Why I'm rebuilding my personal brand with AI, in public.

I built a personal brand once. It almost broke me.

This was 2013. I quit my corporate aerospace job with no business, no website, no income. Just 12 months and a wife who said yes. I started a podcast, learned WordPress, wrote blog posts, recorded videos. For ten months I made zero dollars. Then in month eleven, someone asked me to build them a website. I said yes. Word spread. Referrals came in.

Within a year my wife Linh quit her job and joined me. We had a web design agency. Featured in Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, GoDaddy. Our podcast hit number one in New and Noteworthy at launch. We made more than our combined corporate salaries.

It looked great from the outside.

On the inside, by 2017, I was unraveling.

Podcasting. YouTube. Blog posts. Courses. Client websites. Speaking at conferences. Coaching. Webinars. Social media. Ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. New client leads started feeling like a burden. Conference invites felt like obligations. I was short-tempered with my wife and son. I went to counseling. I had to say it out loud: I had built a prison, not a business.

In 2019 I stopped. Shut down the podcast. Pulled back from social. Turned away clients. Buried the personal side of the brand completely. We sold the condo in California and moved to Arizona.

That same year I saw a job posting. Marketing Director at a WordPress company I’d been using since 2014. I sat on it for over a month. Then one morning at 3 AM I woke up with a clear feeling. Apply. So I did. I got the job. That was almost seven years ago.

People think I disappeared. I didn’t. I kept building, I was just doing it for a company instead of for myself. I managed content writers, course creators, ad experts, designers, SEO specialists. I learned how to delegate. I learned how to build systems that didn’t need me to hold them up. I needed every one of those years for what came next.

In 2026, AI changed the math.

Everything I used to do manually, AI can help me do now. The writing. The editing. The video prep. The research. The planning. The repurposing. All of it, without destroying myself in the process. That was always the real problem. Not the work. The volume of it. One person can only carry so much before they crack.

So I’m doing it again. From scratch. This time with AI.

And I’m doing the whole thing in public.

Why build a personal brand with AI in public?

Because that’s the content that actually helped me when I was starting out.

When I quit corporate in 2013, I didn’t learn from people who had already arrived. I learned from people who were one step ahead of me, figuring it out in real time. They showed their work. They showed their numbers. They showed their mistakes. That made it real.

Most content about building a personal brand is made by people who already have the audience. They skip the hard part. The part where you don’t know what to do next. The part where your first post flops. The part where you start a YouTube channel and it sits at 12 subscribers for three months.

I’m in that part right now. That’s the content I want to make.

No paywalls. No gated downloads. No funnel designed to push you into a course. I already did that version of the brand. It didn’t fit me.

This time I want to help people and see what comes back.

What you’ll find here

Four things.

Foundation work. Picking your niche. Writing your story. Setting up your website. Choosing tools. Building a visual identity. Using AI to help with the decisions most people freeze on. This is where most of us get stuck. I’m going through it right now and showing the work.

Creating and repurposing content. The weekly grind. Writing, video, social, email, blog posts. AI workflows that let one person publish without falling over. How to sound like yourself, not a robot. How to write once and get ten pieces out of it.

Growing the personal brand. Audience. Engagement. Community. Revenue. I haven’t earned the right to teach this yet. When I do, I’ll show the real numbers. Until then, I’m not going to pretend.

Building in public. What’s working. What broke. What I tried and quit. The decisions I second-guessed. The honest stuff that doesn’t make it into most “here’s my framework” posts.

What this is not

I’m not an expert. I don’t have all the answers. I’m a few steps ahead of you on the same road, not a few miles.

I’m not selling a course. I’m not running a mastermind. As Donald Miller taught me, the customer is the hero, not the guide. If I ever launch a product, you’ll know. It’ll be obvious. It won’t be hidden inside the content.

I’m not here to get famous. I already did a lap with that. Stages, interviews, featured articles. It didn’t fill the hole I thought it would. As Zig Ziglar said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” This version of the personal brand is about service, not significance.

Does AI actually make building a personal brand easier?

Everyone says AI makes building a personal brand easier.

I don’t think it does. Not on its own. More tools. More options. More content demands. More platforms to show up on. It’s easy to use AI to create ten times as much content and ten times as much overwhelm.

AI didn’t solve my content problem. It solved my burnout problem. Two different things.

The real win isn’t speed. It isn’t volume. It’s a system that lets a one-person operation keep going for years without breaking the person running it. That’s what I wish I had in 2017. That’s what I’m building now.

Come build with me

If you’re a person with a full-time job, a family, real responsibilities, and two or three hours a day to work on this thing, you’re in the right place. I’m not a few zip codes ahead of you. I’m on the same block.

I’ll share what I try. What works. What doesn’t. The tools, the wins, the walls I run into.

You don’t need to subscribe to anything to read what I post. If you want updates when new stuff goes live, there’s a newsletter. If not, come back when you feel like it.

See it. Plan it. Build it.

That’s how I’ve done everything in my career. Same method, different tool belt. This time the belt has AI on it.

Come build with me.