How to Treat Your Personal Brand Like a Startup and Invest in Yourself
In 2018, I was inspired to create a pitch deck, but instead of creating it for a business, I created it for my personal brand: Kasia Manolas LLC.
My parents are my first true investors. For example, back in 2014, they paid my registration fee for a writing conference in Chicago. By 2016, I was carving out a portion of my paycheck to invest in my own business, so in a way, my next investors were my employers at the time.
I started asking myself: if I had investors what metrics would I report to them? How would I describe my brand to them and what I’m selling?
That’s when I created a pitch deck. If you’re not familiar with what a pitch deck is, it’s what startups take to various investors as they pitch their business and secure new investments. You can look up examples of tech pitch decks here.
If you’re a writer like me, you can also consider your literary agent and publisher an investor.
The process of creating a pitch deck helped me answer a lot of key questions about my personal brand and the value I can provide. Below I’ll share what’s inside of my personal brand pitch deck, so you can do the same.
Personal brand pitch deck
I used Google Slides to create a presentation of my brand. Here’s what’s on each slide, so you can use this as an outline:
Logos
Mission
Keywords to describe my brand
Audience: graphics of who my audience is based on age, location, and gender (I used analytics from Instagram ads and Google Analytics)
Brand colors with hex codes
Brand fonts
Competition (for me, these are comparative titles for books)
Sales funnel (how do I acquire new readers from social media all the way down to how people will eventually be able to purchase on Amazon, BookShop.org, etc)
Key performance indicators (KPIs)
Site traffic
Newsletter subscribers
Revenue
Revenue channels
Timeline of goals & work that’s getting done in the next year
Timeline with a vision for the more distant future
How to contact me
No one is actually going to see this pitch deck, so while it’s pretty, I didn’t invest time into making it perfect. The goal is to create a vision for your brand, make key decisions, and begin to consider your brand an investment.
Here are some questions you’ll answer along the way…
Questions your pitch deck should answer
What is the goal of your business and who is it helping?
What metrics matter to your business and why?
Are your metrics growing?
What efforts are you putting in place to continue growing your metrics over time?
How to use your pitch deck moving forward
Once you figure out which metrics matter and your strategy for how to grow them, the next step is recording metrics over time.
I have a Google Sheet called “Mission X” that I’ve been using for several years now. On the first of every month, I record my key metrics, such as followers, follower ratio, email subscribers, website traffic, domain authority, backlinks to my site.
Watching these metrics grow keeps me focused on growing my audience. It’s also important to keep in mind - that’s just half of the pie. The other half is building products (in my case, books) that my audience will one day want to read.
Next Steps
Creating a pitch deck for my personal brand was helpful for me, and it’s something I only thought of because I was immersed in a tech startup at the time. The idea of investing time in growing metrics made me curious about what metrics should matter for my brand. I was also constantly curious: what is my brand?
Personal brands are interesting because they’re innately tied to who we are. It’s a vulnerable process to create a personal brand and project it online. Will people care? Will my “brand” resonate with others? Does my brand provide value?
These questions come naturally to us. The real work comes from how you answer them, and if you’re consistent in following through every day.
I hope the process of creating a pitch deck for your personal brand is helpful for you.
