Most leaders think they know how they’re perceived. They know their intentions. They know their accomplishments. They know what they want people to think about them. But your reputation doesn’t live inside you. Your personal brand lives in the hearts and minds of others. And now, increasingly in AI systems.
AI Is A Powerful Personal Brand Builder For Leaders
AI can become a surprisingly powerful tool for growing your brand. It can act almost like a reputation mirror, helping leaders identify patterns, strengths, inconsistencies, differentiators, and even blind spots that are difficult to see on their own. It helps leaders build and express the authentic leadership qualities that are essential for leading in our tech-infused workplace.
1. Use AI to Become Self-Aware
Having a strong and recognizable brand is essential for leaders. It helps the people they lead understand and trust them. Focusing on clarifying and expressing your brand is part of your job as a leader. The most successful leaders are self-aware. That means self-reflection and external perception are aligned. Sao Paulo based Personal branding and AI expert Paulo Moreti put it this way, “AI exists to transform subjective perceptions into strategic data, allowing leaders to use technology to scale their presence and influence. This ensures that they are never replaced, but rather empowered.”
2. Use AI to Clarify What Makes You Different
Your personal brand starts with clarity. AI can help you uncover patterns in your experience, strengths, values, communication style, and accomplishments. It can help you describe your unique promise of value. AI can provide the external perspective, identifying themes across your resume, bio, LinkedIn profile, testimonials, results from 360 surveys, and past content. And once you become truly self-aware, you can prompt AI to help you understand your brand differentiation. You can even ask AI to compare your positioning against others in your field by analyzing positioning, communication style, visibility, audience, and differentiation.
3. Use AI to Strengthen Your LinkedIn Presence
Most leaders know LinkedIn matters. They know LinkedIn can be an exceptional reputation builder, but they struggle with what to say and how to say it. AI can dramatically speed up the process. To prevent yourself from sounding like a regurgitated version of all the people who share your job title, craft your own draft profile. Then ask AI to:
Improve your Headline and About section so they are more on-brand and differentiated from your peers
Generate post ideas based on your expertise and unique point of view
Turn meetings, presentations, or articles into content you can use in your LinkedIn profile and posts
In addition to taking the lead with the content drafts, don’t automatically accept all the improvements and suggestions your AI tool provides. Review all content and refine it to ensure it’s completely you.
4. Use AI to Support Thought Leadership Content Creation
The internet is already flooded with generic, AI-generated content. The goal is not to contribute to AI slop. It’s to amplify your perspective, expertise, and lived experience. To grow your brand, you must create content that’s unique and valuable to your audience. You cannot offload that task solely to AI. But you can use AI as your muse, editor, and proofreader. With AI you can:
Turn voice notes into articles
Repurpose presentations into posts, newsletters, videos, and articles
Generate outlines for articles or presentations
Brainstorm stories, hooks, titles, and examples
Transform one idea into multiple content formats. This helps with both visibility and consistency.
AI works best when it enhances human insight rather than replacing it. It struggles with originality and lived experience. That’s why you need to be part of the equation.
5. Use AI to Become More Visible Without Spending All Day Online
One of the biggest barriers to personal branding is time. Many leaders know they should be more visible, but visibility often gets pushed aside by meetings, deadlines, and daily responsibilities. Despite all the ideas you have for articles and videos and your desire to “be out there,” work can take up so much time that your visibility is limited. Ask AI to:
Create content calendars, and batch content creation
Draft networking messages and follow-ups (that you refine)
Summarize articles or industry trends into your own perspective
Prepare comments for strategic engagement on LinkedIn
Visibility becomes easier when AI partners with you to make it happen.
6. Use AI to Improve Your Communication Skills
Leaders are communicators, and communication is one of the most powerful ways to strengthen a personal brand. In fact, communication shapes your reputation faster than almost anything else. To enhance your communication skills, use AI as a coach, sounding board, editor, and mentor. AI can help refine communication. But trust, warmth, energy, and authentic presence still come from the human being delivering the message. Work with your favorite AI tool to:
Practice presentations with AI feedback
Improve storytelling
Customize elevator pitches for different people and groups
Adjust your tone for different audiences
Get feedback on clarity, warmth, confidence, and conciseness
AI can coach communication, but authentic delivery still matters most. And that’s up to you.
7. Use AI to Build a More Human Brand
Ironically, AI is increasing the value of humanity at work. As tech becomes more capable, the qualities that make leaders truly valuable and memorable become more human. Qualities like empathy, authenticity, presence, encouragement, and connection help leaders motivate and engage their teams. AI can help leaders communicate more effectively with their people, but humanity is still what creates trust. Only you can inspire people, create belonging, and make others feel seen. AI can help you accentuate your humanity:
Use AI to remove jargon and robotic language
Analyse whether your content sounds authentic
Create more empathetic communication (especially for those challenging emails)
Spend less time formatting and more time connecting
Focus on stories, experiences, values, and POV
As your peers flood the world with uninspiring, AI-generated content, humanity becomes your differentiator.
Use AI To Scale Your Reputation, Not Replace Yourself
The goal of integrating AI into your personal branding activities is to become more efficient while remaining in the process. The more information AI has about your goals, voice, values, expertise, and communication style, the more effectively it can support you. When you engage with AI as a collaborator, you keep your voice, opinions, and personality intact, and enhance trust and credibility while expanding your reach. The leaders who thrive in the AI era will be the ones who use AI to become clearer, more visible, more connected, and most importantly, more human. Because in an increasingly algorithm-shaped world, humanity is becoming the ultimate differentiator.
