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
Second approach..because there is a limit in which you can scale your personal branding..Because when you are going the product/ service way, how good your product/ service is what determines its longevity..and when you are building the company, the personal brand becomes the deterrent..to start its ok..but the way should be move slowly but swiftly from personal branding to product
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@shikha_pakhide Where do you think is the limit of the personal brand? Like where is the end?
Truly
I think you are right with your intuition. I've done both and my second business that I built has been exponentially more successful because of what you said -- people are buying the product as it is, for what it is, and their usage of it is 100% signal and no noise, so I have a source of objective truth to follow.
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@eroltoker Did you use a personal brand for promoting, or not?
Truly
@busmark_w_nika First business, used personal brand, raised $17M, got to $4M ARR, gartner magic quadrant, keynoted the biggest conference in my industry, got 50% of my TAM to follow me on linkedin. walked away with $0. Second business, built in secret, barely anyone knows what i'm doing and 24 months in i'm semi-retired. I tried to start getting more involved with customers recently but basically the business/customer based optimized itself so there's nothing for me to do (the best customers stayed, the bad fit ones left -- I guess the free market works).
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@eroltoker Do you find "only the product business" as more successful?
For Sweepbase I deliberately went the other way. There is no founder face on the homepage and no personal-brand layer at all. The brand is the category. People who land on the site come through "crypto card comparison" searches, read the data, and have no idea who built it. That has tradeoffs: zero pre-launch hype, no Twitter audience to ride. But trust sits on the data instead of on me being likeable, and for a comparison site that felt safer. Curious whether you think the brand-first approach works equally well for B2C utilities, or mostly for SaaS and community-led products where the founder's voice is the actual moat?
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@sweepbase Sweepbase is a product related to crypto? TBH, if yes, it is more likely that they will not use faces because crypto is related to too many scams :D
Asa.team
The "keys to personal profiles" problem is real and underrated. We've seen teams build decent audiences under a founder's personal account and then hit a wall when they needed to hand off community management. The brand becomes inseparable from one person and that's a liability at some point, not just a feature.
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@ng_junsheng The boths (or all + employees), if they were built equally with a slight emphasis on a personal brand of maker/founder – would be the best I think
Just shipped my first SaaS this month after 90 days solo, and
I think the binary framing misses what actually happens.
I "built first" in the sense that I didn't market until I had
a working product. But the brand was forming in private the
whole time — every UX decision, every word on the landing,
the choice of which features to cut.
When I finally went public, the brand didn't need to be
constructed. It needed to be uncovered.
Build your product first. The brand is already happening
whether you notice or not.
Murror
@khathahat Love this perspective. The idea that the brand doesn't need to be "constructed" but "uncovered" is really powerful. Every product decision you made while building was already shaping how people would perceive you. Congrats on shipping - that 90-day solo journey says a lot about the brand already.
Building a personal brand first can definitely help with early trust, distribution, and faster validation, especially in crowded markets. But as you mentioned, it can also create dependency on the founder’s identity, which becomes a problem later when you want to scale or separate the product from yourself.
On the other hand, building the product first and revealing the team later often leads to stronger product focus and more honest feedback loops, but it can be harder to get initial traction without any visibility.
Personally, I think a balanced approach works best — start with light personal branding to validate the idea and attract early users, then gradually shift focus to the product itself as it matures.
That’s something I’m experimenting with as well while building my own project, including tools like brat generator under my brand. It helps keep early awareness while still letting the product speak for itself over time.
@busmark_w_nika Most founders don’t fail at brand vs product — they fail at timing clarity.
Knowing when to show up vs when to stay behind the product is the real gap.