Five years ago, a founder with a substantial Twitter following had a meaningful business asset. The audience could be activated for product launches, hiring, fundraising, customer acquisition, and recruitment. Some founders used their personal brands more skillfully than their company brands. The combination of operational competence and audience-building was a significant competitive advantage.
That advantage has collapsed.
Several forces have compounded to undo it. The platforms have changed. Twitter became X. Reach is now substantially less reliable. LinkedIn’s algorithm rewards different content than it did three years ago, often favoring AI-generated thought leadership over genuine writing. Instagram has become hostile to text-based content. Substack has matured into a real platform but rewards consistency more than charisma.
The audience itself has changed. The kind of follower who, in 2019, would respond to a founder’s tweet about hiring is now exhausted by the volume of similar content. The signal-to-noise ratio has degraded. Founders who post hiring announcements get hundreds of responses, most of which are not viable candidates. Founders who post product updates get ignored. The reach is there, but the conversion has cratered.
The pattern of consequences is broader. Founders who built large audiences are finding that their audiences don’t translate to business outcomes the way they used to. The “1,000 true fans” formula doesn’t work for most categories anymore because the cost of attention has risen so dramatically. Even founders with hundreds of thousands of followers report that their actual business outcomes — paying customers, qualified candidates, useful introductions — come from much smaller, more specific networks rather than broad audiences.
There’s also a reputational shift. The founder who is “good at Twitter” is now slightly suspect. Investors increasingly view extensive social media presence as a yellow flag, not a green one. The assumption is that a founder spending significant time building a personal brand is one not spending enough time on the company. This isn’t always fair, but the pattern is real and the perception is shifting against the previously celebrated combination.
What replaces founder-as-influencer is harder to define. The most effective founders right now seem to focus on smaller, more specific audiences — customers, peers, potential hires, specific journalists — rather than broad public visibility. They invest in deep relationships rather than broad reach. They treat content as occasionally useful rather than continuously necessary. They’re harder to find on social platforms, easier to find through their actual work.
This shift has implications for how founders build companies. The “you have to build in public” advice that was useful in 2019 is now mostly wrong. Building in public works for a small subset of products and a small subset of founders. For most companies, the optimal posture is some version of “build deliberately, surface occasionally, focus on customers.”
The founders who came up during the founder-as-influencer era have a particular task. They have to figure out how to extract themselves from a model that no longer works without seeming to abandon their audience. The transition is awkward. Many founders have not yet started it.
The takeaway
If you’ve been investing significant time in building a personal brand, audit the actual ROI. Most founders find that the time would be better spent on customer relationships, hiring, or product. The era when building an audience automatically produced business value is over.