William Arruda is a keynote speaker, bestselling author, and personal branding pioneer. He helps organizations boost engagement and impact through personal branding.Watch his complimentary session on upgrading your LinkedIn profile, network, and thought-leadership strategy.
Visibility makes you seen. Reputation determines whether you are chosen. That’s the difference most individuals, brands and even CEOs don’t understand. They believe that if they’re talked about enough, blogged about enough, tweeted about enough, they will be powerful. But getting seen is merely amplification. Sure, it drives exposure. Sure, it escalates reach. Sure, it puts your name into motion. But it doesn’t drive what others think of you when they see it. Reputation does. And outside social media, in the real world, perception is what actually governs results.
To put it simply, people don’t just react to visibility. They react to what that visibility represents. That’s why the reputation versus visibility discussion is not just about branding. It is about influence and understanding the difference between just sitting at the table and having real influence there.
Your Reputation In Relation To Others
Leaders must shift how they think about reputation. A leader—or an organization—has as many reputations as they have audiences, and the reputation belongs to each of these audiences.
The reality is that when you walk into a room, you are no longer managing a fixed identity for your brand. You are managing the interpretation of your brand by your stakeholders.
That is why being visible without a reputation architecture and management strategy is risky. The second your name, your company or your leadership brand is released to the public, a story will be made. That story could be true, skewed, partial or even opportunistic. Yes, it’ll be shaped by your actions—but also by timing, agenda, competition, media climate and audience bias. Once you go public, you begin to lose control. You stop managing information and start managing interpretation.
Executive Reputation And Corporate Risk
This is where leadership personal branding succeeds or fails. Take, for example, the issue of executive reputation. Highly-regarded leaders can greatly improve a company’s reputation, whereas any bad press related to them has the potential to destroy the firm’s reputation. Leaders’ positions are never neutral.
The business community will never draw a line between the leader and their firm, no matter how much executives want them to. Information about the company alone will not affect results. Perception of the person in charge seeps into perception of the company. And when it comes to reputation management, studies backed by lived experience show that silence does not help. Markets don’t wait or operate based on just proof. They look for patterns and whether things appear to be consistent with what they knew about you before.
And stories spread faster than truth. According to a landmark study, false news spreads more quickly and widely than true news on social media platforms. This means that narrative power can no longer be treated as an optional luxury in strategic communication. With speed favouring speculation, there is now only one sure strategy toward influence—credibility must be established in advance of any crisis.
The Momentum Of Reputation
Perception, left to run its course, will compound into reputation. There is no such thing as a static reputation. Rather, reputation works more like momentum. Each article, tweet, silence, endorsement, image, response and inconsistency between message and action gets filed away by the audience. Most signals add authority to your personal branding. Others subtract from it. Very few get forgotten. That effect becomes exponentially harsher in digital reputation management contexts.
The “2025 Edelman Trust Barometer” report reveals that although business continues to remain the most trusted institution in the world, trust varies considerably by country and audience. This reveals an important truth about trust and credibility today—it is fragile and can always be challenged. Consequently, influence does not reside with the most prominent player in the game—it resides with the most credible one.
Silence is also often seen as a protection mechanism for leaders. While sometimes it may indeed be protective, it’s brief. Silence in crisis communication and its effects on organizational reputation and risk perception reveal that strategic silence can affect an organization’s ability to obtain information from the public. The impact of crisis communication silence is negative in the public’s perception. Simply put, when people do not hear from you, they do not stop judging. That is why one of the biggest mistakes in perception management is believing that the lack of communication means the lack of interpretation.
In today’s hyper-speed AI-driven world, visibility can be engineered in bulk, credibility can be faked (for a time) and misinformation can spread before it is possible for humans to assess it properly. Recently, some government bodies issued warnings regarding the potential impact of deepfakes on the reputation of public institutions. The effect of fake content on public opinion and decision-making processes cannot be underestimated. Things like deep fake videos can lead to distrust in public bodies and their actions. The worst part is that the bodies or entities may not even be aware of what’s going on.
Key Takeaways For Public-Facing Professionals
Leaders, founders and public-facing professionals need to understand the following:
• Visibility is a tactic, whereas reputation is an asset.
• Narrative control is not manipulation. Rather, it is making sure that your presentation matches who you are and what you do.
• Corporate reputations are more than branding. They represent an essential form of strategic infrastructure that impacts perceptions of trustworthiness and strength.
• Modern leadership positioning requires nothing but consistency. Consistency between messaging and behaviour. Consistency between visibility and value. Consistency between promises made and promises kept.
In the end, real influence is a matter of reputation, not visibility. The world doesn’t reward presence as you may think. It rewards perception. And if reputation risk isn’t managed carefully, then it won’t matter if you were seen or heard. Your reputation will make all the difference anyway. In fact, if your reputation is exposed to public interpretation, it is already at risk. Assess it before someone else defines it for you.
Executive creative director brand & creative technology, Elmwood
Iván is a Spanish-born, London-based, executive creative director. He designs and develops future-ready brands for sustainable growth. Over the past 20 years, Iván has created multi-dimensional brand identities, online to offline design ecosystems, memorable experiences, and compelling communications for some of the world’s most interesting companies. Clients include The National Lottery, Evian, Mars, Ocado, ABInBev BEES, HALEON, Infarm, NIO, ZARA, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Yamaha, Nokia, Deutsche Bank, Siemens, Cunard, and Panasonic. At Elmwood, Iván is responsible for the development and adoption of Generative AI and Creative Technologies across the team.
Before you move into a new market, make sure you’ve earned the right to be there.
For a long time, our product lived in one room of the house: the nursery.
