How to Build a Personal Brand: 3 Stages to $250 Million

In a world of AI, building a personal brand is one of the most valuable things that you can do. And that's what helped

us generate through our portfolio companies over $250 million a year. And we recently broke the Guinness World

Record for the fastest selling non-fiction book of all time. Money models generate $106 million in sales in

72 hours. So in this video, I want to show you three stages that I went through in building a personal brand and

how you can do the same. So starting with stage one is do epic And the reason that everyone skips this step

because it's probably the hardest step, right? Because every 23-year-old wants to start a personal brand because they

see it online, right? And what everyone forgets is the personal part. Not making videos or posting, but actually having

real skills, accomplishments, or opinions or takes that are worth watching in the first place. But what

makes an opinion worthwhile, right? You have unique insights or experience that the audience doesn't have, and that's

why they value what you're saying. And so, if you want an epic personal brand, you have to do epic first. The

proof is in the pudding. And it's not even in the pudding. The proof is the pudding. Right? You'll build a bigger

brand making content for 6 months after a decade of experience than you will off a decade of content with only six months

of experience. All right? Because no one cares about your opinion until they know it's worth something. And so you have to

back up your talk with your walk. And so think do demonstration. And there's two ways to win uh in terms of doing

this, which is that you have some thing that you accomplish, right? or you could do so much work that people want to

bargain on that work. So, if I make content that's let's let's say I'm in the in the relationship romance niche,

right? If I go on a hundred dates and then I make a video about those 100 dates and it's 12 minutes long, I get

two seasons of The Bachelor in 12 minutes, that's a good deal. And so, if you think about what humans want out of

content is they want speed. This is education to be clear. They want speed. They want to bargain for their time. The

thing that we all feel like we don't have enough of is time. And so people will buy with their attention for things

that paid down the time that they don't have to spend and can get all the benefits. like why did um cliffnotes uh

boom back in the day which by the way if you're watching this probably don't know what cliff notes is because it was

something that I used to spark notes was something else and people would like you don't read Shakespeare you read the

cliff notes and you guys just watch it you know talk to AI and get it but like back in our day right we we still had to

read the cliff notes to pass the test right and so people want the cliff notes but you have to still write the book to

get the cliff notes and the cliffnotes are going to do more than the actual book will for many of you when you're

making content right they don't want to go through five years of entrepreneurship. They want to learn the

lessons in five minutes. Second stage is that once you have the cred, you associate yourself. And again, the

credibility can do from come from volume of work or volume of accomplishments. All right? It can come from either. So

if you're like, "Ah, but I haven't accomplished anything." It's yeah, show the work. Show the work. Do a thousand

uh outreach attempts. Do 10,000 doors that you knock on and document it. That is the work. People will happily not

want to do work. Watch you do work and then get the lessons from it. That's the idea. So anyways, stage two is once you

have that, associate yourself with positive things over and over again. So what do I mean by positive? The positive

has to do with what your audience or ideal customer finds positive, which also by the way means that you have to

know who you're going after. Branding people make feel like it's this big amorphous thing, but it's just

associating you with something else. So if you appear on a podcast with someone, you have a minor association. If that

podcast person becomes your co-host, it's a stronger association because it happens more and more times. And so just

think of them these pairings over and I have paired myself with a beard, a hat, uh the acquisition.com tank top,

flannels. So much so that there are Halloween costumes of flannels and and tank tops, right? Because I've made the

association so strong that people are like, "Oh, uh that guy's dressing up like Herozi, right?" But like

fundamentally, like there's nothing really inherently unique about a flannel or a tank top. It's that I do it every

single day. Now, if I say black tank, black turtleneck and jeans and New Balances, who do you think? Steve Jobs,

right? If I say red S on your chest, I can just give you that and you know it's Superman, right? Because in every single

appearance, he looks the same. And so, the association that's made is strong. So, that's a visual association. Now,

what we're talking about at a kind of the 2.0 level is what are the the nonvisual associations that we're

making, right? And so one is your brand and the other is the thing that your audience or customer likes. And so what

you do to do that is you figure out who your avatar is. Ideally a market that is growing, that is in pain, has a problem

to solve, can afford your stuff, and they're easy to find. All right. Now, the easy to find part is something that

in my first book, Offers, I talk about because back in the day, uh, algorithms weren't as good [laughter] as they are.

So you had to like put a beacon out saying this is for you. But AI knows who it's for now and just serve it directly.

