How to build an audience when you hate building a “personal brand”

If you’re like me, your feed is a daily bombardment of LinkedIn and Twitter wannabe Platos: dispensing life advice, telling some made-up story to push a product, or sharing their Ironman result. I found it cringe for years. But it’s now beyond reasonable doubt: social media might be a game, but it is the undeniable S-tier route to the most valuable commodity left — attention. In an age where you can literally build software products on your phone while sitting on the toilet, how do I get customers? is now 10x more important than what should I build?

And if you’re like me, the whole personal-brand thing makes me wince. It took me years to get over the judgment of parroting my daily thoughts online — but don’t worry, this won’t be the millionth article about overcoming your fear of posting. There are far better writers doing that. This is for people who already know distribution comes first and want the quiet alternative: you don’t need a personal brand to build a distribution asset. Here are the three ways I’ve done it and illustrate various alternatives for you to consider:

1. Borrow someone else’s distribution

If you’re a builder, let me tell you: there are literally millions of people out there with the exact opposite problem to yours. There are over 200 million content creators in the world, and only about 2% of them — roughly 4 million — have more than 100,000 followers. Around half earn less than $15,000 a year, and 67% has never done a single brand deal. Sit with that: millions of people holding real audiences, with no business attached to them. They have the eyeballs and no product. You have the product skills and no eyeballs.

In 2024 I thought: why not send a thousand emails to content creators in the US and find one to build an ecommerce brand with? That became my creator partnership business, Thrive Creators. We had about 15 conversations off those thousand emails (yes, cold reply rates are brutal), and eventually formed a partnership with one of the largest homesteading creators in America. At the time I didn’t even know what homesteading was. But we brought a new dimension to a creator business now doing 7 figures a year: product, distribution, operations — and with the advent of vibe coding, professionalising a creator operation into a e-commerce brand.

If you can vibe-code, there has never been a better time to build software with creators instead of hunting your own audience from zero. Here’s exactly what I’d do:

1. Scrape creators in a niche — use Apify’s APIs to pull creators on TikTok/Instagram in a given vertical (finance, parenting, pets, cooking, whatever).
2. Do handwritten, tailored outreach — not “cold email.” Inboxes are drowning in AI-generated generic crap, which means it has never been easier to stand out with a proper email that took me 10 minutes. Go on their actual profile, watch their last two videos, and make your first line explicitly about one of them. Nobody puts in that effort anymore — which is exactly why it works. Expect 5–10% replies instead of the ~1% mass cold email gets.
3. Test demand before building — a landing page with a signup form and discounted early-customer packages for the service. Offer to set this all up for the creator free.
4. If there’s demand and the product is simple — specifically mini-SaaS-type products — offer to front the build costs yourself (a $60/month Cursor vibe-coding subscription).
5. Agree a revenue or profit share — let Claude draft the agreement structure, then get a real lawyer to look before signing anything that matters.
6. Congratulations — you’ve done the genuinely hard part of making a product: finding the initial eyeballs that get it off the ground.

2. SEO / GEO

I remember sitting at some proptech conference in Miami in 2022, on a project while working in Cambodia, thinking: what the fuck is SEO? It sounded like the most boring, nerdy marketing technique imaginable and I brushed it off. Now, in 2026, SEO — and more recently GEO (getting cited by AI answer engines) — is the foundational asset I build into every new project. In my view it’s the S-tier technique, because it gives the asset itself a higher underlying enterprise value if you ever sell — versus a business where client acquisition depends on someone’s LinkedIn account continuing to post.

I learned this the expensive way. When I first launched my creator-brand UGC marketplace, Pitchlo, I became a Facebook Ads addict — the quick rush of revenue, watching the Stripe balance tick up, thinking I could sit back. Any new Meta advertiser learns the truth soon enough: you’re on a hamster wheel. Constant new ad creatives, tiring audiences, random algorithm shocks. One day, as a solopreneur staring at declining ROAS and the endless spend on new UGC creatives, I decided it wasn’t worth my time — and built my own content-publishing and SEO software instead: something that regularly pushes content, finds backlink opportunities, and has my assistant pitch insertions into blogs. I now run four of my businesses through that same software, and within two months Pitchlo’s traffic went from 90% Meta Ads to 90% Google and AI search:

SEO Growth on Pitchlo has been slow and steady since April…but slowly compounding

SEO/GEO is the strongest long-term distribution you can own, and in the long run the cheapest acquisition there is — and with Claude and other AI tools you no longer need an expensive agency to run it. Here’s the basic setup I use across my projects:

1. Keyword research first. Connect Claude to an Ahrefs subscription (MCP) or the DataForSEO API and have it hunt low-competition keywords in your niche — difficulty under ~20, real search volume, high intent. Prioritise question-style queries: those are what AI engines answer, and what you want to be the cited source for.
2. A content engine on a cron. Scheduled jobs that construct articles to current Google and AI-search standards — which today means: a direct answer in the first paragraph, proper heading structure, schema markup, first-hand data or examples the model can’t get elsewhere, and internal links. The direct-answer-up-top part is what gets you quoted by ChatGPT and AI Overviews instead of scrolled past.
3. A self-improving loop with Search Console. Plug GSC into the pipeline and have an agent review every two weeks: what’s ranking, what’s dead, which pages to kill or merge, which new keywords to test. This loop is the difference between a content pile and a compounding asset.
4. Backlinks, systematised. Use the DataForSEO Backlinks API to find prospects with decent domain rating and traffic from your target market, in a similar field to yours — relevance matters more than raw DR. Build a scraper that hunts variations of “write for us” and “contribute” pages. Have AI generate personalised pitches; expect that some placements charge a fee, and budget for the good ones.
5. Let Claude run the boring parts. Everything above except final editorial judgment can be delegated. Your job is taste and the fortnightly review, not the grind.

3. Build a media asset

This one’s the sneakiest, and my favourite. I’m doing it right now with millionaire.news.

The mechanics are stupidly simple. Some people do podcasts, Instagram pages.. but its now never been easier to build your own news platform. You can build a news website (Wordpress has many templates) in a high-value niche, then reach out to professionals in that world — lawyers, wealth managers, founders, whoever — offering to write about them or interview them. And here’s the thing: Most people says yes. People are obsessed with being seen. A feature in a publication is a LinkedIn flex they cannot resist, and most of these professionals have never been asked.

Now watch what happens. They share the piece with their network — that’s your distribution, borrowed again, but this time you own the platform it points back to. Half of them add the feature to their website’s press page — that’s a backlink, which strengthens your domain, which grows your organic traffic, which makes the next person you approach take you more seriously. And every interview is a warm relationship with someone in a high-value industry who could become a client, a partner, or a buyer. The asset gets stronger with every single conversation — it’s a networking weapon disguised as a website, and unlike a personal brand, it doesn’t need your face on it.

Your own content media site enables you to give value to people you want to connect with

Nobody wants to hear hear this but..

I hate to break it to you, but every one of these — personal brand included — takes a real amount of time to properly see results if you’re bootstrapping (at least 1 year if not two years realistically). Yes. Two years. That’s the one big realisation you earn from actually doing business: this is a 20–30 year game. We’re wired for instant results, and the internet sells overnight winners hard — but nearly everything real is the slow compounding of small, boring, daily actions. Ten emails to creators. The article that goes out on the cron. The backlink pitch nobody will ever see. Weirdly, this is the most freeing realisation in business: nothing is wrong with you — it’s just early. Stop trying to win this month. Pick the distribution asset you can stomach building for two years, and start stacking reps each day.

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Replies

Journeyy @Journeyyahead

Using creators’ audiences is clever, yet the manual outreach still eats time

Louis McKeeve @lmkeev

Yes but nothing is easy 🤷🏼‍♂️

Vah—skezz @alexjvasquez

Surprisingly not annoying as useful.

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My Notes / Thoughts:

Related

Source article for several Hibi distribution notes — the ideas here are already atomized into the marketing vault:

• seo-geo — Hibi’s owned SEO/GEO content-engine channel is adapted directly from section 2 of this article (Pitchlo’s 90% Meta → 90% Google/AI-search shift, the content-engine-on-a-cron, question-style keywords, GSC self-improving loop).
• creator-mining-plan · influencer-gifting-playbook — section 1 (“borrow someone else’s distribution”) is the creator-partnership / gifting play, operationalized for the planner-community.
• gtm-roadmap — the “pick one distribution asset you can stomach for two years” framing sits under the whole roadmap.
• 2026-W27-the-boring-part — the digest where “distribution comes first / the build was never the bottleneck” is worked through in the user’s own voice; this article is the outside articulation of that realization.
• 2026-03-09 - The Brand Age — companion clipping on the personal-brand economy; this one is the quiet alternative to it.
• 2026-01-06 - AI-Generated Software - The Vibe Coding Era — the “you can build software on your phone, so how do I get customers now matters 10x more than what should I build” premise.