If you’re building a brand, this episode will help you shape a message & founder story that actually feel like yours.
Building a Brand That Feels Like Yours
Building a brand that stands out online isn’t easy, but here’s an entrepreneur who’s done it for 16 years. Learn her marketing and branding secrets.
Most entrepreneurs spend years chasing a dream that isn’t even theirs and that’s what makes it so difficult to rise
Katelyn Bourgoin went being the next “LinkedIn for women” with VC backing to going bankrupt. She then started and scaled multiple other brands, some failed, some were incredibly successful. At one point, she told me about how she made a million dollars just selling with a Google Doc!
As a marketing expert and founder of the Ownable Ideas Agency, this is her incredible founder story on how to build a brand that gives you total business alignment and truly stands out…especially in a world of AI.
For business owners, solopreneurs and female founders, this episode is all about giving you inspiration to figure out how to brand your business in a way that feels true to you…and how to build something that deeply serves your customers.
What you’ll learn:
- Katelyn’s founder story & how she grew her email list to 63,000!
- How to identify your own “ownable idea”
- Buyer Psychology – what do your customers want really?
- What marketing experts never tell you
- The new branding rules in a world of AI
Listen For
TIMESTAMPS
00:10 Katelyn’s Wild, Unfiltered Founder Story
05:40 Business Alignment So You Don’t Burn Out
13:06 What marketing experts never tell you
23: 55 Buyer Psychology: What do your people want?
31:52 Your Ownable Idea and How to Build a Brand that Stands Out
MORE ABOUT KATELYN BOURGOIN
Katelyn Borgouin is the founder of Ownable Ideas Agency, where she helps founders uncover the idea they want to be known for and build a brand around it. After building multiple businesses — including agencies, a VC-backed tech company, a media company, and a very memorable barbecue box business — Katelyn brings a rare mix of buyer psychology, lived founder experience, and strategic clarity to the conversation.
CONNECT WITH KATELYN BOURGOIN
Newsletter: https://learnwhywebuy.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katebour/
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MORE ABOUT THIS SOLOPRENEUR MARKETING PODCAST EPISODE
“An ownable idea is the mental territory you own in the minds of your target audience.” – Katelyn Bourgoin, founder Ownable Ideas Agency
- Building a brand starts with choosing your dream
- Your founder story is strategy, not decoration
- Business alignment matters more than borrowed ambition
- Brand your business by deeply understanding buyers
- How to build a brand with an ownable idea
How to Build a Brand That Feels Like Yours — Not Just Louder
What if building a brand was less about becoming louder online and more about becoming clearer in your own mind? Katelyn Borgouin describes an ownable idea as “the mental territory you own in the minds of your target audience,” and that one sentence holds a lot of relief for early-stage entrepreneurs. Because maybe the answer is not more posting, more polishing, or more proving. Maybe the answer is learning how to build a brand around the thing people can actually remember you for.
When you’re in the first few years of business, it’s tempting to look around and borrow someone else’s map. Katelyn admits that for much of her entrepreneurial career, she was “Modeling what I thought I was supposed to want because I was looking at what other people wanted.” That line lands because so many founders do this quietly. You chase the bigger audience, the shinier offer, the more impressive business model, and then wonder why the version of success you built still feels slightly off in your body.
Building a Brand Starts With Knowing What You Actually Want
Before you brand your business, you have to get honest about the business you are trying to build. Katelyn says, “figure out what happiness looks like for you and don’t lose yourself in these the chasing of status symbols and other people’s dreams.” That is not soft advice. It is strategic advice. A brand built on borrowed ambition may look impressive for a while, but it rarely feels sustainable when you are the one waking up every day to deliver it.
This matters because your founder story is not just the sweet little paragraph you tuck onto your about page. It shapes your decisions, your message, your energy, and the way people experience your work. Katelyn shared that after one difficult business closed, she wrote down “what I wanted in my next business” and started naming what would actually feel aligned. That kind of honesty is often where a stronger brand begins — not in a content calendar, but in a moment of finally telling the truth.
The Hidden Cost of Chasing Someone Else’s Dream
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from succeeding at something you don’t truly want. Katelyn said, “I’ve got what I’m supposed to want. And for some reason I’m still feeling really dissatisfied.” For women entrepreneurs, especially in the early years, this can feel confusing. You may hit the revenue goal, get the client, launch the offer, or grow the audience, and still feel a quiet ache that says, “This is not quite it.”
That is where business alignment becomes more than a nice phrase. It becomes the filter that protects your creativity, your nervous system, and your long-term capacity. Katelyn’s reminder is clear: “make sure that the thing that you’re chasing is actually worth it.” Not easy. Not effortless. Worth it. There is a difference, and your brand can feel that difference before your audience ever names it.
Your Founder Story Can Become a Strategic Advantage
A powerful personal brand does not come from pretending you have always known exactly what you were doing. It often comes from the opposite. Katelyn describes her path with “barbecue boxes, agencies, tech startups, now a media company,” and that mix is exactly what makes her perspective feel grounded. The winding road is not wasted. It becomes pattern recognition, empathy, authority, and nuance.
When you let your founder story inform your brand, you give people something AI cannot flatten into generic advice. Katelyn says, “there’s really only can be one you,” which is both simple and deeply strategic. Your lived experience, your failures, your pivots, your weird detours, your hard-earned beliefs — they all shape the way you see the problem your audience wants solved.