Now once you know who they are, we have to figure out what they like. So then we associate ourselves, our brand through

the thing that they like, which is you make content about the thing they like, you make products they like, both free

and paid, and you appear next to the people they like. And so the example of this going wrong is uh Dylan Mulvaney

makes an ad for Budweiser and it went super viral. The problem is it went viral for the wrong reason because the

people who drink Bud Light and Budweiser don't like trans people. Now, to be clear, that's not all Budweiser drinkers

or all Bud Light drinkers. Uh but the majority of them didn't want that association. And so, they netted a loss

in revenue. And this is where this is gets interesting. I make no comment here. My point is that there is an

audience, a smaller audience that loved that association. It was just smaller than the core audience. And so Dylan

Mulvaney might be an amazing brand association for a different product or company who has an audience that like

maybe for Starbucks that would be a better association because they have a more leftleaning audience. I think so I

want to be clear there's no inherently good or bad association. It's just is it a good association for the ideal

customer that you have your ICP your avatar. And so if they like that association they will some of that those

cool points will rub off on you. And if you make a hundred cool associations, then all of a sudden you can just appear

without the association and some of that will rub off on you until eventually you become a brand. Right now, let me give

you one more example of of a bad way of doing it. And to be clear, some all these brands I'm talking about have been

masters at branding. And it's only a parent that made a mistake because of how strong their brands are, right? And

so what did the what did Budweiser do to repair that? They made a super strong association with UFC. And so for their

demographic, UFC uh was a great pairing for them. And so then they saw some recovery and they kind of became a

little bit uh you know, they moved to the right. We'll just call it that way. Real quick, I'm going to show you the

exact 10-stage road map from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple

times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get

through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business. what the constraint feels

like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate.

And we've done this across software, physical products, uh, service, businesses, brickandmortar, all of this,

and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so, the link's in the description, but you just go

acquisition.com/roadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you. All free. So, let me

give you another example of a big brand that made a big brand mistake. And you wouldn't even think about it at the

onset, but let's dive a little deeper. So Coca-Cola Classic made an ad around Christmas time that was like an AI

Christmas ad. And so I can almost think about the meeting of like it's like listen we got to lean into AI it's the

future all this stuff right and what ended up happening is that people backlashed against it because what is AI

associated with with the everyone well many people are very afraid of AI right and Coca-Cola has a very like I would

say vanilla Coca-Cola classic open happiness it's about as broad and general America and now global obviously

but like they want to just get everyone to drink their drink right they're not trying to be polar on any side of the of

the of the the train tracks, but AI is a very polarizing issue because so many people are afraid of it. And so by

associating themselves, because people would tell that it was AI uh with AI, then they're associated with job cuts,

job losses, big Fortune 500 companies cutting people out of creative departments, what about all the actors

they used to pay, blah blah blah blah blah blah, right? And it creates this wrong narrative. And so it wasn't even

that the ad was made with AI. It was that AI itself has a brand, which it does, and the pairing of Coca-Cola with

it was not good. Now, could Nvidia have an AI ad? Absolutely. Could Microsoft have an AI ad? For sure. Right? All of

these could have AI um ads and it would have been great. So, was an AI ad inherent inherently bad or good? It

depends on the brand. It depends on the reinforcement history, the associations that that brand made over time. And so

let me show you another big company that I would say is less cutting edge ironically, but Apple. And I would say

that if Steve Jobs were there, Siri probably would have been one of the first voice AIs and we would have had a

different product than they have, but that's okay. Um, anyways, um, but Apple made an ad purely with the human touch

side, but the idea was that was very wellreceived. And so if you think about Apple, like they're so big now that

they're like everybody's got iPhones. Like they're they're like Coca-Cola. They're general popular. They're

technically bigger than Coca-Cola, but like they're they're mass market, right? And so if you're ma marketing a mass

market, you have to think about mass market wants, which is a lot of times not necessarily what the people who are

making the ads like or what, which is why it's always about the customer. And so long term in the second step, we

associate oursel with cooler cooler things and people and we make content about it. And we just want to make sure

that our products match our promises. So we create a virtuous cycle of branding. what we say is the first level of

branding about ourselves. And then people consume our product and it's what other people say. And then finally, you

have a customer who heard what other people said and they buy it and then it's about what they say. And if you buy

a product, it doesn't matter how good the marketing was, you're going to make a decision about it. My favorite example

of this is like if you go to a movie, you're going to see a trailer. You might think, "Oh, that trailer was

interesting." And then a friend of yours sees the movie and you say, "Oh, how was it?" And the person might say, "Oh, the

movie was great." And then you say, "Fine, I'll go see it." And then when you see the movie, you will make the

decision and you will not care about the trailer and you will not care about what your friend said. Uh you will just care

what you think. And so ultimately, if that movie was good, you're more likely to see a movie with that actor or about

that topic or from that director or from that production studio as a result of that because they fulfilled their

promise, right? And so the idea is that once you do that process, the virtuous cycle of branding is you continue to do

that and then basically wait 5 years and don't give up. Now, the third and final step is what I'll call defending the

belt. All right? And so, what Coca-Cola, what Apple, what UFC, what these what these large brands have to do is once

you get to the top, you have to stay relevant, right? Because that's actually the thing that degrades these kind of

empires. So, like Rome was defeated by the barbarians, not by an on a head-on a head-on match, but because they nibbled

away at the borders, right? And so, brands once they're big, they get nibbled away into irrelevance, right?

