows.
But here's what I do own: everything. I'm the chief architect, the CEO, and the person responsible for every bug — in the code and in the go-to-market strategy. That's not a complaint, it's just the reality of being a solo founder. The product succeeds or fails on my ability to match a solution with a problem that others have, and do it in such a way that they will receive.
So I made a deliberate choices to lower the barrier. Open source. No cost. No login required for key features. And for users who do sign up, anonymous login is supported — because trust has to be earned, not demanded upfront.
Product Hunt is part of how I earn that trust. I'm here because I believe in what I built, and I know it needs to be seen.
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@dstr88 When are you going to launch here? :)
I think the best answer is staged, not binary.
Brand-first helps with distribution, but product-first gives you cleaner feedback. The risky version is when audience trust starts masking product weakness.
I’d rather build enough product to create honest signal, then use the brand to amplify what is already working.
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@luca_ardito Maybe the answer is to 1. create a quality/useful product + 2. use own personal brand to promote it :)
personal brand first, definitely - but the false positive feedback is the silent killer. clients who trust you praise things that aren't actually working. took a while to realize when praise was loyalty, not signal.
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@mykola_kondratiuk1 another option is to build personal brand but the product in stealth, separately building, but after some time revealing that you built the product :)