The Me vs Them Trap: why your personal brand isn't growing.

If your content is about you and not your audience, it will not grow. Period.

What is the Me vs Them Trap?

It’s the default setting for most new personal brands. You launch a YouTube channel or a blog. You talk about your journey, your wins, your process. You share what you’re excited about.

The audience doesn’t grow. You can’t figure out why. The content is good. You’re showing up consistently. But nobody’s engaging.

Here’s the problem. You’re the hero of your own content. Your audience needs to be the hero. That flip is the entire game.

Why it feels right to talk about yourself

Because personal brands are personal. The name is right there. You think the audience wants to know your story, your credentials, your results. And some of that matters. But only after they trust that you understand their problem.

Think about the last time you followed someone online. Did you follow them because their bio was impressive? Or because their content made you think “this person gets what I’m going through?”

It’s almost always the second one.

How I fell into this trap

My first personal brand started in 2013. I had a podcast, a blog, a YouTube channel. I talked about my journey. The conferences I spoke at. The features in Entrepreneur and Huffington Post. The revenue milestones I hit.

Some of it resonated. Most of it just made me feel good to share.

By 2017 I had been creating content for four years. The audience was growing slowly. But the people who showed up weren’t the people I could help the most. They were fans of the story, not builders who needed guidance.

The shift didn’t hit me until I burned out and stepped back. Six years away gave me the distance to see it. I was making content for me, not for them. The audience felt that even if I didn’t.

The counter-argument: isn’t vulnerability the point?

Fair pushback. The advice for years has been “be authentic, share your story, be vulnerable.” And that’s not wrong. Vulnerability builds connection.

But vulnerability without relevance is a journal entry, not content. The test is simple: does this story serve the reader or does it serve your ego?

My burnout story matters because my audience is on the same path. My Air Force story matters because it shows how I handle setbacks. If my audience were accountants learning Excel, neither story would matter at all.

The story has to serve the reader’s problem. If it doesn’t, it’s about you.

Why this trap is even harder with AI

AI makes it easy to create more content faster. That means you can fall into the Me trap at scale. Ten posts a week about yourself instead of two. More volume, same mistake.

The fix isn’t creating less. It’s running every idea through one filter: does my audience need this? Not “would they like it” or “would they engage with it.” Do they need it?

My audience needs to save time, save money, make money, or make things easier. If the content doesn’t hit at least one of those four, I don’t publish it.

How to escape the trap

Read your last five posts. For each one, ask: who is the hero of this content? Me or the reader?

If you’re the hero in more than two of them, flip the ratio. Start the next post with the reader’s problem, not your story. Use your story as evidence, not the main event.

Here’s the test I use. Can I replace my name with any other person’s name and the post still works? If yes, the content is generic. If no, the personal experience is doing the heavy lifting it should.

The goal is content where your experience proves the reader’s problem is solvable. Not content where you perform your experience for applause.

If you want to see how StoryBrand connects to this, read the StoryBrand post. Or start from the beginning with the manifesto.

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Come build with me,

Anthony