The Best Founder Content Barely Talks About the Business

The most effective business content on just about any platform right now is founder-led and centered on one or more personal brands. 

It doesn’t matter the industry, niche, or platform. Whether it’s talking about the experience, expertise, or how they’re building something in public…it just works. 

One of the patterns I find super interesting about the people doing this at the most elite levels is how minimally thye talk directly about their business. Sure, they bring it up and everything ties back to what they are doing but they are absolutely not…

• Constantly explaining their services
• Creating endless educational carousels about what their company does
• Tying to turn every piece of content into some thinly veiled sales pitch.

They’re just telling their story, building things in public, talking about what they’re learning, sharing what it’s like to be a founder, an owner, a CEO, admitting things they’re changing their mind about, decisions they’re making, etc. You get the picture. 

The point is that their business gets snuck in there here and there, and you know what they do, but it’s almost secondary to getting to know them. 

And I’m specifically talking about B2B founders here because I think this is something B2B companies and business service companies still really struggle with.

We’ve accepted this in B2C for a long time. We understand why the founder of a clothing brand or beauty company or consumer product might build a personal brand alongside the company.

But an accounting firm, consulting company, agency, or software company?

Somehow we still feel like those people should be posting infographics. It just doesn’t make sense when we see what’s actually working though. 

I had one of those moments recently where I watched this entire thing play out on me in real time. I came across a founder who owns an accounting company specifically for online creators. She works with UGC creators, high-ticket salespeople, online coaches, digital business owners—people making serious money online. Some of her clients are doing half a million to a million dollars a year.

My favorite thing about her page, though, is that almost none of her content is about her accounting firm or trying to sell anything from it. 

Yet I am now incredibly interested in her accounting firm. I have genuinely thought I would work with her.

That’s fascinating to me because accounting is a pretty dang saturated market. There are tons of people who can do your books and handle your business finances. And yes, she has niched herself into a specific audience, which obviously helps, but she’s still not the only accounting firm serving creators and online businesses.

The differentiator that caught my attention wasn’t accounting. It was her.

She talks about things like… 

• What it’s like learning to be a CEO at her age
• The conversations she’s having with clients 
• Culture and workplace dynamics
• Women in the workplace
• Interesting takes and ideas and things she’s figuring out in her own financial journey

All of this leads to getting to know her, and getting to know her made me more interested in her business.

Because I became more interested in her business, I started thinking about whether I would give her my business.

That is what I’m talking about when I talk about founder reputation.

Especially for emerging companies, smaller companies, and founders trying to get known in saturated markets. Your reputation can become the differentiator.

It can become the thing that gets you the huge client, introduction, or opportunity. I think this matters even more now because, quite frankly, so much traditional brand content is becoming useless. I can look up anything I want to know about accounting in about two seconds.

I do not need an accounting firm’s Instagram carousel to teach me “5 bookkeeping mistakes small businesses make.”

But if I need to decide who I trust with my business? That’s completely different.

If I already have a connection with a real human being, I genuinely think that has become one of the greatest forms of currency. The funniest part is that this is working on me as a marketer who knows exactly what’s happening.

I know what she’s doing. She’s documenting her journey for probably a lot of different reasons, including monetizing her personal brand. Of course she wants to become known in her industry and to be sought after. But she also wants the exact kind of people she’s documenting this journey in front of to trust her enough to work with her.

And it’s working. Because it worked on me.

Companies need to understand that this is how you actually get known and trusted now.

This is how you shorten your sales cycle, and the value doesn’t stop once you’ve closed the deal.

It’s one thing to close a sale, but it’s another thing to start that relationship with someone who already has a tremendous amount of trust in you.

They understand how you think, what you value, and how you approach your work. That makes the relationship smoother and almost everything easier because you’re not starting every relationship from zero.

Which is why I get increasingly frustrated when I see companies spending so much time creating company content for the sake of creating company content.

Another carousel explaining something your customer could have Googled—or asked AI—in two seconds.

It’s crap, nobody cares, but the great news is that you have something infinitely more interesting available to you.

A real person. 

If you want your content to actually make a difference, you have to show your real experience, real life, real story, and the real person behind the business.

Because your competitors can replicate your educational content, but they can’t replicate you.

Your founder reputation isn’t some vanity project sitting beside your actual marketing strategy.

I actually think it is the marketing strategy.