There is a version of this problem I see constantly.

Someone builds their Credibility Line. They figure out what they want to be known for. They start posting. The content is good. The ideas are sound. The experience is real.

And nothing happens.

Not because the content is bad. Because it is aimed at nobody in particular.

“I help professionals grow online”: who is that for? Every professional? In every industry? At every stage? The moment your reader has to wonder whether this is for them, you have already lost them.

Dollar Shave Club did not launch by talking to “men who shave.” They made a $4,500 video talking to one specific guy fed up with overpaying for razors, tired of the locked glass cases at the pharmacy, thought 10-blade vibrating handles were ridiculous. It crashed their servers in an hour. 12,000 orders in the first 48 hours. Five years later, sold for a billion dollars.

The old razor ads made men think “I want to be him.” That video made one guy think “he is me.” That is the difference between talking to everyone and talking to someone.

The same principle applies to your LinkedIn post, your newsletter, your video. Specificity does not shrink your audience. It is what makes your audience feel like you are talking directly to them.

One Framework: Point A to Point B

Your audience is not a demographic. It is one person standing on one side of a bridge.

Point A is where they are right now. Point B is where they want to be. Your content is the bridge. Your products, if you ever build them, accelerate the crossing.

The exercise is simple but most people skip it because it feels too specific:

Describe ONE person.

Point A - where they are now: What is their job? What are they frustrated by? What keeps them up at night? What have they already tried that did not work? What words do they use to describe their situation?

Point B - where they want to be: What does their ideal Tuesday morning look like? What would change if they solved this problem? What words do they use to describe what they want?

I will show you mine.

My person is a marketing manager in her early 30s, working at a tech company in a European city or any English-speaking market. She is good at her job, genuinely good. But she is watching the ground shift. Layoffs hitting profitable companies. AI handling tasks that used to need her. Middle management roles disappearing.

She has thought about building something of her own. She has probably started and stopped twice. She follows people online who seem to have figured it out but their advice feels disconnected from her reality, either “quit and follow your passion” or “just network harder.”

Her Point A in her own words: “I know the writing is on the wall but I feel trapped because I need the paycheck and all the advice I find is either reckless or irrelevant.”

Her Point B in her own words: “I want to build something that is actually mine. Not dependent on some CEO’s quarterly targets. Real skills, real clients, geographic freedom.”

Every piece of content I write, I ask: does this help her move from A to B? If it does not, I do not publish it.

The reason most professionals post to silence is not that their ideas are bad. It is that their ideas are not aimed at anyone real.

The Build Update

I rebuilt parts of Showrunner this week around this exact principle. The tool now starts by asking you to describe your person before it lets you do anything else. Not your niche. Not your content pillars. Your person. It’s called Brand Blueprint, and it’s free and downloadable.

Everything else, what to post, how to position yourself, what to offer, is downstream of that one description.

If you want to try it: showrunner.one.

One Thing to Try This Week

Open a blank doc. Describe your person.

Not a demographic profile. Not “professionals aged 25-45.” One human being. Give them a situation. Give them a frustration. Give them a desire. Write it in their words, not yours.

Then look at your last post. Would that person read it and feel like you were talking directly to them?

If not, now you know what to fix.

Reply with your person if you want feedback. I will tell you if it is specific enough.

Francesco

I want to talk about the part nobody warns you about.

You can find advice on headlines, content strategy, monetisation, posting schedules.
There are courses for all of it.
But almost nobody talks about the loneliest part of building something online: the people closest to you will not understand what you are doing or why.

Your partner will wonder why you are spending your evenings writing posts that get 12 likes.
Your friends will ask when you are going to get a proper job. Your parents will worry. Your colleagues, if you still have them, will think it is a phase.

This is not a maybe. This is a pattern I have seen in almost every professional I have worked with who started building something of their own. And it is the number one reason people quit before anything has time to compound.

Not burnout. Not lack of ideas. Not the algorithm. Isolation.

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​My Personal story​

When I left Warner Bros, the reactions from people around me ranged from confusion to concern.
I had spent 13 years building a career that made sense to other people. Head of EMEA YouTube Strategy, that is a sentence people understand.
It fits into a dinner conversation (and dating apps, too).
They call it “career suicide”.

“I left to build something on my own” does not fit into a dinner conversation.
It opens a door to questions you cannot answer yet. What exactly?
How will you make money?
What if it does not work?

