Personal branding for developers

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of interviews and this episode we're going to wrap up our four part series with DP Caduetin, a man who spent a lot of time in the marketing world, wrote a book on nonfiction brand and all of those links happen to be those will be in the show notes. But we're going to wrap it up this time. This one, I'm going to give you a little bit of warning, a little longer than normal, but it was one of those that I really didn't want to cut it too short. I thought that was a really good rhythm that we're getting into. And also I think to give you a little bit more of a feel for while being a self-described introvert, DP is quite the conversationalist as well. And so without any further ado, let's get into it. I like that approach is that you have these vehicles to reinforce the personal brand. As you said, it's all about you're sticking to your three core principles there. And then really are you just giving more examples of this is what I am and here's how it applies in this case, the NFT approach. Or each time you do that, then there's more stuff that people can look at and say, oh, this is reinforcing, this is who you are. This is who DP is. And so it's great. Like you said, in the modern world, there's so many ways to do that. You can write, if you're right, you can do blogs or you can do video stuff or you can stream or you can do picture, you can do podcasts. And there's so many opportunities to do that. I think you've hit on the key thing, which is you need to demonstrate over and over and over again who you are, what you do and how you do it. And you hit on a big idea, which I include my book and I call it a style stage. All these social media channels are of slightly different styles. For example, you've got TikTok, which is short form, very quick, and it's ephemeral. It disappears over time. There are people who are making millions of dollars on TikTok. I don't know how. Guess what? TikTok is not the style stage for me. The other thing is, so I'm looking at myself saying, OK, what's my style stage? Here's the thing. And this is how deep you have to go. I am a writer. You'd think blogging would be a natural for me. For some darn reason, I cannot maintain a blog tempo in periodicity that works. You know, I had been trying to do a thousand word blog post once a week and I do it for about five weeks and then I didn't. And so all of a sudden, the writer, me, who writes every day, realizes, you know what? I write every single day and I don't want to do any more writing. How about this thing called podcasting? And again, I remember when Adam Curry was a VJ for MTV and then he was off MTV and then Wired magazine did an article about him and this thing called podcasting in like the year 2000 or even maybe 1990 or something. That was the first wave of podcasting. And I remember reading that article going, that's kind of cool. And keep in mind, it's called podcasting because you would download physical files onto your iPod and listen to them. So podcasting is named after the iPod. Did you know that, youngsters? I bet you you didn't. He does not. I follow him and he is not a fan of people calling them pods. He said, you're not casting a pod. He said it was a podcast because of the iPod itself. And so, yeah, they the pod father himself there that created it. So, which is an excellent, interesting story. Well, and frankly, why did Adam Curry embrace podcasting at that very early stage? Because it was a style stage that suited his talents and his interests and his abilities. So am I telling someone who doesn't feel comfortable to do live streaming on Twitch or YouTube Live that they should be doing it? No. If you feel comfortable doing it, let me tell you, a ton of people are doing it because it's a fantastic style stage. If you have that type of presence, persistence and continuity, that continuous. I'm every week, I'm doing it every week like your podcast, my podcast. My podcast comes out every single Monday and it has for, let's see, this week is 154 weeks. In two more weeks, it'll be at the end of three years and the start of a fourth year. I never was able to do blogging that long. For some reason, podcasting is fun enough for me that I've been able to keep it up. And it's a great demonstration of who I am, what I do and how I do it. You know, I'm not afraid of a microphone. I'm not afraid of making content or I'm not afraid of making contact with someone visually via zoom. Thank God for zoom because we can have this face to face conversation, even though we aren't face to face, but I can see your face. I can see if you're bored. I can see if you want to move on. I can see if you're ready to wrap things up. You know, podcasting works for me because podcasting works for me. So my question for your listeners are what works for you? What is the style stage for you? Again, Twitter, 280 characters. There are a ton of comedians on Twitter. Why? They write one-liner jokes. Perfect for them. There are other people who are dancers and stuff who are all over TikTok. Why? Because it works perfectly for them. So what works for you? What can demonstrate who you are, what you do and how you do it in a way that feels so good to you that once you're done with one example of that, you're thinking about the next one you're going to do. For me, it's podcasting. You know, I'm having a great conversation with Rob. I'm getting inspired by that. I'm thinking about, hey, maybe I should have Rob on my podcast and we can talk about personal brands in the development space. What, how that works? Does it, does it matter? Are people doing it? Are, do you have any good examples of that? Are there some people you could turn me onto that I could then invite on my podcast? Like if