How to Build a Brand by Understanding Your Buyers
Building a brand does not mean staring at your own message forever. It also means paying attention to the people you serve. Katelyn says, “I love understanding what makes people tick,” and that curiosity is a brand-building skill more founders need to take seriously. When you understand your audience deeply, your copy gets sharper, your offers get clearer, and your content starts feeling like a conversation instead of a performance.
This is where buyer psychology becomes practical, not theoretical. Katelyn explains, “the customer is an expert on their problems.” That distinction matters. Your audience may not be able to design your offer for you, but they can show you where the ache is, where the friction lives, and what language they use when they are trying to describe what they need. That is gold for your message.
When founders lose that connection, content starts to sound polished but empty. Katelyn points out that “it’s very easy to lose that connection with who your audience actually is unless you’re really intentional about it.” If you sell online, create digital products, coach, consult, or build community through content, you need intentional ways to stay close to the people you want to reach. Not for extraction. For resonance.
The Brand Shift: From More Content to More Meaning
For years, the advice sounded like: create more, post more, publish more, repeat more. But Katelyn offers a more interesting reframe: “I don’t think that’s as easy anymore.” In a world of AI, content replication, and endless noise, good positioning and consistent content still matter, but they may not be enough on their own.
This is where the ownable idea becomes so powerful. Katelyn describes it as “a concept that’s so associated with you that it sounds like an echo coming from anybody else.” That is the kind of brand depth many entrepreneurs are craving now. Not just visibility. Association. Not just attention. Recognition. Not just content people consume and forget, but a message that starts to live in their mind with your name attached to it.
Your Ownable Idea Is the Argument Beneath Your Brand
A brand that lasts usually has a point of view underneath it. Katelyn says the foundation is “getting clear on the argument that you want to make in your business long term and crafting a story around it and sharing that consistently.” This is the piece many entrepreneurs skip because they are trying to get the post out, update the bio, launch the thing, and keep the plates spinning.
But when you know your central argument, your brand stops feeling like a pile of disconnected content. It becomes a body of work. Your founder story, your offer, your podcast, your newsletter, your speaking topics, your social posts — they start pointing in the same direction. Katelyn calls it “something I can really build on here,” and that phrase is the heart of sustainable visibility.
The Personal Brand Advantage in an AI-Saturated World
AI can help you produce content, but it cannot become you. Katelyn says, “I think personal brand is a massive competitive advantage,” and that line feels especially relevant for founders who worry that their ideas have already been said before. Maybe they have. But they have not been said through your lens, your story, your lived experience, your language, or your emotional understanding of the person you serve.
This does not mean turning your whole life into content. It means letting your humanity sharpen your strategy. Katelyn reminds us, “How do I solve the problem differently?” That is a beautiful question for any founder who wants to brand your business with more clarity. Your difference may not be a brand-new concept. It may be the way you frame the problem, the identity you give your audience permission to step into, or the shame you help them put down.
Don’t Abandon the Message Too Soon
One of the most quietly powerful parts of brand building is repetition. Not robotic repetition. Meaningful repetition. Katelyn says, “you got sick of it way before your audience did.” And isn’t that the tiny painful truth of content? You finally find something that lands, then your own boredom convinces you to move on before the market has had time to associate you with it.
The deeper work is learning how to stay with the message long enough for it to compound. Katelyn says, “that’s how you break through.” Not by saying the same thing in the same way forever, but by finding new angles, stories, questions, examples, and emotional entry points that bring your audience back to the same essential truth. That is how building a brand becomes less frantic and more rooted.
A Simple Brand Framework to Sit With
Instead of asking, “What should I post today?” start with better questions. Katelyn offers five powerful prompts: “what’s my buyer’s goal,” “What problem are they struggling with,” “What’s my point of view,” “What is my approach,” and “How is it revelatory when they hear it for the first time?” These questions move you beyond surface-level branding and into the deeper architecture of your message.
You do not need to answer everything perfectly today. But you do need to begin noticing what keeps returning. Katelyn says, “more often it’s the underlying story.” That is where your brand’s emotional gravity lives. The words may change. The hooks may evolve. The format may shift. But the underlying story is what helps people feel, “Oh. This person gets it.”
The Future of Your Brand Can Feel More Like You
The most encouraging part of this conversation is that building a brand does not require you to become a different person. Katelyn’s work points back to becoming more associated with what is already meaningful, useful, and true in your world. As she puts it, you can “become known for an idea they own.” That is a different kind of ambition — not louder, not flashier, but clearer.
And if you are in your first three years of business, clarity is a gift. Katelyn says, “it just took me this long winding journey to get here,” and maybe that is the permission you needed. You do not have to have the whole brand figured out before you begin. You get to listen, refine, live, learn, and let the message become more honest as you do.
To hear the full conversation with Katelyn Borgouin on building a brand, business alignment, founder story, buyer psychology, and ownable ideas, listen to the full episode of Her First Three Years. As Katelyn says, “if we spent a little bit more time really nerding out and trying to understand our audience and what they need, we’d see our results would compound faster.”
FAQ: Building a Brand, Founder Story, and Ownable Ideas
What does building a brand mean for early-stage entrepreneurs?
Building a brand means creating a clear, memorable association between you, your message, and the problem you help solve. Katelyn calls this “the mental territory you own in the minds of your target audience.”
How do I build a brand that feels aligned?
Start by questioning what you actually want, not just what looks impressive. Katelyn says, “figure out what happiness looks like for you,” which makes business alignment part of your brand strategy.
