Catalytic Leadership

Tired of Posting Without Results? The AI Personal Branding Fix

• Dr. William Attaway • Season 4 • Episode 15

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 Posting more isn’t your problem; conversion is. In this episode, I sit down with Ruheene Jaura, co-founder of Hey Levi and the new app Brandify, whose background includes launch work with Apple and Amazon. We unpack how AI personal branding (done right) separates you from your business brand, clarifies positioning, and drives revenue without feeding the algorithm treadmill. You’ll hear how Ruheene moved from reach to results using deep audience research, systems, and practical automation to surface the podcasts, events, and keywords your buyers already trust. If you’re scaling a 7 or 8-figure agency or business and want less bottleneck, less burnout, and more high-fit demand, this is a clear, actionable path: align your personal brand to authority-building outcomes, keep your business brand sellable, and turn visibility into pipeline.

📚 Books Mentioned
Working Backwards by Colin Bryar & Bill Carr


 Explore Ruheene’s platform at brandif.ai. Start on the free tier to run deep research on your audience and map the podcasts, events, and search terms that align with your story.



Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

Connect with Dr. William Attaway:

Dr. William Attaway:

It is such an honor today to have Ruheen Jara on the podcast as the co-founder of Hey Levi and a brand new app called Brandify. Ruheen has worked with some of the biggest brands known to mankind, including Apple and Amazon. Now she spends her time building the same buyer psychology processes that these big brands use into apps that make them accessible and available to small businesses across the globe. Raheem, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show.

Ruheene Jaura:

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Intro:

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host, author, and leadership and executive coach, Dr. William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway:

I'd love for you to share just a little bit of your story with our listeners, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How did you get started?

Ruheene Jaura:

It's interesting when you use the word leader because I think a lot of people just love that word. Um and I think they're very comfortable with that word. I feel like I'm still growing into that word and into that role. I feel like I'm always learning. I I never feel like I'm completely ahead of the pack. So with that, I think a lot of my journey to what I'm doing right now, which is, you know, I we just launched our second software startup, um, has just been about figuring out how I can help people. I know that sounds very oversimplified, and but really it's always been about what is the one thing that people are struggling with that I that, you know, so far, what all the all the advice out there hasn't helped. And what is that thing that I could maybe help solve based on my experience and based on uh on my background? Um, and so very early on, of course, when I was younger, that wasn't the case. Uh, I just wanted to get into the movie business and uh be glamorous and uh have my name up in the in movie credits. And so that was my big goal when I was just starting out with my career. So I decided to get into the movie world, get into visual effects, worked with companies like Marvel for about eight eight years, uh, got my name uh in the credits, so yay to me. Um, I guess my name's in the Avengers, I invented a whole bunch of things. Um, I have an IMDB profile. I always thought my kids would be really impressed one day with all of these stories. They could not care less. I am not a cool mom.

Dr. William Attaway:

Isn't that so true? They don't care.

Ruheene Jaura:

Not at all. They yeah, not not cool. Nothing I could do could ever make me cool. So I've tried to show them my IMDB profile, they could not care less. But that was my goal. That's how that's how I started really doing those things. And then from there, anyone who knows me knows that I can't sit still very long. Um, I have to keep doing and I have to keep doing stuff. Um, and so the movie world is very, very hectic, and you get really burnt out for like three to five months, depending on the size of the project. And then you have a month or two of downtime, usually. They're not usually back to back depending on the company you're at. And and the studio I was at, we definitely had a month or two in between where things would really slow down. And so I was telling my bosses at the time, I was like, I can't do this. You need to start loaning me out. So I got loaned out to an advertising firm, local advertising firm in San Francisco. And that's how I started doing launch campaigns. And so I got to be part of the launch campaign, actually lead the launch campaign for the Apple iPhone 5 back in 2012, long time ago. Uh, but a huge part of what I've been able to bring with me all these years and into what I do now. The Amazon Firephone in 2014 did the a lot of failed products, I will say, uh, more failed products than I have successful products. But I think that is uh what has made me uniquely uh qualified to talk about what works and also equally what doesn't work. So um so yeah, did a lot of uh branding work, advertising work, marketing, film, and storytelling. And I ended up combining all of that when I got into the startup world and the small business world, because I realized that a lot of small businesses struggle with positioning themselves. It started out as, you know, helping them figure out how to position their offers, understand the difference between brand-led growth and product-led growth and sales-led growth and all of these things that a lot of people just get thrown into and they have to now figure it out. Um, and now, more recently, you know, when I launched my first startup, which is Hey Levi, uh when I first launched it, nobody knew who I was, nobody cared what we had built, even though it had it was something that was very much needed in the market. Um, it was a positioning, it was a branding and positioning tool that didn't exist at the time. Now, of course, there are other tools that exist and do similar things. Uh, but at the time we were the only ones that were approaching it in this AI but no prompt way. Uh but nobody cared because nobody knew who I was. And no amount of telling people that I worked with Apple and Amazon mattered because the question is always, okay, that's great, that's cool, but what can you do for me? Right. It it I mean, that's how we listen to That's so true. And so that's how I realized that more than just developing products and developing solutions to market gaps that I feel like I can help with, I realized that what I needed to focus on was positioning myself first. And that led me on this journey over the past year, year and a half to building my personal brand. And I know a lot of people, a lot of founders and creators, but you know, mostly in our world as founders, to are trying to get out there, build their personal brand, establish themselves as thought leaders in their space, but nobody really knows how to do it. And the only advice that I'm hearing is keep posting on social media and the algorithm will take notice and you'll be famous. I'm exaggerating, obviously, but that's kind of just the narrative that we're hearing over and over again. And there I wish it were that easy, right? And my own journey, it has not been that easy. I have tried posting a lot, posting a little, posting somewhere in the middle, posting on different channels, and honestly, just as a way of doing research. And what I found is it doesn't matter. Yes, if you post more times and you're posting quality content, I just got a message from Facebook today that they've increased my reach. But what does that mean if we're not converting anyone?