We built Hatch to help babies sleep, and it worked. We found our customers, earned their trust, and grew. By most measures, we had won our category.
So naturally, the business advice would be: stay there. Protect your turf. Don’t mess with what’s working.
We didn’t do that.
Instead, we launched into adult sleep believing our brand would carry over. But we quickly learned that brand loyalty had to be earned all over again. Adult buyers who’d never had a baby had no reason to know us. The product had to stand on its own merit. Here’s the framework I wish someone had handed me.
The question isn’t “Can we reach more people?”
Most brand expansion conversations start in the wrong place. Founders look at market size and growth maps. That’s all useful. But the more important question is simpler and harder to answer: Does this new strategy make sense coming from us specifically?
If the expansion requires you to become a different company, that’s a red flag. If it requires you to become more of the company you already are, that’s a green light.
We didn’t start our expansion with market research. We started with our mission. Nearly a decade of helping babies sleep has shaped a core belief: that what makes sleep work—environment, consistency, a reliable routine—doesn’t change based on age.
The adult sleep market was growing rapidly, and we realized we had something real to offer it. Not only because the market was big, but because the problem was the same one we’d been solving all along: sleep.
Let your customers lead
Founders should pay attention to customer behaviour.
Our customers showed us what they wanted before we even offered it. We found that nearly 25 percent of parents who bought a device for their nursery then bought a second unit for themselves. For them, the device’s value proposition didn’t stop at the nursery door, even though we weren’t marketing the device for adults.
When customers are already taking the action you’re considering, you’re not taking a risk—you’re catching up. The market is telling you something and you should listen.
The core value must be strong
Here’s the failure mode I see most often: Founders expand the brand before the original business is truly solid, because growth pressure demands something new. A new product line, a new segment, a new channel. The original strategy then gets less investment, less attention, and slowly stops being the best version of itself.
We needed to earn our place in the adult market the same way we earned it in the nursery—by solving the problem better than anyone else.
The discipline to stay put until you’re genuinely ready is one of the hardest things in brand-building. Growth pressure is relentless. Investors want to see new facets of the business. The industry rewards expansion announcements more than focusing on getting the core right.
I would urge you to resist that pressure. Your brand equity is your most durable asset. Stretching into spaces you haven’t earned yet chips away at what you’ve already built. And brand equity, unlike revenue, is slow to rebuild.
3 questions to consider
If you’re weighing an expansion right now, here are three questions worth sitting with first:
Can you articulate the expansion in a single sentence that doesn’t require an asterisk? If you need to caveat it—”we’re sort of entering X, for a specific kind of customer who also does Y”—the story isn’t clear enough yet. Clear expansion stories are ones you can say out loud without wincing.
Can you tell the difference between genuine customer pull and vocal-minority noise? A handful of loud requests aren’t a signal. Sustained behaviour—customers buying more, using the product in ways you didn’t design for, asking the same question at scale—is.
What are you protecting by staying put, and what are you risking by not moving? This one is often skipped. Knowing when not to expand is just as strategic as knowing when to press go.
We moved from nurseries to nightstands not because we were done with babies, but because we understood that sleep is sleep, and that the families we’d already helped could receive more from us than we’d originally imagined.
The brand didn’t change. It grew up. And we think that’s the only kind of expansion worth doing.
As younger travellers increasingly use TikTok like a search engine, the platform is expanding its push to turn viral travel inspiration into direct bookings.
TikTok may have officially completed its transformation from social media app to full-blown lifestyle ecosystem.
The platform has rolled out new in-app travel booking features, allowing users to book hotels, experiences, and other travel services directly through the app after discovering destinations on their feeds. According to Engadget, the feature is launching through partnerships with travel companies and booking providers, such as Expedia, streamlining the process from inspiration to purchase.
In other words: the “TikTok made me book it” era just got a lot more literal.
For years, TikTok has quietly become one of the internet’s biggest travel discovery tools. Entire destinations, restaurants, and hotels have gone viral overnight thanks to creators posting hyper-specific travel itineraries, aesthetic vacation recaps, and brutally honest reviews. Users already treat TikTok like a search engine, typing in phrases like “best Greek islands,” “hidden Italy restaurants,” or “Instagrammable hotels worth the hype” before they ever open Google.
Now, the app appears to be capitalizing on that behaviour in a bigger way.
The new booking integration could also mark a major shift in influencer marketing and travel content creation. Instead of simply inspiring trips, creators may now directly influence purchases inside the same app where viewers discover the content in the first place.
It’s another sign that social media platforms are increasingly prioritizing commerce over connection. TikTok Shop already turned viral beauty products and gadgets into instant purchases. Travel may be the next frontier.
The move makes sense. Travel content performs exceptionally well on TikTok because it combines escapism, lifestyle aspiration, and practical recommendations all in one scrollable format. A creator posts a dreamy boutique hotel in Ibiza or a hidden beach club in Albania, viewers immediately want to know the location, the price, and how to book it.
TikTok’s new feature eliminates the extra steps.
The rollout also reflects a broader shift in how younger travellers plan vacations. Instead of relying on traditional travel agents or lengthy blog guides, many Gen Z users now trust creators and short-form video recommendations more than polished tourism campaigns.
At this point, TikTok isn’t just influencing where people travel. It’s becoming part of the booking process itself.