Why does founder story matter in personal branding?
Your founder story gives emotional context to your message and helps people understand why your perspective matters. Katelyn’s own path included “barbecue boxes, agencies, tech startups,” which shaped how she understands buyers and founders.
How can I brand your business without copying competitors?
Look for the point of view only you can bring. Katelyn asks, “How do I solve the problem differently?” which is one of the most useful questions for creating a more ownable brand.
What is an ownable idea?
An ownable idea is the concept people associate with you so strongly that it becomes part of your reputation. Katelyn says it is “so associated with you that it sounds like an echo coming from anybody else.”
How does buyer psychology help with building a brand?
Buyer psychology helps you understand what your audience wants, fears, values, and struggles to name. Katelyn says, “the customer is an expert on their problems,” and that insight can sharpen your message.
Why do founders get tired of their message too soon?
Founders often live inside their message every day, while the audience needs time to notice and remember it. Katelyn says, “you got sick of it way before your audience did.”
How do I know if my brand idea is strong enough?
A strong brand idea connects your buyer’s goal, their problem, your point of view, and a fresh emotional reframe. Katelyn says the real power often sits in “the story underneath it.”
TRANSCRIPT WITH KATELYN BOURGOIN ON PERSONAL BRAND AND OWNABLE IDEAS
Chardét Ryel (00:00)
Sometimes you have a conversation with someone, and it’s just kind of like this is giving me so many business insights. I’m ready to build, I’m ready to go forward, I’m so inspired. That’s what this is here today. You are going to find so much inspiration around how to stand out in a world of AI, how to go through that windy entrepreneur path, and it’s okay if you fail a few times. So my guest is the amazing Caitlin Burgoyne.
She is the founder of the Ownable Ideas Agency. And she is all about buyer psychology. So understanding your customers, your clients, every single person in your community, really truly understanding what they need. And on the other side of that, creating something that makes you truly, truly stand out. Your ownable idea. Now, Caitlin has had multiple businesses, some of them enormously successful.
Some of them that she admits have failed and were more difficult. And that’s why I think this story is really incredible to hear from her because she is sharing all this knowledge over sixteen years of experience as an entrepreneur. I’ll see you inside.
Welcome to her first three years from breakdowns to blenders. Learn what worked and what didn’t. I’m your host, Sardet, and whether you’re a new entrepreneur or you’re just starting something new, this is your space to learn and feel a little less alone. Okay, Caitlin, can we jump straight into the moment where you decided to first be an entrepreneur? I know there’s been a lot since then, but that first moment.
Katelyn Bourgoin (01:45)
I have a weird backstory. I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur. I never had any ambition to do a business. I never did any business courses in university initially. And ultimately I was really lucky because I was surrounded by these young, impressive women who were running their own businesses. And so one of the first jobs I had was a couple that were running their own business restaurant. Another one I worked for this amazing woman. She was not that much older than me, who’d opened a restaurant. And so seeing that, I think provided like
some clarity that this was something I could do. And I ended up going back to school to get a PR degree and realized through that that I actually loved marketing. I had no idea. I like it wasn’t something I that was even on my radar. Fell in love with marketing, got a job at an agency. It was my dream job. I was like, this is great. I’m gonna like work in an agency hopefully for most of my career, get to do incredible creative work. Out of the blue, this guy reaches out to me.
who had previously been an agency owner, he’d sold his agency, he was doing something different. He wanted to create a creative collective. So I had this weird intro where I got to have my first client and start a business. It was a very lucky, very, very fortuitous.
Chardét Ryel (02:58)
It makes a lot of sense though, having looked at your background, how this the pieces start to come together here though, like the PR and then the design and then the marketability piece. And I think what was really interesting to me with your story is that you were really, really successful doing it the way that a lot of people do, which is like hustle your hardest. And then you found another way. So I’m very curious about like that moment, that discovery and what led to it.
Katelyn Bourgoin (03:26)
I’ve been an entrepreneur for 16 years. what I share with you, that was my first company. I have built several since then. some that were successes and got sold, others that led to birth, like personal bankruptcy. It’s been a journey. I’d say that most recently, I think a real turning point for me was this idea of really evaluating what I want. Because I think that as entrepreneurs, we are subject to so much like entrepreneur heroeship, people.
Presenting entrepreneurs as these incredible, amazing people and they’re living these big lives and they’re building these big companies. And I tried to do that, right? Like I tried to build, I did build a VC back tech company. Inc. magazine said we were gonna be the next LinkedIn for women. That’s the company that made me go bankrupt. Not looking. But what I was doing for much of my entrepreneurial career, and I’d say only up until very like in the last three or four years, is when I really got out of this, is I was.
Modeling what I thought I was supposed to want because I was looking at what other people wanted. And there’s this great book called Wanting by Luke Burgis, and he talks about this concept of mimetic desire. And I think anybody who’s at this stage in their life where they are feeling attention, not exactly sure what where they want to go next, but feeling drawn to doing something different. I think anyone should read this book. And what he gets into is this idea that as humans,
We often decide what we want based on what we see other people want. And what this leads to is us modeling our lives after theirs. And it also leads to a lot of dissatisfaction because there’s often this disconnect between what we thought we were going to want, what we hoped that was going to bring, and what actually comes at the other end. And that’s happened to me several times. You know, I’ve built my my media company up into me being a solopreneur, doing a million dollars a year. That’s supposed to be the dream.