I asked you, Rob, right now and say, what developer is out there killing it in building their personal brand? Do you have a name or a handful of names? I don't, but I think I know several listeners do because I'm not, there are, there are several people like your neighbor that are out there that they do. They do Twitch. They've got YouTube channels and do just tons and tons of stuff. I think that's what these things have allowed is we can take any niche and then we can find our, you know, our comfortable platform for it. And then we can go off and do it. And you can see people that are, they've, they've got careers out of doing what they like on a platform that's suitable to them that you would have never thought of. Yeah. Well, let me give you an example of that. When I do live streaming, I use an, a Mac OS application called e cam live, and it's really easy to use, you know, OBS studio may be familiar to some of your listeners, but he cam live has really been embraced by the Macintosh based live stream, you know, community, and they do a really great job at that. Well, through that I'm paying attention to people who are doing really cool stuff with graphics and things because he cam live is a good platform, but like any platform with tools, there are people who do though use those tools better than others. Well, there's this guy I came across on YouTube and he goes by Bradley teaches and he does nothing but tutorials on how to do graphics and specifically for e cam live. Now, some of the concepts he talks about, of course, translates over to OBS studio or some of the other live streaming platforms, but he niches down to a Mac application and keep in mind, there are more PCs than Macs in the world. So he's in a smaller universe and this guy owns the position of being the guy to go to with questions about how do I do cool graphics that come sweeping in from the right and left and do this thing and how can I have a countdown timer before I start my live stream and how can I do this and how can I do it for cheap because I don't have I don't want to pay a graphic designer. Boom. Check out Bradley teaches tutorials on YouTube. The guy now has a business based on that niche, niche, niche, tiny little niche. And he's got people coming to him from around the world. Why? His style stage is YouTube tutorial videos, and he walks you through how to do this in a way that people who don't speak English can understand it enough to enjoy it. Understand and then contact him for more information. So if you want to see how someone who's kind of it's not development, but it's in the tech space, if you will check out Bradley teaches because he does a fantastic job on YouTube, helping people serving an audience and converting a fair number of those audiences and converting a fair number of those audience members in the paid members of his seminars or his webinars or his products and services. So he's a good one to take a look at and also take a look at some of the I would love your listeners actually to chime in and send me via email some recommendations of developers that are building their personal brands. And I'm going to make it easy for you. My email address is DP as in David Paul at DP Canooton.com. Let me spell Canooton for you. It's K N U D as in David T as in Tom E as in Edward and N as in nothing.com. DP Canooton.com. If you know of a developer who's killing it when it comes to creating a personal brand, I want to know about it because I want to have them on my podcast. Oh, and by the way, that's an example of a personal brand working for the person creating it. I don't even know them yet and I want to know them. Yep. Exactly. Well, we're getting sort of a, I don't want to eat up too much of your time. Although this has been fascinating. I could do this for many, many hours. And actually I'm going to go back. I think I'm probably catch up on some of your, your prior podcast episodes and things like that as it's just fascinating to me. Like I said, this is, that's why I like this platform is it's just a way to, to connect to others. And I've, I was a fan of podcasts long before I did any sort of, it was one of the things I'd listened to them enough and connect, felt like I was connecting to these people, even though they have no idea who I am. Right. And yet, yeah, they, it's, they are, they feel like, you know, personal friends of mine, basically because of the, of the time I've spent with them. Let me tell you this story. Cause it's a fun one. The pivot podcast is pretty popular in the tech space. It's Kara Swisher of the New York times tech reporter and Scott Galloway, who's a professor of marketing at the Stern school of business at NYU. Great podcast. They have great banter. If you love what's going on in the Valley and hearing the backstories of, you know, the kind of chatter that people talk about in everything from Elon Musk to Tim cook and everything in between, check out the pivot podcast. They do a fantastic job. They, what was the point I was going to make about that? Oh, the, the story, Scott Galloway, who I love he's this icon, you know, frankly, if I had a spirit animal, it'd probably be Scott Galloway. He wants said on one of his podcasts. And I quoted in the book, uh, one of the, it was an episode of the pivot podcast that he said this, he said, when I meet people and someone comes up to me and says, hello, they've seen me speak somewhere. When someone from across the room shouts at me and goes, Scott, I know that they've read a blog post of mine. But when they come up and talk to me, like I'm their best friend, I know they listen to my podcasts and I take that as meaning that it's because you're in their head, literally you're injecting your voice into their head to the point where they go, you know what? I feel like