I was scrolling X yesterday when a take from Olly Dobson stopped me dead in my tracks.
He posted: "Personal Branding is the 21st Century .com bubble."
Damn. He's absolutely right.
Open LinkedIn or X right now. It's a sea of sameness. You'll find thousands of accounts posting the exact same ChatGPT-generated platitudes about leadership. You'll see endless threads starting with, "99% of people do [X] wrong. Here is my 5-step framework."
We've reached peak saturation. The barrier to entry for creating content didn't just get lower—it hit absolute zero.
Anyone can prompt Claude to write a month's worth of LinkedIn posts. Ghostwriters are selling templates to other ghostwriters. The timeline is flooded with empty-calorie content masquerading as "authority."
It feels exactly like 1999. Back then, anyone could slap a ".com" onto their company name, write a buzzword-heavy business plan, and suddenly be valued at $50 million.
Until the bubble burst.
The Coming Creator Crash
When the dot-com bubble popped, it was a bloodbath. It wiped out the grifters, the Pets.coms, and the companies built on pure hype with zero underlying business models.
But you know what else happened? It cleared the runway for Amazon.
We are hurtling toward a "creator crash." The algorithm is already getting smarter. Audiences are getting exhausted. People are developing a visceral, subconscious gag reflex to AI-generated formatting and copy-paste hook templates.
The AI-parrots are going to get wiped out. Their engagement will tank, their follower growth will flatline, and they will quietly abandon their accounts.
And honestly? That is the best thing that could possibly happen to you.
When content is a commodity, raw authenticity and real-world experience become your only moats. The purge will reward the actual operators—the people with hard-earned opinions, real battle scars, and a unique voice.
Here is how you survive the purge and build the Amazon of personal brands.
1. Trade platitudes for battle scars
AI is incredible at summarizing best practices. It can write a flawless "10 tips for better time management" thread in three seconds.
What AI cannot do is tell the story of how you had to fire your co-founder in a sweaty WeWork conference room. It can't explain the panic you felt when your Stripe account got frozen during your biggest product launch.
Stop sharing generic advice. Start sharing specific stories. Specificity is undefeated.
2. Burn your hook templates
If your post sounds like it could have been written by 400 other "growth marketers" on X, delete it.
People don't follow you for the information anymore; they can get information from ChatGPT. They follow you for your perspective. Write like you speak. Use your actual vocabulary. If you swear in real life, swear in your newsletter. If you use weird analogies, use them online.
Friction and personality are what make you memorable.
3. Develop a dangerous opinion
Large Language Models are programmed by corporate engineers to be helpful, polite, and painfully neutral. They hug the median. They never want to offend.
To stand out in a sea of AI, you have to do the opposite. You need to take a stance.
You have to risk alienating the people who aren't your target audience in order to deeply resonate with the people who are. If everyone agrees with your post, you haven't said anything worth reading.
4. Document the messy middle
The current meta of personal branding is acting like you have everything figured out from a mountaintop of success. It's fake, and audiences are tired of it.
Show the messy middle. Post screenshots of the broken code. Share the marketing campaign that completely flopped. Talk about the things you are struggling to figure out right now.
Real life is messy. When you show the mess, people trust you.
Are you building Pets.com or Amazon?
The bubble is already popping. The engagement bait is dying. The templates are rotting.
Soon, the only thing left standing will be a smaller, richer ecosystem of real people doing real work, sharing real experiences.
So I'll leave you with this challenge: When the algorithm stops rewarding the templates and the AI hacks, do you actually have anything to say?