I was burned out. I was lonely. I was not satisfied with being a soloprener. I’d been chasing somebody else’s dream. And so I’d say that the big realization for me, that was one of the catalysts, but it came on the back of just recognizing I’ve got what I’m supposed to want. And for some reason I’m still feeling really dissatisfied. There’s something missing here.
Chardét Ryel (05:39)
This is kind of there’s this saying that I hope you get what you always wished for so you could see it’s not what you need. And I think it’s so nice to hear this from you because a lot of people, entrepreneurs, you know, the success rate is tiny. And so they might spend their whole working lives trying to reach that dream. To never have realized it, to realize it wasn’t the dream in the first place. So it’s really nice to hear this from someone who did, who was there, who saw it and was like, you know what?
This isn’t how I want to do it.
Katelyn Bourgoin (06:09)
For me, I I think it was there’s a couple of things that I have written down that I always go back to and one of them is happiness is the goal because I know a lot of very wealthy, unhappy people. Now there’s nothing to say that you can’t make money and be happy. Like there’s a threshold of earnings where people are just likely to be more happy and it’s because they probably feel more security. Like all of that is meaningful. So I’m not saying don’t go out and make money, but I just think that a lot of people conflate earning and
optics and status with what’s gonna bring them joy. And then when they get those things they find them wanting. And so figure out what happiness looks like for you and don’t lose yourself in these the chasing of status symbols and other people’s dreams.
Chardét Ryel (06:57)
Do you think that this is a realistic so like the hustle harder and this model of modeling after what other people are saying, the status symbol, the heroeship that you’re talking about? Do you think it’s realistic to from the beginning, like for people listening who are just starting their businesses, not emulate that? Honest question, I’m just curious to see.
Katelyn Bourgoin (07:18)
I think that I think you will need to hustle. And I think that people that are selling ease, in my opinion, are selling a false promise. I think that it is hard. There’s evidence to show that, you know, as you’re building a business, the it’s incredibly hard in the beginning because you haven’t figured out what’s working. You you don’t have the attention of the audience that you want to sell to yet. It’s really hard. And so you do need to work hard. You do need to hustle.
The most important thing though is if you’re gonna put in that work, if you’re going to be working really hard, making sacrifices in certain ways, make sure that the thing that you’re chasing is actually worth it. And for a lot of people, that’s the part that they don’t question. When I did my first company, the thing that became sexy was the tech startup, right? And everybody was trying, like I saw these visionary entrepreneurs and I was like, that’s what I want. And so when I was building my, my, my VC back company.
I was part of this accelerator program run by Tony Shea. And Tony Shea sadly has passed away, but he was the founder of Zappos, sold it to Amazon for billions. He was an incredibly interesting dude. But he’d moved his company from San Francisco, where most of the tech companies were, to Las Vegas, which was a weird move. And he’d set up his campus there. And he had Airstream Park, where he actually lived with a lot of his employees. There were like lamas running around. Very interesting product. But really
Chardét Ryel (08:41)
It sounds
amazing to be part of.
Katelyn Bourgoin (08:43)
Yeah, I think that it was a little cultish. And I think that it was either you loved it or you were like, get me out of here. But I remember touring his his campus, which was for 1,500 people. And at the time, again, I was trying to build this big business and success for my startup would have looked like something like that. It would have been, you know, hundreds, thousands of employees.
And I had this anxiety attack walking through there because I realized in that moment, I was like, my God, this isn’t what I want at all. And I was like, I’m so far in now. I’ve taken on a lot of debt personally. I’ve raised money from venture capitalists, but also through people who are in our network, who are good friends of my husband’s, you know. And like I was like, this is really bad. The thing that I’m supposed to do, which is build this unicorn billion dollar tech company.
I’m now realizing is not at all the thing I want to do. And how do I s how do I manage this? And so I ended up going, I kept trying because I couldn’t, you know, I couldn’t give up. I’d made I’d made too many promises. I had people I that I really wanted to get a win for, but ultimately it didn’t work out. And I think that there’s probably a big part of that I didn’t truly want it. You know, I I continued working hard. I continued doing the 60-70 hour weeks. I
continued making the efforts, but I knew in my heart that this wasn’t what I wanted. And I’m sure that that impacted the the success of the company too.
Chardét Ryel (10:13)
There’s something the intangible of how much do you really want the dream you’re going after is the like this hidden reserve of energy that comes or doesn’t come. But when you realize that, like after this first one and you started making the shift into I’m gonna be a lot more intentional about what I want this to look like, what did that end up being for you? You know, when you started seeing the real value of
For I don’t know if this is where we bring in the honorable idea, so I’ll let you frame that, but I’m thinking it comes from this.
Katelyn Bourgoin (10:43)
Yeah. Well, it does. So how what’s the best way to share this? So after that company closed down, you know, I’m I’m licking my wounds. I’m trying to figure out what I’m gonna be when I grow up. I’ve had to go personally bankrupt. remember writing a blog post. People were still blogging back then. This is 2018. And I remember writing a blog post around like what I wanted in my next business. And I made this list because I was really doing a lot of soul searching. I was like, I want to build a business that is.
not based on me personally. Like I’m not the business. The business is bigger than me. I wanna build a business that I have a partner in. I wanna build a business that is a you know, a scalable asset, something that I isn’t location dependent. I wanted to be able to live anywhere. And so I made this list. Then I defaulted back to the world that I knew. I started doing some freelancing, consulting work again with marketing. my lead investor came to me and they were like,
You were really good at the marketing, not so good at the product stuff. We’ve got all these founders who need marketing help. Will you work with them? So I was like, yes, I’m very broke. So I started doing a lot of consulting and eventually got into doing training. Then I had this plan, which was in alignment with my original goal of build a company that isn’t just me, build something that’s scalable, build something with a partner. I had this plan of creating a productize insights agency. So we would work with tech companies.