I did not have clean answers. I had a conviction that the path I was on was dissolving and a vague sense that there had to be a better way to use what I knew.

But here is what kept me sane through all of it.

I owe everything to about 4 people. Not my whole network. Not a mastermind group. Four people.

We all started our careers around the same time, in London. Same age. Same hunger. Completely different paths.
Some ended up at Google and Apple.
Some built businesses through YouTube worth millions.
None of us planned it. It grew organically, we had the same interests towards our careers, personal finance and whatever was/is happening in the world.

The most valuable thing these people gave me was not introductions or advice.
It was a protected environment where my worst ideas could get destroyed before they saw the light of the world.
They were not yes men.
They told me the hardest things about my thinking, specifically because they wanted me to get better.

That is very different from criticism.
It is the difference between someone tearing something down and someone forcing you to build it stronger.
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One Framework: The Right Circle

The people who love you most will almost never understand what you are building.
That is not a failure of the relationship. It is a structural limitation.
They are not in it.
They cannot see what you see.
Asking them to validate something they do not understand will frustrate both of you.

What you need is not more support from the people already around you.
You need a different circle, even a tiny one, made up of people who are building in the same era, facing the same kind of problems, and willing to be honest with you about your work.

Not a networking group.
Not a mastermind you pay for.
Just a few people where the dynamic is: challenge my worldview without making me feel unsafe.
Show me by example where I can get to.
Call me out when I am choosing comfort over growth.

You do not need 50 of these people. You need 2 or 3.

The criteria is simple: do they make you think harder?
Do they hold you to a higher standard without tearing you down?
Would you trust them to tell you your idea is bad?

If yes, hold onto them. They are rarer than you think.
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The Build Update

Showrunner exists partly because of this problem.
The professionals I worked with were not just looking for strategy.
Half of those conversations were tactical.
The other half were someone finally talking to a person who understood what they were going through.

That is the loneliest gap in this space. Everyone sells you the how. Nobody sits with you in the why-is-this-so-hard.

If you have not tried it: showrunner.one. It is a tool, but it is built by someone who knows what this part feels like.
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One Thing to Try This Week

Think about who is in your Right Circle right now. Not your friends, not your family, the people who understand the specific thing you are building and will be honest with you about it.

If the answer is nobody, that is the most important problem to solve this week.
Not another post. Not another framework. Find one person who gets it.

Reply to this email if you want, that counts.

Francesco

There is a pattern I keep noticing and it is the opposite of what most people assume.

The professionals who have the least to say are posting constantly.
The professionals who have the most to say are posting nothing.

I am not talking about imposter syndrome.
That term gets thrown around so loosely it has lost all meaning.
I am talking about something more specific: the paralysis that comes from knowing too much.

When you have 10 or 15 years of experience or more, you understand nuance.
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You know that the answer to most questions is “it depends.”
You know that the confident, simple takes flooding your LinkedIn feed are often wrong, or at best, incomplete.
And so you hesitate.
Because the moment you open a blank post, your brain starts adding caveats, qualifications, edge cases.
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By the time you have mentally drafted something that feels accurate enough to publish, it is 2,000 words long and you are exhausted. So you close the tab.

Meanwhile, someone with two years of experience just posted a confident take that oversimplifies everything you know.
And it got 500 likes.

So here is my take.

One Framework: The 80% Rule

The thing that eventually got me moving was a simple realisation: my 80% is better than most people’s 100%.

If you have been in your field for 10 or 15 years, a post you write in five minutes, off the top of your head, no research, no editing, is still drawing on a decade of pattern recognition, real experience, and hard-won lessons.
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It might feel incomplete to you. It might feel obvious.
But to your audience, it is more useful than the perfectly polished post from someone with two years of experience who has never actually done the work at scale.

Your bar for what counts as “good enough to publish” is set by your expertise.
That is the problem.
You are comparing what you write to what you know, and the gap feels embarrassing.
But your audience is not comparing your post to your full knowledge.
They are comparing it to everything else in their feed. And your 80% wins that comparison almost every time.

Here is what helped me practically:

Pick ONE thing you know that most people in your field get wrong.
Not five things. One.
State the wrong belief.
Then state what you know to be true instead.
Then give one example from your experience.

That is a post. It is not everything you know. It is one useful idea from someone who has earned the right to share it.