Annmarie Gajdos is a Slovak-American on-camera host, journalist, and content creator born and raised in New York City. She covers pop culture, concerts, travel, and fashion, bringing an on-the-ground perspective to the moments shaping culture today. Known for her street interviews and live event coverage, she specializes in capturing real-time audience reactions and translating them into engaging, personality-driven storytelling. Read more
Hindsight can be a wonderful thing, especially within a fast-growing business – if only we could see the mistakes we were making before we made them! If your business is growing at pace, here are the common challenges we’ve seen scaling-up businesses face, and our 5 key insights to help you avoid the pitfalls
The evolving proposition
Laying out your customer proposition is not a one-off project. As your business grows you get pickier about the audience you’re focusing on, and as you get closer to your customers you better learn the language that resonates with them. You also become more sophisticated in understanding where your margin comes from as you start to make money on the bottom line as well as the top. All these learnings help you to evolve your proposition which shifts your brand tone, your marketing campaigns, and often your services entirely.
Top Tip: From the start set your expectation that the proposition will evolve over time, and plan in time to review what’s working and what’s not. See any time that you invest into evolving your proposition as progress rather than thinking you got it wrong the first time – it’s all part of the journey to success!
Speed over sanity
Lots of businesses have very high expectations on the speed of growth they want, and sometimes these high expectations encourage them to fall into the trap of ‘throwing money’ at marketing.
By investing heavily in marketing there can be the belief that the more that is invested the faster the business will grow, and whilst effective marketing can obviously fuel growth it can also be where vital money gets burnt. We see this particularly with digital marketing. Don’t get us wrong, well thought out digital marketing can be spectacular in fuelling fast growth, however it’s also a precise art. Spending too much on digital marketing before truly understanding your customers or your proposition can make money magically disappear, and unlike other marketing efforts once it’s gone, it’s gone.
Top Tip: Make sure you’re happy with the ROI and conversion rates by running smaller ‘test and learn’ digital pilots before scaling up.
The customer is ALWAYS right
The brand can look and sound great, with everyone in the business on the same path, but one pitfall we often see is that an important group of people aren’t onboard with the vision – the customer. We’ve regularly observed brands not bringing the customers on the journey with them, and not validating the business proposition with customers is a real hazard to success. Scale-ups are often disrupters, ahead of the curve in their thinking, and sometimes the challenge is that the customer just isn’t ready.
Top Tip: If you’re innovating and treading new paths, remember to factor in how you will bring the customers on the journey with you before they will buy your product or service.
Brand before business or business before brand
The adage about the chicken or the egg is apt here! Businesses often fail when they invest all their energy into building a great brand but trip up over not putting the same effort into making the business model stack up – they simply run out of cash before the whole thing monetises.
We’ve also seen businesses miss out on their full potential because they focus all their efforts into running a great business, and not enough on investing in their brand (which has sometimes meant letting a friend design a logo and buying a cheap off-the-shelf website).
Top Tip: The reality is investing in both your brand and your business is where the true value lies, neither deserves a shortcut.
Vanity over sanity
It’s easy to get over excited about your success, after all you’ve seen the numbers in your forecast and this thing is going to make you the next Richard Branson…. but keep those feet on the ground! Getting your head in the clouds by hiring a highly paid CMO and a top London agency is where things can start to unravel.
Top Tip: Look for the best expertise at affordable rates. Instead of committing to huge marketing salaries consider tapping into part-time networks like The Marketing Centre. When choosing your agency shop about, reach out for referrals, and find a team that wants to come on the whole journey with you as you grow.
Pepsico, the global giant, already derives more of its revenue from food than drinks. Last year it launched a corporate rebrand that is designed to carefully move away from cola-centricity.
The company’s global corporate affairs boss sat down with Mumbrella this week to explain the relaunch, which will see the new logo subtly appearing on billions of packages worldwide.
For Stephen Kehoe, Pepsico executive vice president and chief corporate affairs officer, the key constraint of his company’s corporate branding is also its biggest strength: “Pepsi”.
Solving that particularly devilish problem — maintaining the brand power but moving beyond the fizzy drink — has been the focus of the food giant’s first corporate rebrand in more than two decades.
”Obviously 25 years ago, we were a company steeped in beverages,” he told Mumbrella.
“Today we’re primarily a foods company. Second largest food company on the planet, largest food company in North America. We are steeped in agriculture, 60 crops, 30 countries around the world, localized production, involved in farmers …the old Pepsico way of looking at the logo didn’t really speak to all of that in a way that came across.
“All of that” is a lot.
Pepsico’s global revenues were US$94 billion last year, from sales of more than 500 food and drink brands. That places it behind only Nestlé (around US$115b revenue) in terms of the packaged food and drink market.
As Kehoe points out, the majority — 58% — of Pepsico’s revenue now derives from food, including products from big global brands such as Lay’s, Doritos, Quaker and Cheetos.
Local Pepsico food brands include Australian favourites such as Smith’s and Twisties.
Kehoe mentions how the new logo, which is styled all lowercase, seems to take the emphasis off the “Pepsi” brand recognition. On closer examination it seems clear the omission of Pepsi’s defining red, white and blue in the colour scheme is also significant.
“[The old logo] was very much dominated by one particular brand in our beverage portfolio, Pepsi, and whilst we’re extremely proud of that heritage and will never want to let it go, it doesn’t speak to the overall company who we are today.”
The logo redesign work was done in-house, with brand senior design director Marco Escalante credited as the lead creative.
A question of strategic positioning
Kehoe declined to comment on his company’s long-time rivalry with Coca-Cola. The latter company remains squarely focussed on beverages, and is around half the size (US$48b global revenue).
“Our brand proposition only being linked to the fortunes of the beverages industry is a self-limiting proposition,” he said.
Kehoe seems focussed on building that brand proposition with regulators and the company’s 320,000 employees first. Pepsico as a house of brands for consumers would be a much more gradual build.
