Think about the last time you followed a company on LinkedIn. Now think about the last time you followed a person. Chances are, the second one came much more naturally. There was a face, a voice, a point of view you connected with. Maybe they made you think differently about something, or they just felt honest in a way that most corporate content doesn't. That instinct, the one that pulls you toward people over logos, is something every founder needs to understand, because it changes everything about how you grow a business.
We live in an era where trust is scarce and attention is expensive. Investors are inundated with pitch decks. Talented people have more job options than ever. Journalists are swimming in press releases. In that environment, a polished company page rarely cuts through. But a founder who shows up consistently, shares what they actually think, and builds a real audience? That's a different story entirely.
People invest in people
Ask any early-stage investor what they're really betting on when they back a pre-revenue startup, and most will tell you the same thing: the founder. Not the product, not the market size, not the financial projections. The founder. Their judgment, their resilience, their ability to attract others to the mission and adapt when things don't go to plan.
So it stands to reason that if investors are evaluating you as a person, you should be giving them something to evaluate. A strong personal brand is essentially a public track record. It shows how you think. It demonstrates your domain expertise. It proves you can communicate clearly, build an audience, and generate interest around ideas, all of which are skills that directly translate to running a company.
Some of the most fundable founders in the world built their reputations long before they ever opened a pitch deck. By the time they were fundraising, investors already knew who they were. The due diligence had been done in public, one post at a time.
Your best hire might be watching you right now
Hiring is one of the hardest things about building a startup, and for international founders establishing themselves in the UK, it's often one of the first real walls they hit. The job market is competitive, great people have choices, and getting talented candidates to take a chance on an early-stage company with a small name is genuinely difficult.
A personal brand changes that equation. When you share your vision, your values, and your thinking publicly, whether that's on LinkedIn, in a newsletter, or through speaking at events, you give future team members a reason to believe in what you're building before they've ever spoken to you. You're not asking them to leap into the unknown. You're showing them exactly who they'd be working for and why it matters.
The best hires are often not the ones you go looking for. They're the ones who were already paying attention.
Press follows people, not press releases
If you've ever tried to get press coverage for your startup, you'll know it can feel like shouting into a void. Journalists are busy, inboxes are full, and unless you've raised a significant round or done something genuinely newsworthy, the chances of your company announcement getting picked up are slim.
But journalists do follow interesting people. They bookmark the voices they trust. When a story breaks in a particular sector, they reach for the names they already know. If you've been consistently sharing sharp, credible insights on your industry, you become someone they want to quote. And being quoted as a founder in a relevant publication does more for your company's credibility than most press releases ever will.
This isn't about being controversial for clicks or chasing virality. It's simply about having genuine expertise and being willing to share it. On LinkedIn particularly, thoughtful, original perspectives in a specific niche consistently outperform polished corporate messaging. The algorithm rewards personality. More importantly, so do people.
Your company brand can disappear. Your personal brand travels with you
Here's something that doesn't get said often enough: companies pivot, rebrand, get acquired, and sometimes close. If your entire identity as a founder is tied to one company name, you're building on borrowed ground. A strong personal brand is yours. It follows you from venture to venture, survives a rebrand, and compounds in value over time in a way that a company page simply cannot.
Think about the founders you admire most. When you hear their names, you probably don't just think of one company. You think of a body of work, a way of thinking, a set of ideas they've championed. That's personal brand at its most powerful, and it's something you build through showing up consistently over time, not through a single product launch.
So where do you actually start?
The most common mistake is waiting until you feel ready. Until the business is further along, until you have more to say, until you feel like an expert. The thing is, that moment rarely arrives on its own. You build credibility by sharing the journey, not by waiting until the destination looks impressive.
Start with what you already know. What are the questions you get asked most often in your industry? What misconceptions frustrate you? What have you learned the hard way that others are still making? Those are your starting points. You don't need to have all the answers. You just need to be honest, specific, and consistent.
LinkedIn is the most obvious place to begin if you're a B2B or startup founder, but it doesn't have to be the only one. Some founders build powerful audiences through newsletters, podcasts, or speaking circuits. The platform matters less than the commitment to show up regularly and say something worth reading.
Our co-founder Richard Harrison is a good example of exactly this in practice. His LinkedIn following has grown steadily because he doesn't just talk about building businesses in the UK, he shares the reality of it. The hard-won lessons, the things that surprised him, the honest perspectives on what it actually takes to move a company forward in a new market. That consistency has built him an audience that genuinely engages, and it reflects far better on Innovator International than any polished company post ever could. If you want to see what showing up consistently on LinkedIn looks like over time, his page is worth a follow.
One practical thing worth remembering: write about your thinking, not just your wins. The posts that perform best, and build the deepest trust, are usually the ones where a founder shares a lesson they wish they'd learned sooner, or a view that goes against the grain. Authenticity is not a buzzword here. It is genuinely the thing that separates a personal brand that matters from one that disappears into the noise.
The compounding effect
One of the things that makes personal brand building feel difficult is that the returns aren't immediate. You post something thoughtful, three people like it, and you wonder why you bothered. But the people who stick with it long enough tell a very different story. Opportunities that seem to arrive out of nowhere. Investors who reach out instead of having to be chased. A hire who says they'd been following you for months before they applied.
That's the compounding effect of a personal brand. It works quietly in the background, building a body of evidence for who you are and what you stand for, long before anyone asks. And by the time they do ask, whether that's an investor, a journalist, a potential co-founder, or your next big hire, you've already given them a reason to say yes.
Your company has a brand. But so do you. And right now, yours might just be the more powerful of the two.
Want help building your presence as a founder in the UK? Explore our resources at innovatorpulse.com or speak to one of our Executive Guides about how to position yourself and your business for growth.
Richard Harrison
