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Personal Branding in the "Age of Abundance"

Made May 10, 2025modified May 10, 20258 min read

Background:

As AI lowers the barriers to entry for “coding” applications, the ability to build “stuff”1 is becoming democratised. The people who can build something impressive are increasingly no longer required to, or constrained by, code2. So if knowing how to code is no longer the top priority, what is?

There are three assumptions that the rest of this essay follows:

  1. Humans will always will always care for other human created “stuff”. 3
  2. That your desire is to become a top “builder of said stuff”4.
  3. LLMs will hit a certain point in the near future where it’s able to build the “stuff coders could previously build in 6 months” flawlessly, in much less time.5

My Proposition:

I propose that creativity and personal branding6 newly become the next most important skills to learn, surpassing coding. My justification is as follows:

  • Historically, great digital experiences are the culmination of great ideas and great execution.
  • Executing anything7 will soon no longer be technically impressive8.
  • Thus, great digital experiences will increasingly be a product of great, creative ideas.
  • As the field of “building” becomes more competitive, constructing a “following” with a “good personal brand” becomes more important (as in the photography example in the 5th footnote).

Disclaimer: My sister, a graphic designer, helped me realise the importance of personal branding - they’ve been doing it since social media took off, as their field suddenly became far more competitive.9

How Does One Become More Creative?

1. Be Interdisciplinary:

New ideas are dead. All the best “new” ideas are just remixes of great older ones. Which are just remixes of even older ones. But for that to happen, you need to consume wide-ranging information, and be able to make novel connections between them all. Here, you’re able to make connections that far fewer people can or will. That’s creativity10.

Thus, you should experiment in different fields.

2. Maintain a Good Information Diet:

It’s obvious when someone points it out.

I’m pretty unhappy with just these 2 as ways of becoming more creative. Feel free to tell me ways I’m wrong / not considering. Consider this a work in progress.

How Does One Cultivate a Better Personal Brand?

I think it’s really helpful to think of this from the lens of a YouTuber (e.g. MKBHD). Thus, lots of the advice told by Colin and Samir is gold.

1. Define Your Why:

This parts important, and I promise I’ll try to minimise the corporate crap. The rest builds on this.

Have a crystal clear idea of why you’re doing something. Try to abstract it a few levels up11. This gives you space to work later. Everything from here on will build on this. A few examples could be:

  • 3Blue1Brown’s may be: “I help people truly understand math by visualising the ideas that make it beautiful.”
  • MKBHD’s may be: “I help people understand the latest tech so they can make smart, confident buying decisions.”
  • Brian Chesky’s AirBnB’s is: “A company that helps creates a world where anyone can belong anywhere”. (Admittedly a very vague reason)
2. Define Your Audience:

First, have a very clear idea of who you’re going to be exposed to the most. Is it technical people? Is it investors, looking to invest in someone with a really clear track record of success? Is it the average person, who wants to know which iPhone to buy? Or are you Mr. Beast, and do you want your target audience to be everyone?

3. Define The Pillars of You?

What are corner-stones of you? The framing of them should depend on who your audience is, but it should fundamentally be a very personal thing. Are you someone who’s curious about the future of technology, tinkering away with cool new tools? Are you someone who’s always punctual?

This is essentially the image of you that you want to convey to your audience. It includes your personality, humour, your results, your capabilities etc. It can be raw and honest12.

4. Be Consistent with Your Branding:

First, on a superficial level, find a good colour palette and design that works with the above 3. Then apply it across your entire platform. Anytime they see anything about you (from you) it should, the design should be consistent. Experiment and evolve your design, but do not jump drastically in design. (My superficial design palette is clean colours and graph-like elements13!)

The branding also involves the first 3 parts as well. Keep consistent with them - in everything you post online, it should reflect the image of you you’re choosing to share. It’s not about being fake, but being you in a consistent way.

