The wild truth about building visibility, from a woman who’s actually lived it - Without a Brief
I keep coming back to the same thing whenever I think about visibility. It’s probably one of the most misunderstood, overhyped and badly applied parts of building a business.
Everyone tells you to build your personal brand, show your face, post consistently, tell your story and become more visible. But what does any of that actually mean beyond having a nice Instagram feed and a collection of carefully written captions?
Because real visibility isn’t nearly as polished as people make it look.
It can be uncomfortable, repetitive and exhausting. Sometimes you put yourself out there and absolutely nothing happens. Other times something works, but you don’t fully understand why, so you’re left trying to recreate it while everyone online claims they’ve cracked the formula.
That’s what kept coming up for me during my conversation with my friend and fellow strategist, Kaila Uli.
Her story is full of hardship, reinvention, modelling, business, loss, visibility, strategy and a hell of a lot of honesty. But what stood out most wasn’t some clean entrepreneurial success story. It was how much of her visibility was built by doing difficult things when hiding probably would’ve felt easier.
Kaila isn’t someone who stumbled into an audience because one post happened to go viral. She understands how attention works. She studies what makes people stop, tests ideas, looks at the numbers and knows how quickly people scroll past anything that doesn’t immediately give them a reason to care.
But she also understands something that gets lost in all the talk about algorithms and content formulas. Strategy only works when there’s a real person underneath it.
You can’t build trust while hiding everything real
Kaila grew up in an extremely strict and insular environment. She was homeschooled in what she describes as a Baptist cult setting, which isn’t exactly the usual starting point for someone who would later build a public platform, work in modelling and become known for understanding visibility.
She jokes about once feeling like the dumb kid who had to learn basic survival skills. But I actually think that part of her story explains a lot.
She didn’t come into the world already knowing how to navigate people, business or attention. She had to study it and figure out how the world worked while she was already trying to live in it.
There’s something interesting about that because many of us build businesses by following formulas without fully realising that’s what we’re doing. We learn what a website is supposed to look like, what a professional caption is supposed to sound like and how we’re expected to introduce ourselves.
We start using the same phrases as everyone else in our industry, then wonder why our businesses all begin to sound identical.
Kaila’s journey from Idaho to modelling, entrepreneurship and rebuilding after the death of her husband wasn’t built by getting everything right. It was built through learning, adapting and continuing to show up when life gave her every reason not to.
That’s where visibility becomes something much deeper than content. It becomes a willingness to let people see who you actually are.
That doesn’t mean sharing every detail, every wound or your entire private life for engagement. It means sharing enough truth that people can feel there’s a real person behind the business.
Kaila doesn’t try to present herself as someone who has every part of life figured out. She’s open about where she’s come from, what she’s survived and what she’s still working through.
That honesty doesn’t weaken her authority. It’s part of what creates it.
There’s a type of confidence you only develop after falling over enough times to realise you can get back up. It’s very different from the confidence that comes from repeating expert language online until people assume you know what you’re talking about.
Lived confidence feels different, and people can usually tell.
Authenticity isn’t the same as oversharing
Authenticity has become one of those words that’s used so often it barely means anything anymore.
People are constantly told to be authentic, show the real version of themselves and tell their story, but the advice usually stops there.
What Kaila’s story reminded me is that authenticity isn’t about sharing everything. It’s about not building a version of yourself that you can’t maintain.
You shouldn’t need to become a different person every time you open Instagram. Your business voice shouldn’t sound completely different from the way you naturally speak. You also shouldn’t feel as though you need to shrink the parts of yourself that are too opinionated, funny, strange, loud or specific because they don’t fit the polished version of a founder you think people expect.
Kaila talks openly about being a big personality and a bigger woman in industries that haven’t always made space for either.
She’s experienced feeling like she had the wrong look, the wrong size and the wrong everything. Instead of spending her life trying to become more acceptable, she eventually built visibility around owning what made her different.
That’s the part people respond to.
Not everyone needs to agree with her or relate to every part of her life. What matters is that she’s recognisable.
She likes cars, cheese and thrift shopping. She speaks directly, takes up space and doesn’t sand down every edge to make herself easier for the internet to digest.
That specificity creates connection.
The real enemy of a personal brand isn’t imperfection. It’s becoming so polished, careful and generally appealing that nobody can tell who you are anymore.
Strategy still matters, whether people like it or not
There’s another side to visibility that often gets ignored because it isn’t as inspiring to talk about.
You can be incredibly authentic and still create content nobody sees. You can tell the most honest story in the world, but if the way you communicate it doesn’t make someone stop, listen or care, it will disappear into the feed.
Kaila’s approach to marketing is highly strategic and, in many ways, formulaic. She understands algorithms, studies patterns, pays attention to performance and tests what makes content travel.
That can sound mechanical when you describe it on paper, but I don’t think it makes the work less genuine. It simply means she understands that creativity and data don’t have to be enemies.
One of the biggest misconceptions about visibility is that showing up is enough. People are told to keep posting, stay consistent and get on camera, as though the act of being present will automatically create attention.
But showing up without understanding what your audience responds to can turn into months of producing content that goes nowhere.
Visibility isn’t simply having your face online. It’s understanding what makes someone pause, pay attention and trust you enough to keep listening.
That requires you to know what your audience cares about and how quickly you’re getting to the point. You need to recognise whether your content is genuinely clear or whether you’re taking three paragraphs to explain something that could’ve been said in one.
You also need to understand why one idea worked while another didn’t. Sometimes you need to accept that a piece of content simply failed.