“For those of us that spend more time than others talking to policymakers, governments, regulators and all of this, I think this is a powerful new way of representing the company,” he said.
”It’s been a very quiet, understated launch to start to get the brand out there. And we hope through putting the logo on all of our packs around the world, consumers will begin to associate the name with the brands that they love and that will over time increase the overall halo and reputation for Pepsico itself.”
The spectre of advertising regulation
Kehoe was measured in discussing regulatory interventions targeting junk food advertising — for example, South Australia’s ad ban on government properties.
“Banning ways in which we can communicate to consumers is probably not the long-term solution in all of this,” he said.
“ It’s much more around the provision of transparent information about what’s in the portfolio, allowing us as a company to continue to innovate and reformulate, as we have over the years reduced the amount of salt within the portfolio, a switch to healthier oils reducing the amount of sugar.”
In a slightly different context — the question of his long-term outlook — he made a case for choice.
”I believe in the average human being’s ability to make rational, intelligent decisions for themselves and their families,” he said.
Macro economic conditions
Given the signs in Australia of a retail downturn, Mumbrella asked Kehoe his opinion of the general economic environment.
”It’s certainly a challenging moment,” he said.
“It’s an economy of two halves. You’ve got the affluent who continue to do very well, and then you’ve got at the other end of the spectrum, people who are finding it very difficult to make ends meet.
“You can see that actually reflected within the Pepsico portfolio itself … certain aspects of the portfolio continue to grow very well, which tend to be the more premium products like Red Rock Deli here in Australia … people are willing to pay for products that they perceive are healthier for them.”
So how will he know the relaunch has been a success? What are the core KPIs?
“Number one is people’s awareness that we are a food company as well as a beverage company,” he said.
“And then secondly … if people are able to name three, four brands which are part of the Pepsico portfolio and not just one or two.”
“We’re doing something which really is about making sure that people understand that Pepsico, the mother company, is one that has a real, deep voice to play in some of the biggest existential problems and challenges that we face in the world today.”
Note on house style: Mumbrella follows standard capitalisation in company names (for example, “Pepsico” rather than “PepsiCo”) except where non-standard capitalisation is required for legibility.
Nuseir Yassin is the founder and CEO of Nas.com, an AI-powered platform that helps solo entrepreneurs launch online businesses from a single product photo.
Yassin left his software engineering job to travel and create Nas Daily, a one‑minute video series he produced daily for 1,000 days.
With Nas.com, he is productizing his storytelling and growth experience into tools that automate storefront creation, marketing content and ads for small business owners.
Yassin is the founder and CEO of Nas.com, an AI-powered startup designed to help solo entrepreneurs start and grow their online businesses with a single product photo. Yassin studied economics and computer science at Harvard University, graduating in 2014. He started his career as a software engineer at Venmo.
In 2016, Yassin left his job to travel the world and document his experiences, launching Nas Daily, a one-minute video series that he sustained for 1,000 consecutive days and grew to a global media brand.
That venture into content creation, spanning 19 languages and multiple social networks, gave Yassin deep insight into storytelling, audience growth and digital marketing. With Nas.com, he is turning those lessons into software. The platform, which he founded in 2022, automatically builds storefronts, generates high‑performing marketing content and runs ads for creators and small business owners, lowering the technical and marketing barriers to solo entrepreneurship.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Nuseir Yassin. Credit: Nas.com
Pitching Nas.com
For someone who’s never heard of Nas.com, what’s the most concrete way you explain what it does for a solo seller in their first week?
In the first seven minutes, you take a picture of whatever you want to sell, and we handle everything else to help you find a customer to buy that thing. With that one picture, AI creates your store, makes your marketing, and helps you find the customer.
It really comes down to three main things: you can sell any product you want, market the product, and get paid. You upload a single picture of whatever you want to sell—yourself, your products, your candles—and AI automatically creates your product page, sets pricing and options, writes the content, and can even generate a video. With one click, you can market that product on Instagram and Facebook directly through Nas.com. We’ve simplified what used to be three difficult skills—coding a website, creating content and doing performance marketing—into one simple interface to create more entrepreneurs in the world.
His content background
You have a decade of experience creating content. How successful were you?
Across the internet, Nas Daily reached about 70 million followers and more than 20 billion views. We have around 5 million followers on TikTok and 55 million on Instagram on the Nas Daily channel. I built Nas Daily across virtually every social media channel and many languages: Nas Daily Arabic, Nas Daily Indonesia, Nas Daily Spanish, and more — 19 languages and six platforms in total, with about 70 million followers overall. It became a great lifestyle business, but I realized the bigger opportunity is being the platform for others rather than being the influencer.
What did it take to get that many followers?
It felt like eating glass. I made 1,000 videos in 1,000 days straight, which is where the name Nas Daily comes from. Each video took about 15 hours to make, and I produced them from 64 countries. The first 270 videos failed, and it was video 271 that finally broke through. To get attention and build a social media following, you need an irrational work ethic and passion. I don’t recommend it for everyone; at a certain level, it becomes a security concern and isn’t necessarily a healthy way to live. What I do think is for everyone is building a business and working for yourself.
What kind of content did you put out in those 1,000 videos?
I travelled around the world focusing on whatever was interesting about people and places. I looked for the most interesting people—founders of companies, people doing crazy or inspiring things—and made videos about them, plus personal stories. For example, I did a video in Bhutan about it being one of the most romantic countries, showing a nation that’s one of the least visited in the world. Another video covered the woman founder of Miami—Miami is the only major U.S. city founded by a woman—and others included a video about my friend’s death and my experience with Wikipedia. “Nas” means “people” in Arabic, and the channel was really about everyday people.