Note: It’s easiest to just pick a consistent colour palette and call it a day. But the “influencers” (🤢) with the best personal branding clearly understand these in the order that I’ve given them.

5. Experiment In Public and Invite Them For the Ride:14

Throughout this entire process, you should be working publicly. My favourite example of this is Steven Gong. Tweet about what you do, the experiments you’re running, the challenges you’re facing, the hot-takes you believe. All of this cements you as a voice, with a consistent brand that people buy into.

So What:

As I was writing, I realised that I’m basically implying that as “building” becomes commoditised, your edge then becomes how well you can you craft and sell a story. I’m not a big fan of that conclusion. I’ll keep editing this as I come up with thoughts on it.

Footnotes

  1. Defined (overly broadly) as online, digital experiences, that could be built by an experienced coder in less than 6 months. This has historically included video games, productivity software, social media apps etc.

    As well, the broad umbrella of “experiences” covers YouTube videos, Instagram posts, Tweets etc. I think the impact that AI has on the latter group is different (and to a lesser scale), but there are arguably as many lessons to learn from them. We’ll dive into that later. ↩

  2. AI is also (to a lesser extent) democratising other fields. For example, marketing: you no longer need expensive royalty images or to pay models for wearing your clothes. ↩

  3. This seems to be empirically true as well. We’re still watching games of Go and Chess. Arguably, there exists some AI-generated images that are better than all other human-created images in a specific domain (e.g. realistic images of anthropomorphised pets wearing human clothing), but we’re still taking photos. The people that are doing the best (in both) are the skilled people who are using the tech to their advantage. But that’s for a different essay. For now, here’s a cute (AI!) image of a dog with some juice:
    ↩

  4. Builder of online digital experiences. ↩

  5. Once an LLM is able to code at a 99% software engineer’s level, what fundamentally new experiences does this unlock? This essay assumes that creativity will always be the bottleneck. But what if the new technology unlocked a fundamentally new set of requirements? Take becoming a famous photographer: Pre-2000’s, you needed to have a deep knowledge of film camera’s, aperture etc, as well as the skills in a darkroom and to develop photos. Most importantly, you needed to know how to network with galleries and magazines. Nowadays, photography has been democratised to the masses (with everyone having a high quality camera on them). A fundamentally new set of requirements was discovered: You need to understand algorithms, learn how to tell a story that captivates an audience. Not to mention, since photography has become more competitive, you now need to nail some of the earlier things (e.g. composition). ↩

  6. Shut up lol. I know that “personal branding” isn’t a skill, but it works in the context of things someone should learn how to improve / get better at. Sooooo, we’re rolling with it. ↩

  7. Again, something that can be built by an experienced coder in under 6 months. ↩

  8. It’s unclear if there will eventually be limits to this. It’s not intuitive that a single AI will ever be able to completely recreate the world’s banking system. But, if you gave the top 0.01% coder (or team of coders) unlimited time and cloud resources, it’s not clear why they couldn’t do just that. ↩

  9. Fun fact: Every time I see comic sans in the wild I send her a photo of it. ↩

  10. Leonardo Da Vinci had medical diagrams that were years ahead of their time. This was largely thanks to his observational ability as an artist. Or Noam Brown created the first AI that beat multi-player poker - thanks to his love for the game, understanding of human psychology and depth of knowledge in ML. ↩

  11. So turn “I build puzzle games because I love designing tricky levels” to “I help people experience the joy of solving difficult problems”. Crucially, you should stop abstracting the moment it stops becoming true as an over-encompassing fact. ↩

  12. Emma Chamberlain became uber-famous by realising this - her entire brand became her raw, open honesty with her audience. It helps build connection. Or MKBHD’s developed trust with his audience - they know they’re getting real opinions. ↩

  13. A new front end for this crappy site is coming soon! ↩

  14. This part is essentially telling you to build an audience. Building an audience essentially underscores the rest of the essay. It’s also a different (but related!) skill that’s hard to learn. ↩

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