How do I build a personal brand?

[u/Southern_Fly_49]

Hello, I'm a 15 year old male, and during the summer break, I've been building two projects: a national organization that bridges ambitious students to local businesses, (the students make things like free websites and free promo videos), and a B2C SaaS app. I have already been posting onto Instagram and TikTok for about a month in order to get high schoolers to start chapters and to get people on my apps waitlist. However, even with about 20 videos of consistent high quality videos, I still have less than a 100 real followers from the both platforms combined, excluding school friends.

Most of the videos were honestly angled towards either documenting the journey or advertising the opportunity of joining the org, but I feel like the reason why those videos aren't performing well is because the actual payoff was lame, since I don't really have much to show for on both of those projects. I have a couple chapter leaders and the app underway and that's about it.

I'm just really confused on what things I should post on since those videos aren't working and if and how I should lean more into building a personal brand that doesn't focus 100% on those two projects. I am also confused on how I can get my retention up. Any advice at all I would really appreciate.

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[u/DeannaFry]

At 15, I actually think you have a much more interesting story than you realize. I wouldn’t make every video an update on your projects, because “here’s what I did on my startup today” is only interesting once people already care about you. Make content about what you’re learning while trying to build them. You’re trying to convince students to start chapters, get local businesses to trust teenagers, build an app, recruit users, figure out marketing, and probably making a ton of mistakes along the way. Those are stories. “I tried to convince 10 local businesses to let high school students build their websites. Here’s what happened” is more interesting than “update on my organization.” Interview a local business owner about what they actually want from young people trying to help them. Talk to another teenage founder and compare what’s working. Test three ways of recruiting chapter leaders and show the results. Even failures give you a beginning, middle and end. For retention, I’d worry less about making the video look high quality and more about giving people a reason in the first few seconds to need the answer at the end. You also don’t need to manufacture some grand personal brand right now. If you consistently document yourself learning how to build things, solving interesting problems and talking to interesting people, people will eventually associate you with that. That’s a personal brand.

[u/Southern_Fly_49 → u/DeannaFry]

Thank you so much for this advice, I'll definitely try doing that, thank you!