FounderPersonalBranding

Nobody warned me I'd be on camera three times a week. Today I sat down to make a reel. It took four long takes. Instagram was never a big part of my life. It definitely wasn't a big part of my career for the ten years before this. I ran a business in fashion. I looked at fabrics, made calls on taste and production. Nobody handed me a phone and asked me to explain myself in fifteen seconds. Now three times a week involves exactly that. Reshoot the hook because it's not capturing enough, say it slower because the pace needs to grab attention, and say it like I mean it. It's a strange kind of work. Nothing to do with the actual company, and somehow still core to whether people believe in it. I don't think this is a complaint. It's a signal that founder-as-influencer is a real job now, whether you're trained for it or not. Founders who came up before social media was mandatory: did you actually get good at this, or just get less resentful of it?

When we started the company, I thought my role would be mostly around building the product and getting the business moving. That assumption lasted about five minutes. Today, I find myself spending time across marketing, HR, operations, partnerships, hiring and a dozen other things that didn't exist on my job description. And honestly, I think that's been one of the most humbling parts of building a company. You quickly realise how little you actually know when you're responsible for something end to end. Marketing has made me rethink how people perceive a product before they ever use it. HR has made me understand how much thought goes into building a team beyond simply finding good people. Operations has shown me how many small decisions have to come together for the larger machine to keep moving. I wouldn't call myself an expert in any of these areas. If anything, taking them on has made me much more aware of how much there is still to learn. That's probably one of the things I enjoy most about building a company. You start with a role, and the company keeps giving you problems that force you to become a little better at things you never expected to learn. Some days it's uncomfortable. But it keeps you humble, and I think that's a pretty useful quality to have as a founder.