Everybody is talking about authentic content right now. And I get it. The word “authentic” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in 2026.
But I think it’s become one of those words that gets misused as permission to overshare, to be performative, or to just post memes every day and call it a strategy.
That wave was a bit refreshing when it started. People were tired of the polished corporate stuff. But just doing whatever you want online is not effective either.
There’s a version of this that works really well for founders that also maps to better performance long term. Done poorly, there’s also a version that burns people out and makes them invisible.
So I want to talk about what authentic content actually is, what it isn’t and how to find the balance between showing up as yourself and still being strategic about it.
What is authentic content?
Authentic content is anything you create that aligns your internal self with your external self. It’s content that feels natural, energizing and sustainable to publish on a regular basis.
That’s it. No complicated framework. No 47-step content strategy doc.
I can see from my Google Search Console performance that some of you (or maybe it’s all bots) are searching for this exact question. So let me break it down further.
If you dread creating it, it’s not authentic. If you have to put on a mask to write it, it’s not authentic. If it sounds like it could have been written by literally anyone in your industry, it’s definitely not authentic.
To some of you, that separation might seem terrifying.
You like keeping your “personal” life and your “business” presentation in neat little boxes. It probably feels safe and “right”.
Completely valid, but incorrect. There’s a much better way.
Founders don’t have a fear problem, they have a subtraction problem
When I talk to founders about putting themselves into their content, I don’t think the core issue is that they’re scared of storytelling.
I think it’s more of a black and white thinking problem.
- There’s business things to talk about.
- And there’s personal things to talk about.
And I actually agree with that at some level. Oversharing is a bit cringe.
Don’t post about your kids if it doesn’t connect to anything meaningful.
But that hard line prevents founders from ever asking themselves the opposite question. Is there anything about me, my experiences, my personality, my weird obsessions, that would actually enhance how I deliver my services or how we designed the product?
The narrative of every company includes the founder.
But when it comes time to create and post content, founders subtract all of themselves out. Not just the oversharing stuff.
The good stuff too. The experiences that led to the founding. The beliefs that shaped the product. The judgment calls that set them apart.
They subtract everything instead of leaving in the parts that actually drove the success.
I used to contort myself into a pretzel trying to sound “professional”
I’ll give you a personal example because I think it illustrates the point.
When I was running Doorbell, I had this very specific idea of professional presentation. On the website. In the copy. In the content I was producing. Very stoic and reserved and direct. Tactical. Almost clinical.
I thought that’s what a thought leader was supposed to sound like.
Then one of my consulting clients found me on Upwork for a job I never bid on. I hadn’t heard of them. Didn’t see a posting. Didn’t pitch anything.
What happened was they watched a video I posted about how I think about strategy. Went to my LinkedIn. Read my content. Then reached out through a DM and said, “we think you’re dope, we think you have the exact right vibe for what we’re looking for.”
They didn’t hire me because of my professional presentation. They hired me because of the stuff I wasn’t trying to be. The stuff I had been actively hiding in the background.
That’s when I realized the whole pretzel act was misguided. Because regardless of what anybody says, we’re all going to make judgments pretty quickly and pretty emotionally about whether we like someone and whether we trust them.
That’s human psychology. No amount of tactical, buttoned-up content is going to override that gut reaction.
What happened when a founder stopped hiding herself
I recently did a verbal identity workshop with a woman who had this incredible life. She’s a mom, loves to travel, loves different cultures, studies psychology, worked at a child development center at a prestigious university just for fun.
But she was working in a highly regulated industry because she thought she needed to niche down. Not a bad business strategy by itself. But it meant she was subtracting basically everything interesting about herself from her content.
Her version of the subtraction was, “why would anybody want to hear about these parts of me?”
Then she started describing some of the real events that have happened to her. Things from her life, her interests, her psychology background. And three things happened:
- Her content performance improved on LinkedIn. Not marginally. Noticeably.
- She connected with someone who might be a good fit for services she’d been wanting to offer but was afraid to put out there.
- Those services were more aligned with her actual vision for her business than the regulated industry work she’d been forcing herself into.
The competitive advantage spoke for itself.
Look, you might lose three clients who are a bit stuffy and dislike those aspects of you. But what Seth Godin calls the tribe, the people rooting for you, part of your community, partnering with you, will almost certainly win out.
And beyond the business case, she didn’t seem like she was enjoying what she was doing before. That’s a pretty quick recipe for burnout. So competitive advantages aside, being more of yourself in your content is just good for business and good for staying in the game long enough to win.
Build your verbal identity like a scientist would
I think about content strategy the same way I think about the scientific method.
A scientist has a hypothesis. A thesis. They present their findings. If it’s compelling, other people try to disprove it. And then it becomes an accepted thing over time.
But when founders define their verbal identity, they skip all of that. They start with an assumption about what they think they’re supposed to sound like and it’s based on some arbitrary idea of “professional.” No data. No introspection. No feedback from actual humans.
Two things happen from there. Either it kind of works short-term but it plateaus because there’s nowhere for it to grow. Or the person feels so much resistance that they never build any momentum. They won’t stick to it. They won’t post. They won’t engage. It dies.
Instead of guessing, start with three questions:
- What do I actually sound like when I’m doing my best work and talking to people I respect?