I would like this person. And assuming they like you enough to listen to multiple episodes, you know, and this actually happened to me once. I was at a, uh, back pre COVID. I was at a meeting about 60 people milling around. I'm talking to a friend of mine, kind of at the back of the room. And all of a sudden this woman who's about 20 feet away from me, whips around, looks at me, has a smile on her face. And I kind of do the, hi, I don't know who you are. Why are you looking at me like some type of weird stalker? And she walks up and says, DP. And I go, yeah. I listen to your podcast all the time and you sound exactly like you do in the podcast. And I'm like, so she had a relationship with me before I knew who she was even someone who breathed there on earth, you know? But that's the cool thing. And one of the things that I, I love to say about personal branding is especially because in spite of my, uh, comfort on the mic, I am a self-described high functioning introvert. After this podcast session with you, I'm going to be drained. I'm going to be lying on a couch watching Netflix. What the big thing building a personal brand does for me, the introvert walking into a room that used to be ice cold. You know, it's like, I don't know anybody here. There are no cold rooms anymore because not everybody will know who I am, but inevitably I'll be scanning the room and I'll see someone who's given me kind of a benign smile on their face, which is an invitation to come over and say, hi, I'm DP Knute. And I'll go, yeah, I've read your book or I've listened to your podcast or I've listened to your podcast and that got me to get your book. And I really liked the book and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are no cold rooms when you have a personal brand. People don't necessarily, you don't have to be Elon Musk famous, but they'll know who you are, what you do and how you do it because you've demonstrated it over and over and over again. And consequently they remember, they remember what you do, but they remember who you are. And best of all, when you have a name like Knuten, it's nice that they know how your name's pronounced because at the end of every one of my podcasts, I say, that's it for me. I'm DP Knuten host of the nonfiction brand podcast. I'll be talking to you guys next week. Bye bye. Yep. That's my, that's my, my favorite of the, of the podcasts and, and people that I've, you know, that I've never met, but feel that connection to it's actually Gary Vaynerchuk himself. Yeah. Always is the Vayner. He always has to, you know, slow it down. And I think he's changed it over the years, but especially early on when he was doing Wine Library TV, it was very enunciated the whole way through it. It just, I chuckled every time I heard it, but I don't, nobody was going to mispronounce his name after that. And actually I think most people pronounce it. They enunciate it the way he would just to be clear. Yep. There you go. You mentioned Wine Library TV. I actually grabbed a screenshot from his very first Wine Library TV and included it in the book, because if you needed an example of why to become a personal brand, start by learning who Gary Vaynerchuk is now, then go all the way back to the very first Wine Library TV video that he did on that is on right now on YouTube, you can still watch it and compare where he is now to where he was then he's been doing it consistently. Ever since. And that's why this dude is globally known as the guy who can drop F bombs right and left and nobody cares because he's so dynamic. I that's yeah, I've had those conversations with people. I say, look, if you want to, it's usually about like motivation and personal brand. And I'll say Gary's a great guy to listen to now. His language is going to be salty. You're going to have to deal with it, but there is a, there is a, you know, there's a great genius there and it comes from the experience of going through it. So, yeah, yeah. And so I don't want to take your thought because you actually, that was a great wrap up there and the idea of, you know, no cold rooms, especially from a, because I think there are a lot of develop, there are a lot of developers that, especially I've met that are maybe not pure introverts, but definitely, you know, 10 more to that introvert side, because that's what we do. We live in our head where we're dealing with computers and not people as much. And so I think that's just a great, I want like a selling point, basically of, of getting that personal brand out there anyways, and even for yourself, finding ways with, even though you are an introvert, maybe you don't feel comfortable. You don't have that. You don't get energized talking to other people, but you can still get your story out and you can do it in a way that is without that, that pressure and isn't painful to you exactly going back to the app we discussed, like, uh, doing an app, creating it live and stuff like that. Imagine you're at that room and someone comes up to you, not to talk to you about stuff you don't want to talk about, but they say, you know what I saw you were building that Eldritch wizard. I thought it was really cool that you did this, but I'm wondering, why did you do that? Do you think you might want to talk about that Eldritch wizard that you were working on with your partner over? So I understand NFTs are very popular. Let me talk to you and bore you about non-fungible tokens. Exactly. Yeah. It's a great way to avoid insurance guys and financial services people who just want to give you a business card. Yep. Oh yeah. That's, I think we all hate that. Well, that's good. It's a, it's a way to network without networking is that you get out there and it, and it, anybody that's going to come up to you, then it's, it's that much more