I've started unfollowing some of my favourite creators. Here's what changed

I want to start by saying this isn’t a callout, and I’m not naming anyone. Honestly, writing this feels uncomfortable because the person I’m really examining here is myself.

Recently, I was at an event, and I saw someone in person for the first time. Someone I had followed for years, whose content had genuinely inspired me, whose story I had shared with other people and whose journey I had quietly cheered on from the other side of a screen. I was looking forward to meeting them more than I let myself admit.

And then I did, and something was off.

It wasn’t one thing. It was the accumulation of small moments throughout the day, the way they moved through the room, who they made time for and who they looked straight through. The version of themselves that showed up in person had very little in common with the person I thought I knew.

I left feeling something I didn’t expect, not angry, not even particularly disappointed, just sad. Because I could see that somewhere along the way, they had lost something, and I don’t think they even knew it was gone. I unfollowed them on the way home, not out of anger, but out of grief, really.

Because it made me ask myself this question:

How would I come across to someone meeting me for the first time?

There’s a term for what we build as creators and founders when we show up consistently online, and it’s called parasocial relationships. The people on the other side of your content feel like they know you. They root for you, share your work with their friends, message you at 11pm to say your post made them cry, and buy the thing you made because they trust you.

They are not just followers or subscribers or numbers on a dashboard. They are real people who have given you something incredibly precious, their attention, their trust, and in many cases, their loyalty over the years. But because it is often a one-way relationship, it is the easiest thing in the world to forget that.

Success has a way of doing something quietly sinister to people and it doesn’t happen overnight, which is exactly what makes it so hard to see. The room gets bigger, the opportunities get shinier, and slowly, without anyone meaning for it to happen, the people who were there at the beginning start to feel less important than the people who might be useful now. Old connections get deprioritised, messages go unanswered, and the warmth that built the whole thing starts to feel like a lot of effort. I’ve watched it happen to people I admired, and I’ve had to ask myself honestly whether I’ve ever let it happen to me.

What is the parasocial personal brand paradox?

The more successful your personal brand becomes, the more people feel like they know you, and the easier it becomes to forget that those people are real.

You build a following by being human, warm, relatable and consistent. People invest in you emotionally because you made them feel seen. But as the numbers grow, the individual gets lost in the metric.

The paradox is that personal branding asks you to be yourself in order to grow, but growth itself creates the conditions that make it hardest to stay yourself.

I think about the people who were there before any of this made sense and continue to be on the journey with me. Those people are not stepping stones; they are the foundation. And a personal brand that forgets its foundation is not a personal brand at all; it’s a performance.

This has become so much more real to me since we launched Lucky Founders Club a few weeks ago, and now I get to spend time with some of the incredible founders who have followed my journey over the years and help them build their personal brands.