I just got off a 45-minute call with a founder who’s about to launch his personal brand from zero. He showed up with a full plan on what he was planning on doing. He had bought a couple of fan pages in his niche. Wanted to do ads, PR, SEO, a weekly livestream, pay creators to engage with his posts, clippers... the full shebang. Honestly? The plan looked great as a strategy. However, I told him to cut most of it. Here’s what I told him, because I have some version of this conversation with almost every founder I talk to. 1. Pick a market you can actually win. He’s going after a local market in his own language. I loved that. The English-speaking market is so crowded you have to keep getting bigger just to get noticed. In a local market, you can take what’s already working in the US and bring it somewhere nobody’s doing it well yet. 2. Start with one account. Going from zero to one is the hardest part of this whole thing. Finding your angle. Finding the format that pops. Getting that first viral video that gives you enough data. He was planning on launching his strategy by having 3 different fan pages. I asked would you try to do that on three accounts at the same time? Every fan page or clip account you add pushes more people into the top of your funnel, yes, but it also means fewer of them end up following the one account that matters. His. Early on, all you want is followers on your page. Send everything there. 3. Use your grid and your reels tab for different things. On Instagram, let the grid be your lifestyle stuff. The house, the lifestyle, the car, the trips (This is the brand aura he wants to build). But keep the business content in the reels tab. Tons of big creators do this, and it lets you have both on one account. 4. The second time someone sees you is way easier than the first. The hardest moment is the very first time you show up on someone’s feed. Once they’ve stopped on you once, they’re a lot more likely to see you again. You’ve probably experienced this yourself. You see a creator's content on your feed for the first time, and two days later there they are again. That’s how it starts rolling. And all it takes is one video that pops to lift your baseline for good. A baseline of 200 views turns into 2,000. 5. Post way more than feels normal. His plan was one reel a day per account. I told him that’s not much. The personal brands I see growing on Instagram right now are posting 5 to 10 times a day. He asked what I’d do with unlimited budget. I said 10x the amount of content. 1 long-form YouTube video and 10 short-form videos a day. Every day. I showed him a creator who posted 50 times on Instagram in one day just to see what would happen. None of them went viral, but it was his largest account growth day of the year. 6. Nobody knows who you are. He asked me, “Won’t people get bored if I post 3 or 4 times a day?” Bro. Nobody knows you exist. Nobody knows I exist either. I’ve been posting for 5 years. I’ve never missed a week of long-form YouTube. I’ve never missed a day of posting at least three times. I watch Hormozi’s stuff all the time, and some days he doesn’t show up on my feed at all. He’s posting 10 times a day. And posting times? Doesn’t matter. Day of the week? Doesn’t matter. What matters is the content. 7. Stop making content for your friends. If you’re thinking about what your friends will say, you’re already headed the wrong way. Make it for the one person you actually want to help. For him, that’s a 20-year-old stuck in a job he hates who could change his life with the right push. And if some of your followers don’t care about business content, the algorithm just won’t show it to them. That one fixes itself. 8. Keep it simple before you get fancy. He asked about trial reels. The people using trial reels well have a whole system. They test the same video with five different hooks. Test all five, push the winner. It takes a lot of content to run. When you’re starting out, just post a lot and let the platform tell you what’s working. 9. Paid won’t fix weak content. He wanted to throw a couple thousand at ads and pay creators to comment on his stuff. So I told him: I spent $10,000 on ads over the last 60 days. My account got about 40 followers out of it. Forty. Hormozi spends a ton on ads. But he started after the brand was already strong. Get your content working on its own first. Then pay to push the stuff that’s already proven. 10. When you do boost something, attach a freebie. Every boosted post should have a lead magnet on it. Something like, “I sold my business for seven figures at 26. I wrote out exactly how. Comment EXIT and I’ll send it to you.” He pushed back. He wanted to save his best stuff for his paid community. But the free stuff is what gets people into the community. That’s how they find you in the first place. 11. Fancy cars and pretty girls aren’t enough anymore. People have seen so much flexing that they’ve stopped caring. Lifestyle content is fine for getting attention. But the next layer has to show there’s real value behind it. Give real value. Sell a dream people can actually picture themselves living. 12. Livestreams come after you have an audience. Livestreams barely get pushed to new people. Build your base with short and long-form first. Then go live for the people already following you. 13. Your positioning should always fit you. His brand idea is strong because it’s just him. The way he talks, the way he carries himself, the story he’s lived. He went from broke to doing well, and now he wants to help guys who are where he used to be. When the brand fits the person, you never have to fake anything. And people can always tell when you’re faking. 14. Post today. He told me he wants to launch in 2027. I asked him, why not today? None of the plan matters until the first video’s out. Forget 10 a day for now. Post one. Then post the next one. Take it day by day. Here’s the order I recommended him to follow: One account → post a ton until something pops → freebies and paid boosts on what’s working → fan pages and clipping → livestreams → community. Most founders try to build all of it on day one. Then they're spread so thin that nothing ends up working.