The irony is this: the person with two years of experience who posts confidently is reaching your audience right now.
They are shaping how your industry is understood.
Your 80% would correct half of what they are saying. But it only counts if you publish it.

The Build Update

I am building Showrunner.one, a tool that gives professionals expert-level content guidance when they are just getting started. Still early. Still evolving.
I am also making content on the side, all this while co-owning YouTube channels, which is what keeps the show on the road (see previous posts).

If you are curious about what I am building, just copy “showrunner.one” in your browser, you will see what it looks like before anyone else!
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One Thing to Try This Week

You have been sitting on something. A take, an observation, a correction to something everyone in your industry gets wrong. You have probably thought about posting it more than once and talked yourself out of it every time.

This week, write it. Three to five sentences. Apply the 80% Rule: useful beats complete.

Then publish it before your brain finds a reason not to.

Reply if you do. I want to see what the experts are finally saying.

Francesco

The most common thing I hear from professionals who start posting online is not “I don’t know how to write” or “I don’t have time.” It is: “I don’t know what to talk about.”

They have 10, 15, 20 years of experience.
They could talk for hours over dinner about what they do.
But the moment they open LinkedIn to write a post, everything goes blank.

The problem is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of direction.
They have not decided what they want to be known for.
So every post feels like starting from zero because it is.

I had this exact problem when I left Warner Bros.
YouTube strategy was always the core of what I did.
But I kept going back and forth: should I talk about how to build a career and get into top companies?
Should I go niche into YouTube analytics, or animation production, or copyright management?
All things I knew well. All things I could teach.

But when I tried to signal all of them, nobody remembered any of them. I was a specialist with five different specialisms, which is the worst position to be in online, because the internet does not reward range. It rewards clarity.

The shift happened when I stopped asking “what can I talk about?” and started asking “what do I want to be known for?”

Different question. Completely different outcome.

One Framework: The Known-For List

This is the simplest exercise I know for solving the “what do I post about” problem.

Write down four things:

2 things you want to be KNOWN FOR: the associations you are building toward.
2 things you want to be KNOWN AGAINST: what you explicitly refuse to be or do.

That is it. Four items.

The “known for” part is usually manageable.
Most people can name what they want to be associated with, even if it takes some thinking.

The “known against” part is where it gets uncomfortable.
Because it requires you to exclude.
To say: I am not that, and I do not want to attract people who think I am.

Think about Alex Hormozi.
You know what he stands for within 30 seconds, but you also know instantly what he refuses to be.
No lifestyle content.
No vague motivation.
No advice without a number behind it.
That “known against” is what makes his positioning sharp. Without it, he is just another business creator.

Here are mine:

Known for:
1) Warner Bros-level platform expertise applied to individual creators and professionals
2) Earned freedom through intelligence and persistence, not inherited advantages

Known against:
1) Guru mythology and get-rich-quick narratives that promise transformation without work
2) Doom without direction: analysing what is broken without offering a way forward

Every piece of content I make, every post I write, every newsletter I send - I check it against these four.
Does this reinforce what I want to be known for?
Does it accidentally associate me with something I want to be known against?

If you do this exercise and then look at your last ten posts, you will probably notice that half of them do not connect to any of the four.
That is not a content quality problem.
That is a clarity problem.

Once the four are clear, content ideas stop being a blank page.
They become a filter.
The ideas were always there, you just did not know which ones to use.

The Build Update

I spent some time building this inside Showrunner.one: specifically, what questions should someone answer first when they are building a professional presence from scratch.

If you want to take this further, two options.
If you are already using AI for content, add your Known-For List to your prompts, it becomes a filter that keeps everything you generate on-brand.
Or if you want the full guided version, showrunner.one walks you through this and other questions in sequence, starting with what the tool calls the Brand Blueprint.

One Thing to Try This Week

Open a blank doc. Write your Known-For List. Two FOR, two AGAINST.

Then look at your last five posts or your LinkedIn profile.
How many of those four things are visible to a stranger?

If the answer is zero, that is why posting feels directionless.
The ideas are not the problem. The filter is missing.

Reply with your four if you want a second pair of eyes.
I will tell you honestly whether they are clear enough.

Francesco

I watched this happen in real time at Warner Bros.
During the mergers, managers who had been there for years got absorbed into restructures that had nothing to do with their performance.
They understood the system, played by its rules, and assumed the system would hold.