That doesn’t mean you’re a failure, and it doesn’t mean your entire brand is wrong. It means the idea didn’t connect in that format, at that time, with that audience.
You test again, say it differently, strengthen the opening, remove the unnecessary parts and try another format.
That’s the less glamorous reality of visibility. It involves a lot of repetition, rejection and adjustment. The people who make it look effortless usually have a graveyard of content you never saw.
Going viral isn’t a business strategy
There’s an entire industry built around convincing people they’re one post away from changing their lives.
You’re given a hook to use, a format to copy, a time to post, a trend to follow and an exact sentence to say. Maybe one of those things will work, but attention isn’t automatically trust, and reach isn’t automatically revenue.
Kaila understands viral content, but she also understands that virality isn’t about blindly copying whatever everyone else is doing. It’s about understanding why something works and knowing how to repeat the underlying principle at scale.
That distinction matters because a lot of founders aren’t really building strategies. They’re collecting tricks.
One person tells them to post three times a day, so they post three times a day. Someone else says long captions are dead, so they stop writing them. Then another person says storytelling is everything, so suddenly every post becomes a dramatic personal revelation.
The problem is that none of it connects back to a clear point of view, audience or business goal.
The real question isn’t simply whether a post gets attention. It’s whether the person who sees it understands what you do, remembers you, trusts your perspective and wants to hear more.
The product or service also needs to hold up once that attention arrives. Content can get someone through the door, but the offer still needs to give them a reason to stay.
That’s one of the clearest points in Kaila’s approach. Your product needs to stand out too.
A large following won’t rescue an unclear offer forever, and a viral video can’t permanently cover for something people don’t want. The market still gets a vote.
The market is more crowded, and pretending otherwise won’t help
I think we also need to be honest about how much harder visibility has become.
The old promise was that anyone could make it online if they were consistent enough. People were told to post every day, work hard, stay positive and trust that eventually the audience would come.
But there are now more businesses, creators, coaches, podcasts, courses and pieces of content than ever. Everyone is talking, everyone is building a platform, and everyone has access to professional templates, AI tools, content prompts and the same collection of trending hooks.
That doesn’t mean there’s no space left. It means being visible now requires more than simply being present.
You need something recognisable. You need a clear point of view, a way of communicating that feels like you, a product people actually want and a reason for someone to choose you when they have hundreds of other options sitting in the same feed.
Kaila started with very little. She modelled, hustled for work, borrowed what she needed and fell flat on her face more than once.
That story isn’t just an interesting background detail. It’s part of how she learned to keep moving without waiting for ideal circumstances.
Visibility grows through doing difficult things repeatedly. It means publishing before everything feels perfect, learning what works, letting people misunderstand you sometimes and accepting that not everyone will like you.
It also means staying visible when the response is quieter than you hoped.
You can’t build your entire business around waiting for a viral miracle to arrive and validate everything you’re doing.
Your personality isn’t getting in the way
This is probably the part I care about most.
A lot of women are still building brands around being palatable. They don’t want to be too loud, opinionated, emotional, serious, funny, ambitious or difficult.
They’re scared of being too much, so they create a professional version of themselves that nobody can object to. But usually, nobody feels especially connected to that version either.
Kaila’s confidence doesn’t come from being flawless. It comes from knowing who she is and no longer treating that as something she needs to apologise for.
Her personality isn’t a distraction from the strategy. It’s part of the strategy.
That doesn’t mean every founder needs to become louder or more provocative. It means you need to stop treating the qualities that make you recognisable as problems that need to be solved.
Maybe you’re blunt, quiet, obsessive about details or have a strange sense of humour. Maybe you care more deeply than the people around you, or you have strong opinions about the way your industry operates.
Those qualities give your brand shape.
They’re often the parts people remember long after they’ve forgotten the polished caption you spent two hours writing.
Visibility is earned in the trenches
Most founders aren’t trying to become internet famous. They’re trying to turn an idea, skill or side hustle into something that genuinely supports them.
That’s why the overnight success story can be so damaging. It makes people believe slow progress means they’re doing something wrong.
But what looks sudden from the outside usually contains years of work nobody saw. There are years of learning, making bad decisions, undercharging, overthinking, changing direction, trying again and wondering whether any of it will work.
Kaila’s story is a reminder that visibility isn’t granted to the most perfect person in the room.
It’s built by the person who’s willing to keep learning how to be seen without abandoning who they are.
It takes resilience, strategy and the ability to look at something that didn’t work without turning it into evidence that you’re not good enough.
It also takes confidence to keep going before the outside world fully understands what you’re building.
Maybe you don’t need to become more impressive
Maybe you just need to become easier to recognise.
That’s the thought I was left with after my conversation with Kaila.
So much of the noise around visibility lives in our own heads. We tell ourselves we’re not ready, don’t know enough, don’t look right or aren’t confident enough. We convince ourselves that someone else has already said it better or that people will judge us.
And yes, people might judge you. They might misunderstand you, scroll past or not care yet.
But hiding doesn’t protect the business. It just makes it harder for the right people to find it.
Kaila built her visibility by showing up as an imperfect, unapologetic and highly strategic version of herself. She didn’t build it around a manufactured persona or an empty aesthetic.
She built it as a real person with a real story, a strong point of view and a willingness to understand how attention actually works.
That’s the true power of visibility.
It isn’t about followers, likes or becoming known by everyone. It’s about building trust with the people who see you clearly and decide they want to stay.
That’s the long game, and I hope more women start playing it as themselves.
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