Instant aura loss when a founder secretly hires a reply guy to run their account. It’s not a secret, we can tell.

Meta ads ROI across most of the people I know is down across the board, myself included. This is likely temporary because of election season. However, one thing is sure: Cost of ads will only keep going up over time. Owning your distribution, and owning your audience has never been more important.

If you’re below 100k followers, the only question with content you should be asking yourself is how do you post more without jeopardizing quality.

The best experience with AI agents was OpenClaw + Opus. Can’t wait to run it back.

Update.

If you have calls today, remind yourself to speak louder than you would naturally, talk with energy, have your camera on, and greet people with a smile. As small as this may sound, you'd be surprised how much of a better first impression you'd make.

Before, it used to take a full team to make content for a brand. You needed editors, script writers, and designers... Today, all you need is one person with AI who can crank out hundreds of content pieces a month. The name of that role is Head Of Content, and its becoming one of the most important roles in tech. That one person scripts content, hands that off to the founder for filming, then edits it, publishes it, clips it, distributes it across socials, and repurposes talking points into stand alone written content across X and LinkedIn. Here's the important part, the better the material the head of content is working with, the better the output they'll get. If the founder they're working with has bland takes, generic guru insight, doesn't prioritize having a regular filming cadence, or just doesn't want to be on camera, the entire role of the head of content flops. Founders, if there's one hire you want to make, it's this hire. However, it is incredibly important that you budget enough time to make this person's role a success.

In a world where AI agents filter everyone's inboxes, email marketing as an owned marketing channel starts to weaken. The 2030 equivalent of "owning" your audience is going to be a gated community built on your own infrastructure.

So much free publicity for a smaller competitor. This is likely the equivalent of $500k in free publicity that Mailcheap got today.

If you lose everything tomorrow, but your fighting spirit, you have lost very little.

Not investing in building your personal brand in 2026 is the biggest mistake founders will make, and they'll have to pay for it for the rest of their careers. It'll only get harder and more expensive to build a brand from here. Stop pushing this into the future.

If I was hiring for the role of Head of Content, here are the qualifications of perfect candidate: Someone who can push more volume through the organic funnel. This means increasing top of funnel reach (More qualified views), increasing opt-in rates through lead magnets, nurturing people so they close faster using targeted content, email sequences, and one-on-one touchpoints. The way you achieve the above includes: - Increasing content output (More volume) - Increasing content performance (Better reach per content piece) - Unlocking new content channels - Turning internal customer case studies into content - Turning the founder's expertise into how-to videos and tutorials - Strategizing, then creating lead magnets to capture more emails - Setting up email automations and ongoing campaigns

Agreed. Nothing converts like talking-head content. Especially today, the more raw, less scripted, and less polished edits, the better it converts.

Head of Content is becoming the most in-demand hire in tech right now. I’m on 20+ calls a week with founders and their marketing leads, and the reason comes up on almost every one. Building got cheap, a small team is now shipping so many new products and features. A founder put it to me pretty plainly last week: "The tech isn’t the hard part anymore, anyone can copy it. The hard part is getting people to use it." At the same time, buying attention keeps getting more expensive. Ads costs are rising. Influencer marketing, especially in tech niches, are through the roof. So companies are doing the math. They can either pay an influencer 5k for one creator sponsored video on YouTube, or they can hire a fulltime person to lead all their content efforts on social media. These companies are realizing the importance of building a channel they own, and they need someone who can take full ownership of this growing priority.

Every serious entrepreneur I know is religiously using grokbot. These are people who never setup OpenClaw or Hermes. Grokbot cracked AI agents for power users.

Reactivated an old side project on Instagram. 100% automated by Claude. Will be documenting the process.

Friend of mine just blew past 100k followers in IG. He makes very good quality dating content. However, his content has not been generating clients. The thing I suggested him to do is to mix in more middle of funnel content. His videos are very top of funnel. But now that he has all that exposure, it’s time to convert it into revenue. And the way you do it is by showing clients transformations, case studies, results, and more tactical content. Top of funnel on its own does nothing to generate customer. It’s when you combine TOF with MIF that you start seeing great results.