All these little players do things that are a little bit more relevant for smaller audiences and they start gaining

market share. And so what does a big brand do to stay a big brand? You have to fight newer, hungrier challenges to

defend the belt. Like somebody can't just win the UFC and then say, "I've won forever, right? They've got to stay in

the title spot and let people take shots at them to usurp them, right?" And so a couple like one of my favorite examples

is obviously like Red Bull when they did a jump from outer space, right? Like why would an energy drink do a jump from

outer space because they have to take the most extreme example of craziness of like that guy must have been hopped up

on so much stuff to do something that insane and if he if he was able to do that then you know what maybe if I'm a

little bit tired they'll give me a little boost this afternoon. Right? And so you're defending the belt is doing an

aspirational thing that your audience finds cool or interesting. All right. And so the thing is is that if if if Red

Bull did that, but if they just stopped doing advertisements and they stopped doing big brand moments like that,

eventually they would fade into irrelevance when another uh energy drink company comes along that's new and hip.

So they've got to they got to show they got to kind of like put their fallus on the table, if you will, right? They got

to show people what's up. They got to show who daddy is. Like still remind them or mommy, what you know, whatever

your vibe is, right? Um you still got to say who's boss, who can still who can still show up. like can Jon Jones still

show up and still put a hurting on someone, right? And so let me give you a couple examples of this. Like Apple, you

know, and Steve Jobs famously did these big big huge keynotes like those were these huge events, these brand moments

of their innovations, what they had done, right? Uh Elon is famous for doing these these big uh you know Tesla, he

did the robo taxis, he did the Optibbots for us. We do our, you know, we did the book launches. We did the launch for the

leads book. We did the launch for the money models book. I sold the company. This, that was kind of my first big

brand moan, if you will, um, of selling the company for just under 50 million bucks. And so each of these things are

brand moments that are aspirational for the target audience, right? Um, Open AAI and, uh, and Claude, when they when they

go make their updates, they make big fanfare about it. And so, you have to have these belt moments. And what I

think is really interesting, I'd say for me as a business owner, shifting a little bit towards uh business, it

underpins branding is that internally I can tell you when you have this big goal and it has to be public. That's the

thing. It's like you have to kind of like set the date, make the shot across the bow, and you've got to let the world

know that you're going to do this thing. And the amount of energy that it incites within the team and the alignment of

where we're going is unbeatable. And this is why you hear the Steve Jobs and the Elon Musks talk about these insane

timelines and they're so demanding because they know they've got this public thing that they can't cancel.

There is a reason that sports has maintained relevance for such a long time. And why is that? Because they play

a championship every year. Literally 7 days after the championship over like no one even pays attention to it. They're

literally all the commenters are talking about what's next season going to look like, who's who's on the waiver wire,

who's getting traded, what coaches are moving around. people move on, but they need to have this thing. And you know

what? You're only as good as your last season, right? If you were Super Bowl champ and the next season, you go one in

one in, you know, 15 or one and 16 or whatever it is, um, you're no longer relevant. So, you have to keep defending

the belt, right? You have, if you want to create a brand, you're trying to create a dynasty. What do you do right

now? Number one, do epic in terms of volume or a quality outcome. So, big accomplishment or lots of work that you

can show your work for. And that becomes your initial content. Then we continue with this loop by associating with the

stuff that people want. So business owners want to make money. Uh girls want to get pretty or they want to lose

weight. We associate with those things and we associate with the people that those people find cool or interesting.

And we do that pairing over and over and over again. And then some of those people say, "Wow, this person uh is cool

and so I want to buy their stuff." And you just need to make sure that your stuff fulfills the promise and is also

cool and good. When that happens, you start to build yourself a brand. You now have a brand at that point. When you've

completed that loop, at this point, you just continue that loop as much as you can, but you still need to have the

third step, which is you have to defend the belt. You got to find these big moments, these big external goals that

you can drive towards things that scare you, things where you actually have real stakes. That's the thing that people

make like you have to have stakes. You have to have skin in the game. Otherwise, it's not interesting. What is

the first thing that happens in every reality show? They show the big amount of money, right? Who wants to be a

millionaire? There's a million dollars. There's inherent stakes. And so you have to create stakes both within the company

because if we don't do this, we're going to be humiliated. We're going to miss our goals. Uh we could we could lose a

lot of money and that puts everyone's jobs at risk. Like there's real stakes inside the company, but because of that

people out on the outside, it makes you and the goal more interesting. And so what do they do? They pay you the

attention.