And every month we would go out and learn from their customers, doing customer interviews, surveys, and feed those insights back to them so they could make better decisions. And I became obsessed with this question of like why are so many companies struggling? Well, it’s because they didn’t understand their customers. So that was my plan. Then the world happened. So this is pre-pandemic. I my husband loses his job. I’m now the sole our sole income. And
I had built this little newsletter that was supposed to build pipeline for my agency. And that newsletter started growing at this at this rate that I hadn’t expected. And brands started reaching out to me. Can we sponsor your newsletter? And I didn’t even know that that was something that happened. And I was like, What? No, like I’m not gonna like I figured they’d offer me like a hundred bucks. I was like, I don’t they’re I’m not gonna like do that for a hundred bucks. And then they started sharing what they would pay. And I was like, this is actually a thing. So at this point, it’s the pandemic.
Husband’s not working. We decide to start a business up together because why not? Right. We start a ready to grill barbecue box. So think HelloFresh, but barbecue. So my husband’s an amazing chef. So different, right? No, he but he’s a chef and he’d been a restaurateur, sold a bunch of we’ve had a restaurant consulting business together. So for us, this made sense. And it’s during the pandemic, no restaurants are open, but people are doing people want to be part of some cool experience. We were doing these awesome live events.
Chardét Ryel (13:10)
So different.
Katelyn Bourgoin (13:27)
virtually live events. And that took off in a way that again, like I didn’t expect, but it wasn’t lucrative. It would we were having like $50,000 launches every month and losing money because the cost of shipping fresh meat is insanely expensive. So the margins in that business were just god awful. But my husband’s so happy. He’s he’s doing a business again, he’s loving it. I want to see him be successful. A few months.
Like I’ve as we’re trying to figure this out, we’re about five months in. We find out we’re pregnant. And I’m like, this is amazing. We’ve been trying for a long time. We had a lot of challenges. But now we’re running two businesses, only one of which is actually paying the bills. And we’re about to and we’re gonna have a baby. And the baby comes, and I’m actually like sending emails promoting our next barbecue box from the delivery room because I’m like so in grind mode. I’m like, we need to figure this out.
Fortunately and unfortunately, we didn’t end up pursuing that business because then my husband four months later broke his neck. So yeah. And so I know it’s crazy. So we have at this point we have a 10 pound baby and he’s not able to lift our baby. And the barbecue boxes we were sending were more than 10 pounds. So I was like, we have to shut down this business. Like this is the universe telling us this is done. But at that point,
Chardét Ryel (14:31)
Like a Netflix series.
Katelyn Bourgoin (14:50)
I’d ignored all the lists that I’d made for myself of what I’d wanted because I needed to figure out how to make money. And the fastest way to do it was to send the newsletter, work with sponsors, and then save as much of my time as I could to work in the barbecue business. It was just not what I’d wanted. And so I ended up getting into that track. And then because my husband had broken his neck, like he was out of commission and not working for a long time. And so, long story short, in about it, it was about two years.
Of figuring out what was next. And then we ended up moving from Nova Scotia and Canada where we live and started coming back. he got a job in Quebec, but it was a rotational job. So he would work for three weeks on every day and then have three weeks off. And we’re here with a with a one and a half year old, no support system. I’m still trying to grow the business. I was just a broken person for a while. And so it took me, even though I’d known way back in 2018.
what I actually wanted, it wasn’t until I’d say two years ago that I started like really meticulously planning for what that looks like. And that brings us to now, which is like the business I’ve recently started working on and what my plan is for that company. It looks a lot more aligned with the vision I had in 2018. It just took me this long winding journey to get here.
Chardét Ryel (16:13)
I feel like that’s so relatable though, because it’s I know anyone listening feels the same. You have this goal of what you want to create, what you think you want or what you know you want. And then it’s just life happens and so you go down this other path, you know, financial issues, kids, like travel, all this stuff comes up and then you’re back in the trap that you were trying to get out of, but you still kept the vision. And I think I hope that people hear that part is you
maintain the vision. You couldn’t do it immediately. But you ended up doing it two years ago. And now it’s like when you speak, I feel like from all of these different experiences you’ve had. And when you write and I see your post, it always feels like you’re speaking directly to the to the person. Like you really understand buyers. You really understand founders because of this windy road.
Katelyn Bourgoin (17:04)
I appreciate that. And I think at the end of the day, because I’ve done so many different things, like again, like barbecue boxes, agencies, tech startups, now a media company. Like I’ve done a lot of things. And I feel like that has then forced me to to really learn how to get to know an audience in a buyer segment quickly. Right. And I’m and I’m really nerdy with that. Like I I’m I don’t know if I’m an empath, but I just I love understanding what makes people tick.
I find it very exciting and fascinating. And I think for all of us, if we spent a little bit more time really nerding out and trying to understand our audience and what they need, we’d see our results would compound faster.