It did not hold.

There is a pattern in economic history called the Engels Pause: a 50-year stretch from 1790 to 1840 where wages flatlined despite massive economic growth.
The cause was new technology.
The gains flowed to the people who owned and operated the new tools. Everyone else waited decades.

We are in another one.

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AI, platforms, digital tools, the gains are flowing to the people who use them. Not to the people waiting for their industry to adapt. This is happening globally, under every type of government. It is not a political problem. It is a technology transition problem.

Here is what most people in this position are not seeing.

If you are a skilled professional considering going independent or building something on the side, you are in a stronger position than you think.
Stronger, in some ways, than the CEO of the company you just left.

That CEO has AI capabilities flooding in, new tools every week. But the business they already have, with the overhead, the politics, the bureaucracy, sucks them right back in.
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They cannot move.

You can. No legacy infrastructure. No board to convince. You can experiment tomorrow morning.

That is not a consolation prize for leaving corporate.
That is a genuine structural advantage.
I did not appreciate this when I left Warner Bros.
I thought I was trading security for risk. What I was actually trading was paralysis for agility.

But none of it matters if nobody knows you exist.
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One Framework: The Visibility Lag

Visibility does not work when you need it. It works when you started building it months ago.

If you start building an online presence the day you get laid off, you are 6 to 12 months behind.
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Because visibility compounds, it does not switch on.
The post you write today does not generate leads today.
It contributes to a body of work that, over months, teaches strangers who you are and what you know.
On YouTube, visibility starts being asymmetrical in many cases after the first 100 videos.

Nobody hires a consultant after reading one post.
They hire after the fifteenth.
Trust builds through repetition.
Repetition requires time.
Time means starting before the urgency hits.
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The Build Update

I am writing this from somewhere in Kuala Lumpur. Last month I was in Vietnam. Different country, same laptop, same work.

That sentence is the point. Not the travel, the optionality.

If you are curious about what I am building: showrunner.one. Still early, still rough. But the chat works and it is smarter than it has any right to be at this stage. It’s a YouTube content consultant in the pocket. For free.
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One Thing to Try This Week

Last week was the Credibility Line: one sentence for your LinkedIn headline.

This week: write one post.
Three to five sentences about something you know professionally that most people in your field get wrong.

It does not need to be perfect. It needs to exist. The Visibility Lag is already running.

Reply if you publish it. I want to see it.

Francesco

The barrier to turning your expertise into something visible online is lower than it has ever been in human history.
A phone works. A screen recording with a voiceover works. That is not an exaggeration.

But here is the part most people miss.

We are living through real economic uncertainty. Skilled professionals, genuinely skilled people, are being made redundant from companies that were supposed to be safe. The job market is absorbing more talent than it was designed to handle.

I do not know exactly what happens next for everyone navigating this. But I know one thing with conviction: the professionals who build a visible, credible presence online before they need it will have options that others simply will not.

Not because online presence is magic. Because expertise without visibility is wasted.

And right now, most professionals are invisible. Not because they lack skill. Because they have never been taught how to make that skill legible to strangers.

That is a solvable problem. And it starts with one sentence.

One Framework: The Credibility Line

I consulted with coaches, consultants, executives, freelancers, professionals from almost every industry you can think of.

The single most common pattern I saw: people with 10, 15, 20 years of deep experience who could not explain what they do and why anyone should care in under 30 seconds.

They knew they were good. But when it came time to put it on a LinkedIn headline, a website, a video intro, or an elevator pitch, it fell apart.
Too vague. Too long. Too generic. Or worse: they defaulted to a job title that said nothing about the value they actually bring.

So I started building something I call The Credibility Line. One sentence. Three parts.

[Past credential] + [Biggest number/KPI or proof point] + [Who you help and what they get]

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Here is mine:
​Ex Warner Bros. | 1.5B+ monthly views managed on YouTube | Helping professionals build creator-led businesses.
​

That single line does three things at once:

1. It borrows trust. A recognisable name , like a company, a publication, a role , tells a stranger “this person operated at a level worth paying attention to.” You are not asking them to take your word for it. The credential does that work for you.

2. It proves scale. A number makes the abstract concrete. “Experienced marketer” means nothing. “Managed campaigns that generated $2M in revenue” means something. The number does not need to be enormous. It needs to be specific.