Origin story of Nas.com
How did you get the idea for Nas.com?
While building Nas Daily, I met roughly 100,000 people in person. I saw in many of their eyes that they hated their jobs and lives and had a constant desire to do something different, work for themselves, and control their own schedules. I’d already experienced the difference that working for myself made in my life; at Venmo, I was overpaid and underworked—I worked about four hours a day and made over $100,000—yet felt no meaning or passion. When you work for yourself, your life changes, and I wanted others to experience that. Helping them build their own businesses felt like the starting point.
What did it take to leap from content into an AI‑driven business with generated ads and storefronts?
We’re careful not to send the message that this is “easy money.” If you think one click of AI will create everything and you’ll just sit there printing money, that’s not our positioning. Our message is: life is better when you work for yourself, and now technology can help you do that through this business platform. It still takes work to build a business; it’s still hard, but it doesn’t have to be as hard as it used to be. In the past, it could take two months to start selling online; now it can take as little as five minutes. You can take a picture, start a free trial, and accept payments within about ten minutes.
Nas.com has created millionaires
How many new entrepreneurs has Nas.com created so far?
We’ve had hundreds of thousands of people express interest in building a business. We have tens of thousands of paying users running active businesses on the platform. The big success is that we’ve created four millionaires on the platform.
Could you tell me a success story?
One big success story is a woman in Singapore who teaches financial advice under the brand “Singapore Budget Babe.” She monetized her financial knowledge on the platform and made over a million dollars. Another story is a 60‑year‑old farmer in Mexico who wanted to build a business teaching farming; he now makes about $1,000 to $2,000 a month on Nas.com. I consider that an incredible success because technology used to gate people like him out, and we’ve made it simple enough for him to participate.
Those four millionaires you mentioned — what industries are they in?
They’re in very different industries: one in events, one in education, and one in fitness, among others. The beauty of Nas.com is that you can sell almost anything. We support all types of products: physical goods like candles and cookies, events (for example, meet‑ups after you’ve sold 1,000 candles), memberships (such as 20 dollars a month to join a network), and coaching (like teaching others how to make candles). Our users all share one thing: they want to work for themselves as solo entrepreneurs, but they monetize in many different ways.
Finding customers and marketing
How do you help sellers find customers?
It’s all about integrations. We help you create the content and then we help you run ads. For example, for a “Dubai Entrepreneur Networking Night” event, a user spent about $200 on ads we ran on Instagram and Facebook. That resulted in 32,000 views, 971 page visits, and 130 ticket buyers. We aim to be your marketing arm across channels like Meta, TikTok, Google, and eventually Amazon listings, which would otherwise be too complicated for most people to manage on their own.
How do you determine what goes into an ad?
We have 10 years of experience creating content and understand what makes a good or bad piece of content. We’ve turned that experience into programmatic “styles” that tend to perform well. For example, if you’re selling a candle, we might create a UGC‑style or unboxing‑style video. We know the script should begin with something paradoxical or superlative—“the best candle,” “the worst candle,” “the healthiest candle,” “the coolest candle”—and we generate that script using AI, guided by our internal rules about what makes a strong ad. This kind of automation would have been impossible five years ago, but AI now allows us to generate effective ads quickly.
So you create the ads using AI?
Yes, the ads are all AI‑generated. As of two weeks ago, AI has gotten good enough that the average person often cannot tell the difference between an AI‑generated ad and a human‑made one. I expect that by the end of the year, about 90% of AI ads will be unrecognizable as AI to 90% of humans.
Pricing and competition
How much does it cost to use the platform?
Pricing ranges from as low as $10 a month to up to $99 a month, with an average of about $30 a month. For roughly $1 a day, you get your own website, payment processing in every country, AI-generated marketing content, the ability to list unlimited products and ownership of your customers.
How does the company make money?
We make money through subscriptions, a small cut on marketing spend and a small cut on some transactions. If you advertise $100 through our platform, we take about $5. We also take about 1% on some transactions, but we charge 0% on physical products because we want to be competitive as an alternative to Shopify, at least for now.
Is Shopify your main competitor?
Essentially, yes. Shopify is an amazing $150 billion company, but it doesn’t work well for new entrepreneurs. It’s too complicated and doesn’t help you with marketing. The entrepreneur’s priorities are: first, product; second, content; third, marketing — using that content somewhere. Shopify focuses mostly on creating the product store, whereas we focus on helping you create content and then market it. Many Shopify users have a store but don’t know how to get traffic to it, and that’s what we aim to solve.
Growth, traction and fundraising
How many people are on the Nas.com team, and where are they based?
We’re about 40 people. Engineering is based in Singapore, and marketing is based in the United States, and I’m the founder and CEO.
How much did it cost to start the company?
A lot. We’ve raised a total of $40 million, including $27 million in the round we’re now announcing. Building technology is very expensive if you want really good engineers, but I believe the opportunity is in generating billions of dollars’ worth of value in the form of new businesses on the internet.
How much in sales did the company do last year, and what is it projected to do this year?
Last year, we started at about $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and ended at around $8 million in ARR.
How Nas.com grows
What tactics do you use to grow Nas.com?
We grow Nas.com using Nas.com. We market Nas.com with Nas.com because we’re also a business on our own platform.
Can you give an example of that?
In Mexico, we run an operation called ECO Mexico by Nas.com. We built that business on Nas.com and sell a product called “Build your own e‑commerce in 2 hours.” Around 4,000 people signed up for it and came to events where we introduced them to Nas.com. We found those people by marketing ECO Mexico through Nas.com itself, and we host workshops and events for potential new customers to try the platform and build their businesses on top of it.