Chardét Ryel (17:43)
It’s almost like in the beginning you do that ’cause either in your case someone comes you with a business idea for you to do and you because you’re qualified for it or you see a need. But then it’s almost like the more time that goes by, the more you take your you create these walls between you and and your customer and you forget what their needs are, what they need to hear, what they want, and you just get kind of like in your bubble.
Katelyn Bourgoin (18:08)
Particularly, you’re so right. And particularly if you’re trying to build an online business where there’s a gap between you and the customer. So for me, for the a long time, I was selling courses, sponsorships in my newsletter, and I wasn’t having intentional one on one connection with my buyer unless I did it intentionally. And I think for a lot of folks, if you’re not doing sales calls, if you’re not in a l brick and mortar business where you’re actually seeing your customers coming in and out every day.
It’s really easy if you’re selling an e-commerce product, you’re selling courses, you’re you know, an influencer, it’s very easy to lose that connection with who your audience actually is unless you’re really intentional about it.
Chardét Ryel (18:49)
Yeah. I’m just having this like aha right now. Cause I I always say I started as an in person business until the pandemic. And I had like seven years of in person business and I felt like I always tell people it was easier. I feel like it was easier. But I think perhaps it’s because of what you’re saying that I knew what people needed because I saw them every single day. Yeah.
Katelyn Bourgoin (19:11)
I there’s the funny thing in the marketing, especi particularly in advertising, where all the best advertisers will say, you don’t need to listen to the customer. You know, the customer doesn’t know what they want. It’s your job to tell what they need, which was something that Steve Jobs had said, but it’s taken out of context because he’s actually a big research nerd. It’s not the customer’s job to tell you what to give them, but the customer is an expert on their problems. And if you dig in and really understand your customer’s problems.
You will be able to solve those problems better than anybody else. And if you can solve their problems better than anyone else, they will love you. They will pay you. They will tell people about you. We as entrepreneurs really need to spend more time making sure that we’re solving the right problems. Cause I think we’re all guilty of we want to build something that fits our lifestyle. We want to build something that makes money. We want to build something that’s like we, we, we, but ultimately none of that will work unless you focus on them, them, them.
Chardét Ryel (20:05)
How do you feel like what are some ways to to maybe even build that in then? Because let’s say for example you’re not doing the sales calls and you’re not doing even live coaching and you’re an online business owner. I mean, how do you intentionally bring that in to so you don’t have that barrier between you and the person you’re trying to serve?
Katelyn Bourgoin (20:27)
There’s a couple of ways you can do it. So I actually have a product. My first digital product I ever sold is called the Clarity Call Cheat Sheets. And it’s a specific method for interviewing buyers, either your buyers, people who’ve bought from a competitor, to really understand their buying journey because there’s so much insight that comes out of that buying journey that you can use to improve your products, to market them more effectively, to be better at sales. So I’d say customer interviews are the gold standard.
And you can get stuff from talking to a customer and ask and really acting like a detective and learning as much as you can about their buyer journey. And also, people love to share that stuff. I remember one person I was interviewing her about her reason to buy a pair of jeans. And what came out of it was that she had her daughter was going to university and she had this moment where she realized my role is just being mom isn’t the role I need to play anymore. And my gosh, I get to actually be a woman again and
Come back to being me. And then she looked at a closet and she was like, this has just been my like survive wardrobe. She’s like, now I want my Thrive wardrobe. And I’m like thinking about this. And she’s like, but I’m a woman of this age. So I needed to go to these places. And you think about that. I could just imagine as the brands, how she made her buying decision and what she ended up going with. If you have that type of insight about your customer, you could market to them so effectively. So interviews would be my number one recommendation. One thing you can do too is just open up office hours.
And if you already have an audience that wants some of your time, look at it as a discovery thing and say, I’m well, you know, once a week, I’m going to set aside 30 minutes. And here’s the booking link. And if you have questions, because people will come to you with their problems, right? They’ll book that call because they have a problem and you’ll get to dig into it. And it’s just a great way to also just give back to your audience.
Chardét Ryel (22:13)
I love, love, love the second idea in particular. The first one, of course, especially for anyone who’s thinking about a new offer, refining an offer, all of that. But I really love the office hours because it’s kind of the balance between the lifestyle we’re talking about and still maintaining that connection with your people.
Katelyn Bourgoin (22:30)
A lot of times we have these parasocial relationships with people we follow online where we kind of feel like we know them, but they don’t actually know us yet. And so if they actually get to have some of your time, for one, they get to see, here does a ri regular person like them. It makes their ambitions and goals feel much more achievable. And two, they’re gonna be a super fan now, right?
Chardét Ryel (22:51)
That’s true, yeah. I love I love this idea and I hope people listen like the office hours, the calls. On the other side of that then, we also have okay, understanding what they need, what they’re going through. The Jeans example is brilliant because that’s not something you could do in a simple survey. Someone would have to explain that. But then you have the other side of it, which is where you focus a lot, which I like too, of creating something that is truly yours that makes you stand out, especially in this world right now where so much more competition.
So much AI. Can you talk a little bit about that side as well?
Katelyn Bourgoin (23:25)
Sure. One of the things that had been really true to me back in 2018 that I had not done is I wanted a business partner. Neil O’Grady, who was at the time the one of the co-founders of Demand Curve, which is this great media and education company for tech startups primarily for marketing. he reached out and he’s like, We’re working on doing some collaborations with creators to create courses and cohort experiences. Would you be interested in doing something together? And I was like, Yeah, that would be a lot of fun to create co-create something.
