The Brand Isn’t the Logo. It’s the Person Behind It.

How Chatbase built trust without a single ad and what it says about where marketing is actually going.

©Sandra Djajic

I came across a post on X last week. Sandra, the marketing lead at Chatbase, wrote about how the new generation of buyers make decisions.

16,000 views. Real replies. Nothing paid behind it.

And I kept thinking that post isn’t marketing for Chatbase. That post is Chatbase’s marketing.

A quick look at what Chatbase actually is

Chatbase started in 2023. Yasser Elsaid built the first version as a side project a tool that let you upload a PDF and talk to it. It blew up overnight.

Three years later: 18 people. Zero venture capital. Zero outside funding. $8M ARR. 10,000+ paying customers. A 92% customer retention rate.

No sales team for most of its existence. No traditional ad campaigns. No celebrity partnerships. The growth came from product, word of mouth, and people inside the company showing up in public with actual opinions.

Sandra is one of those people.

She’s the Senior Marketing and Growth Lead. She also co-hosts the Morning Maker Show, a podcast she runs independently where she reads and discusses #buildinpublic posts every Monday and Friday. She has 10,600 followers on X built entirely around genuine commentary on startups, marketing, and how modern companies grow.

When she posts, it doesn’t read like company communication. It reads like someone who works in the thick of it, thinking out loud.

That’s the whole thing.

What most companies still get wrong

Ask most marketing teams to run employee branding and they’ll do one of two things.

The first is the reshare campaign. Push a company post. Ask everyone in the org to share it with their network. More reach, same message. But the message was never the problem trust was. You can amplify a corporate post to a million people and still not move the needle because nobody trusts a corporate post.

The second is the polished personal brand playbook. Train executives. Write scripts. Build a content calendar. Schedule posts on their behalf. It looks like a person talking. But the moment it feels managed, it’s over.

Both approaches miss the point.

What actually works is what Sandra is doing and what Chatbase figured out by building around people who already had voices before the company needed them to.

Why the buyer has changed

Sandra’s X post made a point that’s worth sitting with for a minute.

She said the new generation of buyers younger, online-native founders and decision-makers who are completely comfortable switching tools don’t behave like the buyers Zendesk and Intercom were built for.

They don’t read press releases. They don’t respond to display ads. They make decisions based on people they follow, communities they trust, and what surfaces when they go looking.

If you want to reach this buyer, your brand needs a face. Not a logo. Not a campaign. A real person who shows up somewhere they already are.

And that face doesn’t have to be the founder or the CEO. It can be anyone inside the company who genuinely has something to say.

Sandra writing about how buying behavior has shifted isn’t Chatbase’s content strategy. It’s her actual read on what she’s watching happen in real time. The fact that she works at Chatbase is almost secondary. But it does everything — because every time someone trusts Sandra’s take, a small amount of that trust transfers to the company she’s building with.

The numbers that explain why this works

The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report surveyed nearly 3,500 management-level professionals across seven countries.

The finding that stuck with me: an organization’s thought leadership content is considered a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials and product sheets by a significant margin.

Not marginally more trustworthy. Significantly.

And separately, the Edelman Trust Barometer found that an employee’s voice is 3x more credible than the CEO’s when it comes to building trust. AdWeek put a similar number on individual vs. brand content 76% of people say they’re more likely to trust content from an individual than from a brand.

So the trust was always sitting inside the building. Most companies just never let it out. They were too busy managing the message.

What “building in public” actually means for a company

There’s a phrase Sandra uses on her podcast and across her posts — building in public.

It gets used a lot in the indie hacker and startup world. Sometimes it just means tweeting your MRR. But what Chatbase has built around it goes deeper than that.

Yasser, the founder, has been transparent about the company’s growth, its failures, its pivots, its thinking. He posted publicly about missing his $1M MRR goal. He shared the exact reasoning behind product decisions. He treated his audience less like customers and more like people following along on a real journey.

Sandra built her own presence independently the podcast, the X account, the commentary and brought that into Chatbase. She wasn’t handed a brief. She already had a voice. Chatbase just didn’t get in the way of it.

The result: when either of them posts, it doesn’t feel like brand content. It feels like a window into what’s actually happening inside the company. And that is far more valuable than any campaign because it creates something campaigns can’t manufacture the feeling that you know the people behind the product.

The difference between employee advocacy and employee branding

This distinction matters and most companies blur it.

Employee advocacy is asking your team to amplify what the company is already saying. It’s about reach. It treats employees as a distribution channel.

Employee branding is something else. It’s creating the conditions for people inside your company to have real, public voices and recognizing that those voices are part of your brand whether you manage them or not.

The difference shows up in the output. Employee advocacy produces a wave of identical reshares on a Thursday morning. Employee branding produces Sandra writing a post at 1am with a genuine point of view that gets 16,000 views and a real conversation in the replies.

One of these compounds over time. The other disappears the moment you stop pushing it.

Why this is harder than it sounds

The natural instinct for most companies is control.

Marketing teams want to stay on message. Legal wants to approve everything. Leadership worries about someone saying the wrong thing. So they build processes that slow everything down, add layers of review, and gradually sand off whatever made the voice interesting in the first place.

By the time a post goes through the machine, it sounds like the company. And the company’s voice, no matter how well crafted, will never be as trusted as the person’s.

The companies that get this right Chatbase is one of them make a different bet. They hire people who are already interesting publicly. They don’t manage what those people say. They trust that the alignment between the person’s values and the company’s is strong enough that you don’t need a script.

That bet pays off in ways that are hard to measure but impossible to miss. When you trust someone’s take on how marketing is changing, you’re more likely to look at the product they’re building with. When you follow someone’s honest account of what’s working and what isn’t, you’re more likely to try their tool. When a person vouches for something with their own credibility not the company’s it lands differently.

The shift Sandra was pointing at

Her post said something that I think is more significant than it reads on the surface.

She said marketing is turning into influence. Not influence in the Instagram sense influence in the sense that the most effective marketing is a person who people already trust, talking about what they’re building and why it matters.

And then she said something even more interesting that this influence works inside the company too, not just outside it.

That’s the part people miss. When someone like Sandra or Yasser is visible and trusted publicly, it doesn’t just bring in customers. It shapes how the team thinks about the company. It attracts the kind of people who want to build that way. It creates a culture where showing up publicly and being genuine is part of the job, not a side project.

The brand starts inside. The outside just finds out later.

What this actually looks like in practice

It’s not complicated. It just requires letting go of something most companies are unwilling to let go of.

Stop treating your team’s public voices as a risk to be managed. Start treating them as the most credible marketing asset you have.

Give people the space to have opinions. Let them write about what they’re actually seeing. Don’t make every post go through three rounds of approval. Trust that someone you hired because of their judgment also has the judgment to speak about their work without a script.

Sandra running a podcast independently where she reads build-in-public posts every week isn’t a conflict with her role at Chatbase. It’s why her voice is trusted — and why that trust flows back to the company.

That’s the thing most marketing playbooks still don’t account for. The people inside your building are more interesting than anything you can write about them. Let them be.

The bigger shift isn’t about marketing getting louder. It’s about figuring out who on your team already has something real to say and just getting out of their way.

One genuine post from someone inside the building still does more than a polished campaign built outside it.

Sources: 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report; Edelman Trust Barometer; AdWeek; Chatbase ARR data from Yasser Elsaid’s public posts on X; Sandra Djajic’s post on X, February 8, 2026.