Business strategy

Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim on building a personal brand

The Yorby founders explain how they found their content styles, why the right audience matters, and what makes a personal brand worth maintaining.

11 October 20262 min read8 min listen

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Written for builders and creators.

Building a personal brand is often treated like a quest for fame, but if you're building a business, chasing viral views is actually one of the most dangerous things you can do.

Editor's note

Why this matters now

Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim built their audiences through different strengths. Meng moved toward comedy and storytelling. Kim developed a following around technical subjects.

Their personal-brand discussion is worth hearing if you're deciding what to post while building a business. They connect the audience you attract with the work you enjoy enough to keep making.

You can borrow a video's structure while learning. The harder choice is finding a subject you can return to after the first burst of enthusiasm ends.

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What it says

Distilled from the original. The notes above and below are the editor's own.

Choose a subject you can keep making

Andrew Meng and Thomas Kim describe how their personal brands developed through repeated experiments. Their useful skills and their enjoyment of the work both affected the direction they chose.

Meng found a stronger fit with comedy and entertaining stories. Kim describes an audience interested in technical subjects and his experience as a developer.

They caution against choosing a niche purely because it appears profitable. Disliking the work can make a posting habit difficult to sustain.

Learn how a successful video works

The founders recommend studying the topic, title, thumbnail and presentation of videos that already reach the audience you want.

That can help a beginner understand how a video earns attention. The next task is to develop their own contribution: an explanation, an opinion, an example or a story they can support.

They describe practice as a large part of that process. Early videos provide feedback about both your skills and what you enjoy making.

Give people a reason to follow

An educational creator offers knowledge the viewer wants. An entertaining creator offers an enjoyable story or a distinctive personality.

The founders use that distinction to think about their own work. Sharing a startup's progress can draw on either approach, but a sequence of updates still needs a reason for someone to watch.

For a new founder, useful demonstrations and a well-told account of a real problem may give a viewer more to follow than a bare progress report.

Ask who the views come from

A personal brand can create business opportunities through an audience that trusts your judgment. The founders discuss why a smaller audience of relevant buyers can matter more to a business than a large audience with little interest in the product.

Their observations about TikTok, Instagram and YouTube reflect their own experiences. Platform behavior changes, and a pattern from their accounts may differ from yours.

Keep the audience and product connected

For a founder, the practical question is what the content helps a potential customer understand about your work.

Review the posts that bring useful conversations, product questions or sales. Those responses help you decide what to keep making alongside the view counts.

Editor's note

What to do with this

Look at your recent posts and the people who respond. What are those people coming to you for? Does that overlap with the customers your business needs?

Choose a subject you can explain from experience, then try a few ways of presenting it. Keep notes on buyer interest as well as reach. The show's marketing-channel episode helps connect that audience choice with the product you sell.

Find more from the show in our startup-growth playlist.

The original

Everything we learned from posting 3,000 videos to grow our personal brands

How Does This Get Big? · 8 September 2026