How do you market these products and campaigns?
We create different events for different campaigns in different markets. Inside my own Nas.com account, I have hundreds of businesses I’ve started — Miami Social for Miami entrepreneurs, an education business, internal company businesses, and even a clothing business where I sell my t‑shirts. In the clothing business, I have about 200 members and made around $3,000 selling t‑shirts as a test, with the revenue going to my bank account every two weeks.
Nas.com’s value proposition to investors
What about the company was attractive enough to draw investment from someone like Vinod Khosla?
Vinod is one of the biggest champions of entrepreneurs I’ve ever met; he truly cares about the “small guy” and “small girl” who just want to work for themselves. He understands our mission and sees that existing solutions are too complicated and B2B‑oriented. Shopify, for example, is built for companies like Apple or Tesla, not for a mom in Wisconsin who wants to sell her creations. Vinod believes AI will make everything accessible to the “little guy,” and Nas.com is explicitly designed for that user.
Advice for founders and entrepreneurs
What hard, concrete advice do you have for founders?
I hope you enjoy eating glass. I hope you enjoy doing hard things. Starting a media company or a channel is difficult, and starting a technology company is difficult. More generally, building something out of nothing is hard — whether it’s a human giving birth to a baby or a founder giving birth to a company. My advice is to “choose your hard,” because whatever you do will be hard.
What makes the road to entrepreneurship easier?
AI will make it easier, and I believe that 100%. If you couldn’t speak English before, now AI can help you communicate in perfect English; if you couldn’t make content, now you can. If you couldn’t do marketing before, AI can help you market. But it still won’t be a walk in the park.
When it comes to this specific business, what have you found particularly surprising?
I’m most surprised by how fast technology has advanced in the last three years. What used to take me 15 hours per video felt like an irreplaceable skill set, and I thought no one else would have access to those capabilities. Now AI can replicate much of that in seconds. Technology has evolved so quickly that if a company “sleeps” for a month, it can find itself out of business.
Sherin Shibu is a business news reporter at Entrepreneur.com. She previously worked for PCMag, Business Insider, The Messenger, and ZDNET as a reporter and copyeditor. Her areas of coverage encompass tech, business, strategy, finance, and even space. She is a Columbia University graduate.
Canva’s State of Marketing and AI Report 2026 finds that 97% of marketing leaders use AI daily and 99% plan to increase spending, but 78% of consumers still prefer human-made adverts and 87% say the best advertising requires a human touch. Mentions of “AI slop” have risen ninefold, and consumers want disclosure (52%), data protection (53%), and the ability to opt out (37%). The report was published alongside Canva’s expanded partnership with Anthropic, integrating its design engine into Claude for Small Business.
Nearly every marketer in the world is now using AI to make creative work. Nearly every consumer would still rather that a person had made it. That tension, between the industry’s enthusiasm and the public’s unease, is the central finding of Canva’s State of Marketing and AI report for 2026, and it suggests that the harder problem in AI-assisted marketing is not production. It is permission.
The numbers are stark on both sides. Ninety-seven per cent of marketing leaders surveyed say they use AI in their daily creative work. Ninety-nine per cent plan to increase their AI investment this year. But 78% of consumers say they would rather see adverts made by people, even if AI could produce better ones, and 87% believe the best advertising still requires a human touch. The report, based on surveys of 1,415 marketing leaders at organisations with 500 or more employees and 3,547 consumers across seven countries, captures an industry that has adopted a technology faster than its audience has learned to trust it.
The disclosure question
The trust gap is not abstract. Consumers are increasingly specific about what would close it. When asked what would make them more comfortable with AI in advertising, 53% cited data protection, 52% cited disclosure of AI use, 39% wanted assurances that AI is not replacing jobs, and 37% said they would like the ability to opt out of AI-generated adverts entirely. The demand for transparency is sharpened by a growing awareness that the line between human-made and machine-made content is dissolving: 70% of consumers believe it will eventually be impossible to tell whether an advert was AI-generated without disclosure, and 56% expect that threshold to arrive within two to five years.
The finding reframes a conversation that has, until now, been dominated by capability. Marketing teams have spent the past 18 months asking what AI can do. The report suggests their audiences are asking a different question: whether they were told.
The slop problem
The quality concern has also acquired a name. Mentions of “AI slop,” the colloquial term for low-effort, visibly machine-generated content, have increased nine fold in media monitoring data, according to the report. Forty-one per cent of marketing leaders say it is already a considerable challenge. Seven in ten consumers say AI-generated adverts feel like they are missing something, a response that may reflect not a rejection of AI itself but an instinctive detection of the gap between content that was made and content that was generated.
The paradox is that the same technology driving the slop problem is also the only plausible route to solving it at scale. AI makes it trivially cheap to produce mediocre creative. It also makes it possible to personalise, test, and iterate at speeds that no human team could match. The distinction between the two outcomes is not the technology but the standards applied to it, which is to say, it is a management problem dressed in engineering clothes.
What marketers are actually doing
The report finds that 68% of marketing leaders say AI has led to an increase in marketing-influenced business decisions, suggesting the technology is not merely accelerating production but reshaping how teams allocate resources and measure impact. The investment trajectory is almost vertical: from 94% of marketers investing in AI in the 2025 edition of the same survey to 97% actively using it daily this year, with near-universal plans to spend more.