likely that they're talking to you about something you already are interested in as opposed to the, Oh no, it's another person. I've got to find a way to brush them off because I don't really want to talk to them. Yeah. Well, and it's not just what you're interested in. It's who you are. They are like you, you know, we aren't going to talk about football because we don't care about football. Let's talk about advanced levels of DND. By the way, I saw the fact that you were referring to the first monster manual. Do you know why I have an original sign by Gary Gygax? All of a sudden you're having a great time, right? Yeah. Cause you've already got that connection built. Like I said, it's a, it's a prebuilt connection. So now somebody that you maybe have never met before you say you've got that connection to them. So you've got, you can start a conversation and I, that it, I think it is part of what I've liked about some of the things I've done is that you, I don't like small talk. I hate it. Worthless to me. I would, I can go deep with somebody. I can talk about all of our personal fears and challenges and stuff like that all day, but small talk does, does nothing for me. So it's great to walk into something and have the small talk stuff already dealt with, like let's not even bother. We can bypass that. We're already friends because you're a big fan of, you know, the whatever. Yeah. Let's say you brought up a, I brought up a mayor of East town on this podcast. Yep. If we met, you might say, Hey DP, I took your recommendation. I watched it. I loved it. Boy. I had no idea that, uh, Jean smart was still alive, much less she played the mom. She was fantastic. And what's her name from Titanic? I never liked Kate Winslet before, but boy, she was really good. And then we can talk about that and more because we've got a relationship. Yep. Branding is not about selling or transactions. It's about building relationship. The question is, are you building relationships or are you just living a life of transaction after transaction after transaction? That that's a perfect kicker right there. So I think we will, we'll wrap it up and especially, I, I do want to tell you, uh, thank you so much. I appreciate it for you. Cause we went over sort of the initial time. I wasn't sure how much time you had, but, uh, I can talk forever. Uh, I was, and I can listen forever. That was great. Um, I've got your links. Is there anything, is there sort of with your general links and sites and that, is there any, uh, preferred place, I guess, cause you were giving out your email address, that's sort of the preferred communication. If somebody wanted to get ahold of you. Uh, yeah, I definitely would take any incoming stuff from, uh, for my personal email address, but DP can Newton.com. That's my kind of place to live on the internet, uh, LinkedIn. I'm also on that. So if people would want to connect there, I'm always up for that. And, um, you know, I, I love talking to smart people about smart subjects. So if, if that fits what you're talking about, and you're not trying to sell me anything, I would love to meet you. Cool. Well, I think there may be a lot of people who say, Hey, we could probably talk. We can find something that we can, uh, we can connect on, or maybe you're going to have a lot of, uh, a lot of people talking about Netflix series for a while with you. Yeah. Well, those can, those can, those conversations can go a long time as well. Yeah. Yep. I will say star Wars over Star Trek, but next generation best Star Trek. So there we go. Wow. That's it. Yeah. See now you and I just connected right there. All right. Make it so. All right. Well, I will let you get to it. Thanks a whole lot for your time. I'll let you go back, get back to your couch and, uh, catching up on some Netflix stuff and recharging and take care of yourself and we'll, uh, probably talk to you again at some point. All right. Great. You have a great one. You do. All right. Bye bye. And there you have it. As you can see, we went a little bit long on this one, but I really wanted to, to just keep that together, to keep that entire, uh, theme sort of that we was meandering a bit, uh, but I think it touched on some very important things for us to, to consider as we move forward. Uh, particularly, I think he has some really interesting insight into the whole connection that comes from things like a podcast or a blog, or if you've got a YouTube channel or something like that, that particularly if you are an introvert, you know, and you're not normally comfortable doing networking or anything like that, maybe something for you to think about. Uh, I'm just going to leave you with that thought since we've already gone a little bit over this time, you know, the affiliates are, are yammering to get their quote, their commercial time in and all that good stuff. So we'll wrap this up, but, uh, there will be another episode coming up. You had another interview. You will enjoy it. Uh, it's another fascinating one. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer nor podcast for more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple podcasts, stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developer.com just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of developer nor one is the book, the source code of happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the developer nor site. You can also find it on Amazon search for Rob Rodhead or source code of happiness. You can get it on Kindle. Uh, if you're an Amazon prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of it. We have a presentation every time we talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at develop a newer.com. If you would like more information, now go out there and have yourself a great one.