👨💻 Brands, Not Businesses
👨💻 Brands, Not Businesses
Dishing The Data #61
Good morning, friends!
This week has been quite exciting! On Thursday, I did my first ever talk about all this content stuff I do online at Accelerate HQ, a meetup/conference for entrepreneurs, founders and creators.
I never thought I would be on stage presenting to 150 people about data science content, but here we are!
Big thank you to Alex Tang for running and organising the event and for
for getting me involved to speak. I met Mandy through Substack as she is also an online data science writer (check out her newsletter Smarter Techies), so it's a surreal moment meeting an online friend in real life!My talk was about the power of building a brand instead of a business, which is greatly inspired by this post from
.Without realising, I have been building a brand by posting all this content over the past few years, but it was never my intention.
I started by writing Medium articles on technical topics to learn data science better. Over time, people started asking me for advice on becoming a data scientist, so I launched a YouTube channel to discuss those topics.
Even now, I still don't do all this to grow my "personal brand." I enjoy it; it allows me to express myself, and some people benefit, and that's all I could ever ask for.
I mean, I even did a previous post on my skincare routine, which is hardly in line with my data science brand!
However, without any of this content, I would never have been asked to speak at an event like I did last Thursday.
Brands are more powerful than people think.
Take Kylie Cosmetics. Why do people buy the product? The majority buy it because it's Kylie Jenner's brand. Don't get me wrong; I am sure the product is also quite good, although I can't speak from first-hand experience 😀.
But there are probably other cosmetic products on the market equally as sufficient and maybe even cheaper. Her brand really pushes sales, or at least significantly helps them.
There is a famous saying in entrepreneurship that goes:
first-time founders focus on product, second-time founders focus on distribution
A brand is a form of distribution channel. If you have a product that flops, it doesn't matter because people follow the brand, not necessarily the products.
The problem is that brands often take longer to build than products, but they pay off more in the long run.
I always recommend that anyone should post stuff online that they are interested in. You probably won't get famous and earn lots of money, but surprising things may happen down the road, as they did for me last week.
Weekly Favourites ❤️
🗣️ Event — Accelerate-HQ. Obviously, this was the highlight of my week. If you are interested in anything entrepreneurial or creator-based work, I recommend coming to the next one! You can even pitch your idea to potential investors if you are a founder!
💻 Course — Thumbnail Masterclass. This week, I took Tintin Smith's thumbnail course to try and level up my YouTube game. It's really good and very concise, which I liked. I watched it at 1.25x speed and consumed it in three hours during my commute!
🔨 Tool — Rode NTG4+. I have finally bitten the bullet and got an XLR microphone. The XLR is a much thicker cable, so the audio is much better quality than that of a regular aux cable.
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you 😎)
My Latest Content 🎬
You can reach me on:
LinkedIn, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
My YouTube Channel and Medium Blog to learn technical data science and machine learning concepts!
💡 If you are interested in sponsoring this newsletter see here.
Loved meeting you, Egor!
"first-time founders focus on product, second-time founders focus on distribution"
This is an interesting quote, because I feel I have it the opposite way. When I started writing online, I had no idea what my product would be. So I inadvertently built my distribution channel first