The timing of the report’s release is not incidental. Canva published it on the same day it announced an expanded partnership with Anthropic, integrating its design engine into Claude for Small Business, a product that allows small business owners to generate on-brand marketing campaigns directly through Claude’s AI assistant. The integration connects to each user’s Canva Brand Kit, so that generated assets automatically use the correct fonts, colours, and visual identity. It is, in effect, the infrastructure for exactly the kind of AI-assisted creative work the report describes, targeted at the millions of small businesses that lack dedicated marketing teams.
The Canva-Anthropic partnership had already seen usage grow fourfold in March 2026 following a January expansion that made Claude the first AI assistant capable of generating on-brand designs through a simple prompt. The new integration extends that capability into a broader suite of business tools including QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, DocuSign, and Google Workspace.
The trust economy
What the Canva report captures, perhaps inadvertently, is the emergence of trust as a competitive variable in marketing, not between brands and consumers (which is old), but between AI-assisted brands and consumers who know the assistance exists (which is new). The 78% of consumers who say they prefer human-made adverts are not necessarily saying AI is bad. They are saying they value the knowledge that a person chose to make something, that creative decisions reflect intention rather than optimisation. Whether that preference survives a generation raised on AI-generated content is an open question. But for now, it represents a constraint that the industry’s adoption curve has outrun.
The marketers who navigate this well will likely be those who treat AI disclosure not as a compliance burden but as a brand signal, a way of saying: we used the tools, and we used them deliberately. The ones who do not will contribute to the nine fold increase in slop, and their audiences will notice, even if they cannot always articulate why.
Your domain says a lot about your brand, long before you meet with a potential client or customer. It’s an asset that can quietly appreciate over time. Here’s what it tells the world about your brand and why it matters.
Your domain name is one of those brand assets that quietly does a lot of heavy lifting and often gets ignored. Long before anyone reads your messaging, watches your demo or clicks through your site, they’re already sizing you up based on that URL alone. Whether you’re reaching out to investors, running paid ads or cold emailing a prospect, the domain tied to your brand is doing much of the heavy lifting. Sometimes it’s helping you. Other times, it’s costing you trust, clicks and credibility.
Here’s what your domain is quietly telling the world before you ever get the chance to explain who you are.
Your domain extension is a trust signal
People gravitate toward .com without giving it much thought. It’s what they know, and it feels dependable, recognizable and easy to recall. Punch in a brand name, and .com is usually the first stop. That reflex has been wired in for years, and it’s not going away. When a business locks down the .com version of its name, it instantly feels more established, especially to audiences outside the tech bubble. And, the right domain has the potential to add millions in brand value to your business over time.
That said, extensions like .io, .ai, and .co definitely have their moment, especially in tech circles where they’ve become a kind of digital badge for startups. But step outside that bubble, and the questions start to creep in. Like, why does the brand not own a .com? Was it already reserved by another entity, or did they just want to pay less for a generic domain? Why doesn’t the brand own the .com? Was it already taken, or did they just not want to pay for it?
These might seem like small concerns, but they can quietly impact everything from response rates to press coverage and user trust.
Short domains speak loudly and leave no doubt
There’s a reason the strongest domains keep it short. They’re easy to remember, quick to type and instantly feel sharp. A single word or a tight brand match doesn’t just look polished; it shows intent. It tells the world this brand knew what it wanted and didn’t wait around to claim it.
Long or hyphen-filled domains hit differently. They can come across as patched together or short-term fixes. It might not be a fair judgment, but people read into it, and perception has weight. If someone has to pause to figure out your email address or double-check your URL, you’ve already made them work too hard.
Some founders shrug off domain quality, saying, “We’ll upgrade down the line.” But that line keeps moving. All the while, content is being added, links are being built, and, more importantly, trust is being assigned to a domain that doesn’t have long-term value.
The connection between domains and brand identity
Beyond trust and professionalism, your domain can signal scale, ambition and industry position. Let’s take a few examples.
A company using “getbrandname.com” or “trybrandname.com” may be signalling that they couldn’t acquire the exact match. That can work in early-stage situations, but once the business matures, the lack of a core domain can be a red flag to partners, investors or media.
Adding a location to your domain like “brandnameNYC.com” or “brandnameUK.co”—can work in certain cases, but it also sends a message: this brand’s focus is local. If the goal is to scale beyond your starting point, your domain needs to match that mindset. Investors notice this, and a regional-sounding URL can make a global vision feel much smaller than it should.
Domains impact perception
Imagine two startups viewed side by side online from their domain perspective. One is using a simple name like hedge.com, and the other might be using a domain like hedgly.app. Which one is more impactful? Often, you know before you even click.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a reporter, an investor or a potential partner. If you’re deciding who to respond to, who to feature, or who to trust with your money, these tiny differences in perception start to matter. You may not consciously know why one feels more legitimate than the other but the domain plays a big role.
I’ve seen deals delayed due to email confusion caused by lookalike domains. I’ve also seen ad performance drop due to weak domain names that didn’t inspire confidence. And I’ve seen businesses pay ten times more for their domain after scaling because they waited too long to secure it.
You don’t need a perfect domain, but you do need a strategic one
Not every business needs to own a single-word .com. But every business should think strategically about the message its domain sends. Is it memorable? Is it easy to say aloud? Does it match where you’re going, not just where you started?
If the answer is no, it may be time to rethink what your domain is doing for, or against, your brand. Whether you’re pitching investors, running ads or growing an audience, your domain name shows up everywhere your brand does. Make sure it’s pulling its weight.
Michael Gargiulo, the CEO and founder of VPN.com, helps brands and businesses secure the best domain possible for their vision. Having spent nearly $1 million to acquire VPN.com, he understands the value of owning the category-defining domain name for your industry. Find out more at vpn.com/domains
