Abby Riggleman

You are doing everything that running a business asks of you, from the website to the team to the product to the books, while also carrying the vision that nobody else can fully see yet.

And on top of all of that, somebody is telling you that you should also be the face of your brand on social media. The camera part is the one that scares you.

I help founders work through this exact moment, and here is what I have come to understand about it.

The work of becoming the face of your brand is almost never about the camera itself.

It is about whether you believe you are someone whose face belongs on it.

The hardest part has almost nothing to do with filming and almost everything to do with the moment a founder decides they are willing to be seen.

There is something I want you to know that gets lost in this conversation. You do not have to be the face of your brand forever.

Social media is still where founder-led brands grow, but the goal is never the camera. The goal is to build something that can outlast you, something that can stand on its own once it has roots.

The founder-as-face phase is the accelerator. It is what gets your brand to a place where it no longer needs you in every frame, because the world it built has its own gravity.

That is the work I help founders do. The Brand Story Content Accelerator is a six-week intensive for the founders ready to take ownership of their story and step into the work of being seen.

Inquiry form is in my bio. See you there.

Look, I’m not trying to say that content creation isn’t difficult, because it is. However, there’s no need to overcomplicate it when you find a format that is performing well.

I often see people leaning into other directions now that they had a piece of content that worked well, but what you need to do is double down on the content that worked instead, and that’s how you are going to continue to grow.

If you are a business or a founder looking to grow on social media, follow my account for more content strategy.

To the founders who believe in what they are building:

This is the work I love. Helping founder-led brands stop hiding behind their products and become brands worth following.

That is why I built the Brand Story Content Accelerator. A new 6-week intensive where we build your brand story, your content system, and a posting habit that finally sticks.

If you are ready to take ownership of your story, the inquiry form is on my website!

Most brands sell products. The ones that build $2 billion empires sell worlds.

Poppi just sold to Pepsi for $2 billion, and it started with a founder who decided to show up.
Built to Be Seen is my new series, where I break down how founder-led brands build entire worlds, not just feeds.

First up: Poppi.

They didn’t win because they made a better health drink. They won because Allison became the door that led you into their world. She made herself the face of the brand, and that single decision became the launch pad for everything that followed: the lifestyle campaigns, the community, the cultural moment.

Poppi built their world on three things:
– A narrative worth rooting for
– Characters you wanted to follow
– A community you wanted to belong to
Not a product. A world.

This is what brand storytelling really does. It doesn’t just grow your following, it builds something people genuinely want to be part of. It’s the quiet engine behind founder-led marketing, and it’s why social-first brands keep winning.

Follow along for the rest of the series, where every episode breaks down a founder-led brand that did it right, and the one thing you can take from them.

Marketing for small businesses and founders doesn’t have to be complicated.

The hardest part of personal branding isn’t deciding what to post, it’s deciding what NOT to post. Before you share your story, you need to know your plot. Think about it like a movie. You’re not watching every moment of a character’s day.

You’re watching a curated view, the parts that matter, the parts that move the story forward. Your founder brand works the same way. You choose what to focus on, what to skip, and what stays off camera. That’s not being fake.

That’s being intentional. Boundaries aren’t walls, they’re the structure that makes storytelling sustainable.

Save this as a reminder that you don’t have to share everything to build something real.

Most founders hire marketing agencies because nobody told them there was another option.

You see growth charts on Instagram. You hear about paid ads at networking events. You meet agency owners at conferences. The path looks like: hire someone, run ads, post content.

But none of those things build the story underneath. And the story is what makes everything else work.

A marketing agency is built to execute tactics. A storyteller is built to find the thread that holds your brand together. When you hire an agency before you have a story worth telling, you are paying to broadcast something that isn’t built yet.

Tell the story first. The rest finally makes sense.

Send me a DM if this is hitting. Tell me what you are building and where you feel stuck.