- What does my audience resonate with on sales calls, in real conversations, in the moments where they lean in?
- What doesn’t exist in the market that I feel strongly about and that isn’t being discussed?
Those three inputs shape a verbal identity that is more compelling and more likely for you to stick with and evolve over time than some arbitrary definition of “professional” ever will.
You can be too transparent, but that’s probably not your problem right now
I hear this fear a lot. “If I post a picture of me having a tea party with my two little girls, I’ll lose credibility and the Fortune 100 companies won’t want to work with me.”
And honestly, I think that’s probably accurate in some cases. There is such a thing as oversharing.
But two things are true at the same time.
People have developed AI blindness. There is so much information on LinkedIn, on X, on blogs. Those have been saturated for a while now. And I think people are doing what happened to millennials with ads.
You’re so used to seeing lists and tactics and big bold predictions that any generative AI tool can give you in thirty seconds that your brain just filters them out.
What stands out is when I see somebody with a real introduction to an experience. I get a story. I understand if it applies to me. I can see myself in what they’re saying or I can’t. And that kind of resonance, you are just not going to get it without sharing personal details, ideas, thoughts and stories from your lived experience.
Everyone talks about taste. But judging things in public is good for business. Taking a stand on something you believe is good for business.
Energy management is an underrated content strategy. This doesn’t get talked about enough. Energetically, you’re going to have less resistance and more interest in showing up consistently if you are talking about things you know, things you’re passionate about, things that make you angry, things that bring you joy.
That’s just better for longevity. And longevity is everything in content.
So yes, you can undermine your credibility with too much transparency. But I just don’t think that’s where the majority of people are right now.
I think most people should strive to get to that point and then turn around. Instead of staying where they are, afraid to even get in the pool.
Sharing struggles and wins without making it weird
This is a leadership question disguised as a content question.
If you aren’t vulnerable about what you’re experiencing emotionally, people don’t have much to sink their teeth into. But nobody likes somebody that’s overly negative or critical too often.
It comes down to the density of sharing hard stuff over a given time period.
If all you’re talking about is how much it sucks to be the owner of your business, what do your customers have to look forward to? What does your team? Why are you even doing this? But if every quarter you share a list of highlights and lowlights you’re actively working on, that’s insightful and probably inspiring.
Here’s a real example from my own company. Our onboarding was terrible. Sub 16% completion. That made me really sad and upset because people were having a terrible experience and weren’t actually using the product. It stayed that way for about two months.
Then it hit me that I had never asked anybody about their onboarding experience. I was just keeping my nose in the dashboard. Staring at numbers instead of talking to humans.
That struggle happened for 90 days. But just talking about how upset I am at my users or listing all the bad things happening with the product is a huge bummer. The move is taking the experience, making sure it’s not too frequent, and shaping it into something you actually learned and internalized. Then sharing all of that together.
On the wins side, I think people need to share them more often. I really do. And I’m talking to my audience here because I don’t think most founders I work with have an arrogance problem. They have a self-esteem problem. If you’re doing four pieces of content across all platforms a week, one or two of those should be about some kind of win:
- A customer had a great experience
- You closed a big sale
- You shipped a new feature
- You hit a milestone you’re proud of
People want to get behind that.
The only time people don’t like hearing about a win is when you qualify yourself as being better than them or better than some other group. Leave the qualification behind. Lead with the thing that happened.
Your body knows before your brain does
This is the squishiest answer I’ve ever given, but I think it matters.
How do you know if your content is authentically you versus just a performance?
I think you just know.
It’s like that feeling people describe when something bad is happening to them. They intuitively understand it. Their body perceives it before the brain catches up.
When you’re misaligned between your personality, your verbal identity, the essence of who you are and the content you’re putting out, you feel it. You feel friction. You feel bored. And boredom is a huge indication of this. You feel resistance to posting, to engaging, to continuing.
I don’t have a framework or any tactics for this one. Pay attention to your affect. If you feel weird about it or bad about it, that’s your signal that something needs to change.
Authenticity without strategy is just cringey noise
Here’s where I want to land because this is the part people miss.
The word “authentic” is kinda played out. But the concept underneath it still matters. The problem is when “be authentic” becomes permission to be performative or to just do whatever you want online without thinking.
You still need to do marketing. You still need to understand the platform and the channel. You still need to understand the algorithmic factors that make your content surface or not. That stuff matters and pretending it doesn’t is leaving money on the table.
The real version of authentic content is taking all of that, the marketing knowledge, the platform understanding, the strategy, and merging it with what you know to be true. Your lived experience. Your judgment. Your convictions about what’s right and what’s wrong in your industry.
If you had to over-index on one side, lean toward the authenticity of who you are. But try to keep it balanced.
We’ve seen a huge shift into saying whatever and being overly personal and posting memes every day. That was refreshing for a minute. But combining who you actually are with smart marketing strategy specific to the channel you’re on is what actually works.
The founders I see building real audiences right now aren’t performing authenticity for engagement. They’re not hiding behind a corporate mask either. They found the version of themselves that’s real and they learned how to present it in a way that reaches the right people.
That’s the whole game. And it starts with deciding to stop subtracting yourself from the story your company is already telling.
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