And so we ended up building the unignorable challenge, which was a 30-day personal branding challenge. We launched that in January 2023. It was never supposed to be a business. It was something we were going to do together. We saw it as a fun way to collaborate on something and our audiences had some a lot of alignment in them. And within two years, we did a million dollars in sales as a very part-time thing. We only had five launches. I loved the impact that we helped people make that came through that program.
And I had always thought maybe this is the thing I want to go all in on. Maybe this is actually more aligned. I’m getting to spend more time with the with the students as opposed to just selling on demand stuff. But I didn’t want to be all in on a business with partners who weren’t all in and demand curve, they had a lot on their plate. They were running an agency. They had a lot they were doing. So I kind of put that idea aside and I said, you know, I’m just gonna keep on working in like Why We Buy, which was my media and education company.
And then I just got to the stage of like burnout and I was like, I want, I’m not loving what I’m doing now. I did love the work with Unignorable. Maybe there’s a way to reshape what Unignorable does so that it’s more in alignment with what I want to build. And so I have a really good friend who’s an amazing designer. And we had talked about doing Unignorable together and we build it more like a where we’d help people with figuring out their strategy and their design for their personal brand.
She ends up getting pregnant within two weeks of us like deciding this is what we’re doing. And then she was like, I’ve already got a toddler. But at that point, I’d already gotten so excited about doing unignorable again that I was like, you know what? I’m still gonna do this. I’m gonna find a partner. And I’m actually co-founder dating right now. So finding a partner is just as hard as finding a romantic partner. I’d say even more so in some cases, because there’s a lot more that you need to be aligned on and it’s still my priority.
business that I’m running now is unignorable and we’re the ownable ideas agency. So we help people to basically find that idea that they want to be known for, what they want to really build their reputation around, shape it into what their audience needs to hear so that they can become known for an idea they own.
Chardét Ryel (26:04)
Well, first like there’s more windy roads, which is not surprising from your experience. The journey’s never done. I feel like that would be such an interesting topic in itself about the the co-founder dating side. But I’m curious. So one of the things that you wrote recently that really resonated around this, what you’ve created is because AI is on the top of everybody’s mind all the time, always thinking about it, is you were saying how like you can’t outpace AI with your content.
Right. Like don’t try to keep beating it with your content that doesn’t work anymore. Maybe six years ago it did, not anymore. Can you share a little bit more about how having an ownable idea, really understanding your message, allows you to compete kind of in this new landscape that is changing a lot.
Katelyn Bourgoin (26:51)
Yeah, absolutely. And just for the the listeners, people hear ownable idea, they might assume that what they what that means, but I’ll kind of give it some context. So an ownable idea is basically the mental territory you own in the minds of your target audience. There are some people, when you think about your absolute favored creators, entrepreneurs, authors, a lot of them have that one idea they first became known for. Some go on to have others, right? But they usually have that one that becomes the breakthrough. So when you think of like,
start with why, right? That’s Simon Seneck. Everybody thinks of him when they hear that. People who are fans are more in the kind of like the woo world. You hear vulnerability as strength, like you think of Brene Brown, right? I believe that there used to be, you used to be able to build an audience based on good positioning, being, you know, knowing what you did, who you did it for, and good content around that. I don’t think that’s as easy anymore. I think that ultimately
There’s just so much noise. Anybody who gets any degree of traction with something, they’re very quickly copied. And I think you need something more now. So an ownable idea, it’s a concept that’s so associated with you that it sounds like an echo coming from anybody else. And the foundation of it is really getting clear on the argument that you want to make in your business long term and crafting a story around it and sharing that consistently. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
with the ownable ideas concept. My ownable idea is ownable ideas, which is very because usually when people find them, it’s almost like lightning, right? They’ve been posting for a while, something hits and they go, there’s I’m gonna do more of that. And then they end up just going deep. I’m like, is there a way to actually engineer that as opposed to waiting for magic? That’s the work that I’m doing now. And I think that in the future, for anybody who’s really ambitious who wants to do something really big, having the ownable idea is your foundation.
Chardét Ryel (28:40)
In some ways it’s almost re well, it not in some ways, it is refreshing because it’s the cont more content actually was not what I wanted to hear six years ago. Like I didn’t want to do that. But this is something where it’s exciting, like to figure out what is the thing that you are uniquely qualified, positioned for, experienced in that part of just you that you can bring out that no one else can really copy. And you know, that’s not something that can just be replicated with AI or someone else who’s.
Building another course or whatever it is.
Katelyn Bourgoin (29:12)
Yeah. You’re so right. At the end of the day, I mean, we all know it. You I think that if there’s this interesting thing that’s happening in concert where everyone’s saying, it’s never been easier to start a business and how great is that. It’s like, yes. And there’s also more competition than ever before. And so you need to figure out what can I do that gives me a competitive advantage. I think personal brand is a massive competitive advantage because there’s really only can be one you. And I think people need to lean into it more with their businesses.
Even with that being true, when it comes to content, most people are a little bit too impatient for their message to take off. And so I’ve seen people do they just start talking about something and it’s brilliant. I’m like, that’s so good. And then you never, you know, they talk about it for a couple of months and then they move on and start talking about something else. And it’s like if you would have just stuck with it, you got sick of it way before your audience did.
Chardét Ryel (30:00)
Yeah, it’s actually a very fair point. I I have seen many things in my past that I can name that have happened that way.
