A few years ago, I believed the key to earning trust as a founder was to sound more like a company than an individual.
I wrote in third person, polished every line until it was stripped of feeling, and hid behind the idea of being “professional.” What I did not realise was that professionalism, when it becomes a mask, can turn you into wallpaper, which means you are there, but no one notices.
The shift occurred when I began telling stories as they actually happened to me, as lived moments. I wrote about my daughter’s diagnosis, the fear of starting over with no job, the frustration of rejection emails, and the quiet satisfaction of closing my first inbound client.
These were stories, and the moment I began to share them, people paid attention differently because it was unmistakably mine.
This is where most founders miss their advantage. They believe credibility comes from speaking like a brand, but in reality, credibility grows when you talk like a person.
Your personal story is the moat around it because no AI model can replicate the way you felt when you almost gave up. No content agency can script the exact words that came out of your mouth when a customer told you that your product changed their life.
Look at founders like Melanie Perkins. She shared how she was rejected 101 times before finding an investor who believed in her, which makes her human. Or Sara Blakely, who described cutting the feet off pantyhose in her apartment before Spanx existed. That is the kind of image that makes you feel like you’re in the room with her, watching the idea come to life.
When you write as a founder, you are not producing content for algorithms but building trust with people who might one day buy from you, partner with you, or support your vision.
The highlight reel has its place, but the messy middle is where connection lives, like the 3am anxieties or the awkward investor meetings. Write about the unexpected email from a customer that reminded you why you started. These stories are assets.
Naval Ravikant refers to this as “specific knowledge”, which is something you can download, outsource, or summarise in a neat template. It is the knowledge that comes from your path, your curiosity, and the patterns you’ve noticed that others miss.
When you share that knowledge, not as bullet points but as a lived story, you stop competing with every other founder for attention and you create a category of one.
This is why I tell the people I coach to write in their own cadence. I ask them to forget the corporate voice, the idea that everything needs to sound like a press release.
Instead, I ask them what story they would tell if they were sitting across from a friend who needed to hear it and then write exactly that.
So, my challenge for you this week is to write one post about a failure that taught you something valuable. Don’t soften it with jargon or try to turn it into a polished case study.
Make it personal and yours because your story is the one thing your competitors can never copy, and is the reason people will choose to trust you.