Ben Francis was 19 years old, a student at Aston University working at Pizza Hut for £5 an hour. When he wasn’t delivering pizzas, he was in his parents’ garage sewing gym clothes on a sewing machine he’d learnt to use, stamping logos with a screen printer he’d taught himself. He made everything by hand.
He had no marketing budget. He had no company history. He had no credentials that would make someone stop and take him seriously as a fashion company.
What he did have was a YouTube subscriber list.
Ben Francis spent years watching fitness influencers. He wasn’t one of them (yet). He didn’t run content for them. He was an average consumer of their content. He lifted weights. He cared about fitness as a sport. He logged in to YouTube and watched the same content his customers would one day watch.
When Gymshark was ready to launch its first products, Ben didn’t launch ads. He mailed packages to the creators he subscribed to himself — fitness influencers whose subscribers invested trust in them, in the exact same way that Ben invested his trust. The clothes sold because those YouTubers had built up the trust necessary to make a recommendation. Those influencers trusted Ben because he was one of them. He wasn’t pitching them—he was just chatting about the shared interest that brought them both to fitness.
To date, Gymshark has raised $225 million in venture funding. By 2020, Gymshark was the first direct-to-consumer brand in the UK to achieve unicorn status without external investment, estimated at $1.45 billion at the time of General Atlantic’s investment announcement. Francis never ran an ad campaign in those early years. But he spent years in the same community that was buying his clothes. Ben Francis built Gymshark in his free time before Gymshark was big enough to pay his salary by being himself.
Why the Founder Is the Brand
The early years of a company have no history. There are no case studies. There’s no track record.
When evaluating whether or not to do business with a new company, the only brand history customers have to go on is the founder.
People do business with people they trust. People trust other people when they feel they have similar judgment, similar taste, when they believe the founder has built something authentic, and when they understand and believe in the founder’s motivation for starting their company.
This isn’t a simple conjecture. This isn’t “customers like hearing from the founders voice.” This is data about what people actually do.
Content shared through a personal profile receives 561% more reach, according to MSLGroup research cited by LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s own research showed that “82% of consumers say they are more likely to trust a company if its founder or CEO is active on social media, and 77% say they are more likely to purchase from that company,” via BrandVM’s analysis of multiple LinkedIn studies.
It should come as no surprise that the algorithm fuels what people are already doing: they follow people. They don’t follow logos.
A company LinkedIn page with 500 followers is blank canvas. But if that company’s founder has 500 followers that organically grew by posting interesting content, commenting authentically on other people’s posts, and speaking from their personal experience as an industry professional — that founder will reach those 500 people in a way that no company page can.
Again: content posted by real people is given greater distribution on social media platforms because real people follow other people. Your brand story will be trusted by more people and remembered by more people when it’s told by a human.
What “Building Your Personal Brand” Means
A lot of people have heard the phrase personal brand, and assume it’s something only influencers and celebrities can master. But a personal brand is just the sum of what people perceive about you.
It’s your area of expertise, communicated through your point-of-view. Your personal brand is the collection of topics you care about, communicated through blog posts, social media comments, or conversations you have wherever your industry hangs out. Over time, your personal brand is built by what you publish, what you say, and what you do publicly.
Ben didn’t wake up at 19 years old and decide to craft a “personal brand strategy.” He was authentic about his interests. He talked to other people who shared his interests on platforms where they congregated. That’s it.
Your personal brand is simply: what you know.
Start by asking yourself:
- What do you know that most people don’t know?
- What problem are you obsessed with solving?
- What do you believe about this industry that other people would disagree with?
You are the authority on what you build. You just need to express those beliefs through a consistent feed of content on whatever platform your customers are using. (Hint: LinkedIn isn’t the only place people spend time on the internet. Check out X, and
YouTube.)
How to Start
The first step is to show up where your future customers are. Not on all platforms, just one. Pick one channel that your audience already uses and post once a week. Talk about the problem you are trying to solve, using your own experience as a reference point. These don’t have to be fancy videos or LinkedIn posts that you’ve spent all week crafting. (Though you can do that, once you’re ready.)
This isn’t a game of likes. You’re trying to become familiar to the small subset of people who understand and share your specific problem. At the end of a year, you should recognize your audience in the same way they’ll begin to recognize you.
The average entrepreneur works 40-50 hours per week. That’s 200-250 hours every month.
Ben Francis delivered pizzas until Gymshark was big enough to hire employees and pay his wages. He literally built his brand in between Pizza Hut deliveries.
You have between 40-50 hours a month. You have more platforms than Ben did. The question is not if you can, but if you will.
