Content Is The Top Skill You Need to Learn

Read this on victoriaprew.com​

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Hey! Happy Monday.

If you follow me online, you will know I am very bullish on the power of personal branding and storytelling. I have built one company where the brand did a lot of the heavy lifting for us, and now that I am building again, content is the first muscle I am training properly this time round. Not because it is fun (although it is), but because I genuinely believe it is now one of the highest leverage skills a founder can have.

Here is my honest view. There is a finite window before AI slop and AI avatars flood every feed. The founders who build real trust with real audiences now will own something that cannot be replicated, automated, or bought.

So I put together the four best resources I have listened to recently. The Caleb one is incredible. Six hours of jam packed value, and I listened to the entire thing on my daily walks. Three of the four are completely free, and between them they will teach you more than most paid courses I have seen.

TODAY AT A GLANCE

• The concept: content is the top skill founders need to learn right now, and the window is closing.
• The resources: four free videos covering personal branding, copywriting, and getting confident on camera.
• The lesson: trust compounds, and it is still a human game.
• This week's action: one hour of Caleb, one video with the doors closed.

[the concept]

Content Is the Top Skill You Need to Learn

Your expertise currently compounds silently inside your head. Your content compounds publicly on the internet. Only one of those builds an asset that works for you while you sleep.

The founders I respect most right now are not the ones with the biggest teams or the most impressive funding announcements. They are the ones who have built genuine audiences around their thinking, because they understood early that distribution is no longer something you buy at the end. It is something you build from the beginning.

I spent years at HURR watching our brand open doors that cold outreach never could. This time round, I am treating content as core infrastructure, not a marketing afterthought. These four resources are where I would tell any founder to start....

[the resources]

1. Caleb Ralston: How To Build a Personal Brand

Start here. Caleb was Gary Vaynerchuk's videographer and TikTok lead for two and a half years, growing his TikTok from 300,000 to 3.5 million followers in three months, before building an 18-person media team behind some of the biggest names in business. This is his complete personal branding course. Six hours, completely free, and better structured than most programmes charging four figures. I listened to it across two weeks of daily walks and finished it with more notes than I have taken from anything in months.

Three things I took from it:

• Followers are a vanity metric. An audience that trusts you is the business asset.
• Consistency is not about volume. It is about showing up in a way people can predict and rely on. What are you known for?
• The biggest mistake founders make is talking about themselves. The best content makes the reader feel like you are talking about them.

2. Oren John - The Creative's Guide to Personal Branding

This one reframed the whole subject for me. Oren goes A to Z on personal branding: formats, funnels, content pillars, and strategy, in one complete playbook. The strongest personal brands are not the most polished or the most prolific. They are the most targeted, because being specific within your niche makes you impossible to confuse with anyone else. If personal branding has ever felt like performing a version of yourself you do not recognise, this is the antidote.

Three things I took from it:

• A personal brand is not a persona. It is an amplified version of who you already are.
• The founders with the strongest brands are not the most polished. They are the most targeted.
• You do not need more content. You need clearer content. One great piece of thinking repeated across formats beats thirty pieces of average output.

3. Jessi Jean: The Yap On Camera Challenge

Jessi started a brand new Instagram from zero in November 2025 and grew it to over 400,000 followers in five months by doing one thing: talking to her phone. Her Yap On Camera Challenge is how she teaches it. Six weeks, 40 posts, a repeatable content system, and the communication skills to hold attention online. It is the only paid resource on this list, and her last launch reportedly did $1.2 million in under two weeks, which tells you everything about how much demand there is for this exact skill. If you know you should be on camera and keep finding sophisticated reasons not to be, this is your sign.

Three things I took from it:

• The camera is not the problem. The self-consciousness is. The only way through is repetition, not preparation.
• You do not need to be good to start. You need to start to get good.
• Holding attention on camera is a skill, not a personality trait. It can be practised, and she is the proof.

4. Harry Dry: Learn Copywriting in 76 Minutes

Harry Dry runs Marketing Examples and has taught over 100,000 people how to write copy that actually converts. This is his complete copywriting masterclass, recorded with David Perell, condensed into 76 minutes. The section on hooks alone changed how I write everything, including this newsletter. His three rules for good copy: can I visualise it, can I falsify it, can nobody else say it? Once you see them, you cannot unsee them in every piece of content you consume.

Three things I took from it:

• The hook is a promise. It tells the reader exactly what they will get and why it matters. If your hook is weak, nothing else can save it.
• Say things only you can say. That third rule is the one that cannot be copied or automated.
• Writing is thinking. Founders who write regularly make better decisions because writing forces clarity.

[the lesson]

Nobody Is Coming to Discover You

Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath all four of these resources.

The era of being found is over. There is no journalist writing the profile, no investor stumbling across your company, no algorithm rewarding you for quietly doing great work. Attention is now something you build or something you buy, and buying it gets more expensive every quarter.

Jessi Jean understood this. She started from zero in November. Not a small audience. Zero. Five months later she had 400,000 followers and a seven-figure business, built entirely on a skill she spent years avoiding. The gap between her and the thousands of founders still "planning to start posting" was not talent, budget, or luck. It was reps.

Meanwhile, AI is about to make average content free and infinite. Which means the only content with any value left is the kind that could only have come from you. Your specific failures. Your specific numbers. Your specific way of seeing.

Trust is the last moat. And it is still available to anyone willing to build it one post at a time.

[the action]

Record One Video This Week

I meet so many people who don't know where to start. What about a 30-60 second video?

Sixty seconds, phone in hand, saying one thing you know to be true from your own experience that most people in your industry get wrong. You do not have to post it. But you do have to record it, and get used to practicing how this feels.

Then start Caleb's course on your next walk. Six hours sounds like a lot until you realise it is one week of commutes! It's one of the best long-form pieces of content I've ever watched.

Until next week,

Victoria