Katelyn Bourgoin (30:08)
I’ve done it too. I’m I’m I’m impatient too, let me tell you. But I realize I’ve seen the power of compounding. And people talk about compounding when it comes to investing. When it comes to your personal brand and your content, if you c if you can find that idea and you just hit it and hit it and hit it. And of course you have to find a thousand ways to say it. You have to keep bringing it back to what your audience needs to hear. But if when you do that and you really stick with it, that’s how you break through. And just most people just won’t do it. They just get too bored or they think,
people have heard enough of this. I’m moving on. And that’s not how you win.
Chardét Ryel (30:41)
Do you feel like there are certain signals that identify this as the idea that’s working because people might not see it in their audience? Like what would be a signal? Because if you’re getting, you know, twenty likes on something, you might not realize that’s your lightning idea.
Katelyn Bourgoin (31:00)
My
thinking on this is basically five things that you want to think through to kind of engineer this. Number one is like, what’s my buyer’s goal? Right. Because ultimately people pay attention to things that help them. So what’s my buyer’s goal? What problem are they struggling with that’s stopping them from achieving that goal? What’s my point of view on that? What’s my lens, right? What what have I lived? What have I experienced? How do I solve the problem differently? What is my approach? And then this is the piece that I think is really important. How does
How does my thinking about it, how’s it different than other people? How is it revelatory when they hear it for the first time? What makes them go, wow, that’s really different? Like once you wow them with this thing, what do they do next? Let me give you a couple of examples of people who’ve done this really, really well. So you look at Justin Wells. He did not create the word solopreneur. Solopreneur existed in the culture well before he started talking about it. What he did was he changed the conversation around it.
And he took a problem that people were feeling, which was that they wanted to have more freedom. They wanted to live a bigger life. They wanted to make more money. And they’d thought that the best way to do that was to either climb the corporate ladder and try to become an executive or go off and take this high super high risk thing and like build the next unicorn tech startup, like I tried to do. And he presented this all this other option, which was really revelatory, which is like, actually, if you truly care about freedom, if you truly care about
living your most real life, then it’s not just all about the money. And you can actually build a meaningful business as a solopreneur. It’s not going to be a billion dollar company, but it could be a really lucrative company. It could give you money in your pocket and more time. That was a message that people wanted. They gravitated towards it. Because previously, for a lot of us as entrepreneurs, there was almost shame in being small. He made being small something that was a choice and it was a strategic and courageous choice. And he reframed the identity.
That’s when you think about presenting your idea back to your audience, it’s not just a couple of sexy words, right? It’s the story underneath it. It’s the identity that they can buy into. It’s the problem that they see themselves in. And that’s kind of the work of finding this. But when you do, that’s when it really takes off. And so if you take some time constructing that story, I call it your central argument, and you craft that.
Then you go, okay, I’ve got something I can really build on here. And then you can play with the language. You can post different things. You can see what the audience picks up on. For Justin, the you know, he initially started talking about the diversified solo printer, and then he dropped it down to just solo printer. Somebody like Cody Sanchez, she did an amazing job making boring businesses, the thing she’s associated with. The language, sometimes that that can just hit like lightning, but more often it’s the underlying story. So spend some time there.
And then you’ll feel more confident as you go off and just t start testing different approaches to saying the same thing.
Chardét Ryel (33:51)
having them combine an idea which could maybe already exist to anyone’s argument that, well, everything that needs to be said has already been said. Yeah. And then combining it in a different way, like that maybe is controversial or against what mainstream is, or is just different or takes away the shame of s of an identity. I really, really love that. So I think if you’re listening and you want to know more, which I
No people will. how can they connect with you, with your agency, see your work, see all the stuff that you’re talking about?
Katelyn Bourgoin (34:22)
Yeah. So they can go to ownable ideas dot com and they’ll have the opportunity to sign up for our newsletter. And then if they want to follow me online, the best way would be on LinkedIn’s probably the channel I’m most active on right now. And so it’s Caitlin Burgoyne on LinkedIn. You can find me there. You’ll see my post where I kind of break down how to build an ownable idea. And in our newsletter, every week we break down a person who you probably like know and admire and how what their ownable idea is and how they brought it into how they built their business around it. So
Chardét Ryel (34:52)
I love it. So definitely encourage people to do both, but especially, especially the newsletter, ’cause I think we you gave some great examples so far, but I’m sure there’s even more that they can kind of dive into and see. Thank you for being here and being so like honest about the entire journey. I really appreciate that.
Katelyn Bourgoin (35:09)
Yeah, thank you for asking so many great questions and letting me blab at you but this is
Chardét Ryel (35:13)
Great. And thank you so much for listening. Make sure next step, as soon as you finish this episode, go sign up for Caitlin’s newsletter. She has thousands and thousands of people reading this thing because it is so helpful. Share this episode as well with anyone you know that’s kind of like, yeah, I’m ready to figure out what my thing is. I’m ready to really step into my space. I’m ready for the next big idea that I have. And I will see you in the next one.
Your story is your SEO. It is as powerful as those words people are searching for. Go to the Her First Three Years website or go to my Instagram, Shardet Rayale. Both of those links are in the show notes. And get the private podcast series, How to Stand Out Online. You will listen to that series. You will probably binge it and you will find your way.
Thank you so much for listening. Share this with someone who needs it. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review. Share this energy. You know it’s all about spreading, receiving. If you feel like it’s made a difference, made you think. Please, please, please share your thoughts.