3. It points forward. The last part tells people what you do NOW and who it is FOR. Without this, you are a resume. With it, you are a solution.

Most professionals skip straight to part three: “I help people with X”, and wonder why nobody engages. It is because they never earned the right to say it. Parts one and two earn that right.

How to build yours this week:

Open a blank document. Write down:

• The most recognisable company, institution, or role on your CV. Not the most recent, but the most recognisable.

• Your single most impressive number. Revenue generated. People managed. Years in a specific field. Projects delivered. Clients served. Pick the one that would make a stranger pause.

• One sentence describing who you help and what outcome you create for them. Not your job description, but the transformation. What changes for the person who works with you?

Now combine them. One line. Under 20 words if you can.

Put it in your LinkedIn headline today. That is not a suggestion, it is the single highest-leverage thing you can do for your online visibility in the next ten minutes.
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This is my Credibility Line. It is the reason strangers reach out to me on LinkedIn unprompted and why I get constant inbound messages on Fiverr. Same experience, same skills - before and after. The line did not change what I know. It changed who finds me.

If you cannot fill in all three parts, that is useful data too. It tells you where the gap is. And that gap is where we start.

The Build Update

I want to be transparent about where I actually am.

I’m building Showrunner.one, a tool I am building to help professionals start and grow a visible, credible online presence. It is early. I am building it in public for the first time, which is uncomfortable in the way that most worthwhile things are.
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I’m at a pre-launch stage, but since you are here, I’m happy to give you a peek into what it is and what it wants to be. Let’s just keep it between us for now. ‘Showrunner.one’ is the actual URL.

What is working: you can use the chat already, it’s super smart!

What is not yet working: I am still figuring out the right way to talk about it.
I have the idea in my head, I’m just juggling a few things at the moment, including where in the world I’m going to be for the next few months.
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If you have any feedback or idea, feel free to reply to this newsletter with your thoughts.

One Thing to Try This Week

Build your Credibility Line. Three parts. One sentence.

Then put it in your LinkedIn headline.

If you get stuck, reply to this email. I will help you write it. That is not a figure of speech, I will actually reply.

For most of my career, I charged for my expertise the way everyone does: employment, hourly rates, project fees, retainers. Good money, predictable, safe.

Then freelancing and networking brought me something different.

I met someone on Lunchclub.com, a platform that matches professionals for one-on-one conversations.
He runs a small investment fund and needed someone who understood digital content strategy.
Instead of paying me a fee, he offered me a percentage of the business.

From a seasoned executive in the finance industry, that was common practice. But to me, owning a percentage of a business was first of all a formative experience that taught me to think long term. And most of all, that I could use my skills as an exchange token to buy my way into businesses.

It changed how I looked at everything.

Since then, I have done this twice more: both times with partners I found through Fiverr, of all places.
They came to me as consulting clients. I saw what they were building on YouTube, recognised that my skills were the missing piece, and proposed a different arrangement.

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​We went from a service relationship to a partnership.

No money upfront. Just weekly calls, some async support and a lot of appreciation from their side as I was doing it “for free“ in exchange for a share of their channels.

About six months later I discovered the power of leverage: I kept putting in the same amount of effort with my regular calls and async catch-ups, but slowly, these channels were growing and generating more money.

Same effort. More and more money over time.
And both of them became better and better at the craft, so they ended up requiring less effort.

I had an eye for the opportunity. I believed in these shows. And it worked out well.
So there is a big caveat: you need to be a real expert in your industry to spot those gems.
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One thing to try this week:

Think about the people you already work with: your clients, your contacts, people in your network. Is there someone whose business you understand well enough to know exactly what is missing? Not “I could help with their marketing.” Something precise, like “their entire onboarding process is broken and I know how to fix it.”

Or go back further. Is there a past client or contact you lost touch with who is building something you believe in?

And if you do not have those relationships yet: start putting yourself in rooms where they happen.
Lunchclub is one way. Platforms where clients hire you for small projects, like Fiverr, are another. Network as much as possible. Start now, while you are still employed.

This one single shift, from chasing fast cash to seeking to own, is what alone is giving me the time and the money to live my life. Which right now is split between building a tool, creating content online, and planning a two-month trip to the Philippines.

No bragging. I just want to give you a peek at what all this could lead to. And if you ask me, I would not have believed I could make all this happen. I pinch myself.

More next week.

Francesco