Dr. William Attaway:

That's right. That's right. It's a vanity metric then, you know?

Ruheene Jaura:

It is. And so is engagement. You know, a lot of people will say, well, engagement shows pre-conversions, but again, maybe, maybe not. So, you know, reach is great, engagement is great, makes you look really popular, makes you look like you know what you're doing. But is it act only you know whether it's actually converting into sales on the back end? And for me, they weren't in all transparency. And so I realized that what I really needed to do was understand my audience better, understand who I was serving, what I was doing for them, what made me different from everybody else who was talking about maybe similar things or trying to solve the same problems. And a lot of that went into just researching my audience, understanding what they were searching for, what they needed, what they were listening to, what they were reading, just understanding their whole world. And so, yeah, that's uh that's a long answer to your question, but that's uh that's why I'm here. And that's why I'm so passionate about talking about personal branding even more than business branding at the moment, and really helping CEOs and founders become social CEOs so that their ideas don't go wasted.

Dr. William Attaway:

I think there's so much value in what you're describing here, but it is something that a lot of people misunderstand. And I would count myself among them up until recently, having heard you speak at a conference we were both at. There's there's this confusion, particularly I think with founders who want to build the brand of what they're doing, their business. And, you know, we look at the the big brands. We've talked about, you know, Amazon and Apple and Marvel and Disney, big brands that are that are well known. But a personal brand feels very selfish, self-centered, self-serving. Like I want to build the brand of the thing, the product, the service, not not my brand. You talk about this and how there's a better way to think about that. I'd love for you to share a little bit about that, why it's so important and why we need to get out of this mindset that it's self-centered.

Ruheene Jaura:

Um so yeah, so a lot of people when you when they hear branding, they're thinking about a company brand. Um and I think at some point they're kind of mixing a little bit of personal branding in and a little bit of business branding in. But it's really important to understand that they are and should be separate. And the reason I said I say that is because, especially because of my own experience just this year in 2025, um, we went through nine months of an Ecuhire uh deal, not really a deal because it didn't go through in the end, uh, but a conversation and a negotiation, right? Um, and a lot of that really made like shed light on a lot of things that I was kind of pushing to aside and ignoring. Um, you know, we've built a strong brand for Hay Levi. And yes, I've been trying to position myself as an expert to bring more traffic into the business, but I realized that unless you have a strong business brand that is independent of you, it's harder to exit out of that business because your face is now married to that business. And a potential buyer or investor might question, well, what if something happens to you or if you were to exit your business, are we actually going to continue, are we gonna be able to continue growing it and scaling it? So you want your business, if you, even if you're not thinking about exiting your business today, it's something that you want to keep in mind because even if you want to grow old with it and take it with you, maybe one day you want to pass it on to your to your kids or to your family. How do you do that when it's your specific face that's that's entrenched in the business? So it's really important to think about your business brand. And all the big brands do it, right? Think about Apple. That's my one of my favorite examples because they've just done it so well. Apple has a really strong brand. Steve Jobs had a really strong brand, but they were not the same thing. Steve Jobs exited, came back, got bought back in, like he bought he built, you know, a software, got bought back into Apple. But through it all, Apple continued to survive and thrive, and it still has, even after Steve Jobs is gone. It's a different conversation, whether the quality of the products is the same or not. But you know, you know, the brand has continued to grow, right? Um, and Steve Jobs had his own personal brand. You loved him or you hated him, but you couldn't ignore him. And and nobody could claim that they had done what he had done because he people knew who he was. And again, he was a known personal brand. So all that to say it's really important for your company brand, for your business brand to have a brand of its own. But it's also equally important for you to have your own personal brand because let's say you do exit out of your business and you want to do something else. You're gonna be starting from scratch if your entire brand weren't with your company and now nobody knows who you are. Everybody knows your company, but now nobody knows who you are. So whatever you do next, whether you know you're working for a larger company and you wanna go open your own thing or you want to get a different job, or you're in a startup and you want to start up maybe something else in that parallel or after this one. Doesn't matter what you want to do, as long as you have your personal brand, that's gonna go with you. Startup to startup, roll up roll to roll, it it travels with you.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's fascinating. I'm thinking of of different examples. Steve's Steve Jobs is a great one. Think about Walt Disney. Here's a guy who started a business that grew into what is now an empire, really, all around his name. Right? He was the center of the spider web, everything connected to him. But when he died, the business didn't fall apart.

Ruheene Jaura:

Exactly.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know, they had to change, to be sure. How would you look at that? Like, was he building a personal brand in addition to the business, or was it really all about the business and was he over-identified with the business?

Ruheene Jaura:

I don't think you can separate him from Disney. I I mean, at least I can't. Maybe I'm I'm now thinking, do I know of anything that he has said which is not related to the business directly?

Dr. William Attaway:

Right. Exactly.

Ruheene Jaura:

Um Walt Disney ever said, and maybe that was before my time, but yeah.

Dr. William Attaway:

Yeah, and so I'm thinking, like, do founders fall into that trap often where they are just completely, completely over-identified with the business. They are at the center of everything. And then it becomes unsellable, like you're describing, because you can't sell yourself. Yes. You know? How do you see that more often?

Ruheene Jaura:

I see that a lot, and it's a little bit scary because if that's your intention, then that's fine as long as you have a clear goal in mind and you're doing it intentionally. What I find scary is is talking to founders and CEOs who don't realize what they're doing. They realize they've heard the term branding. They know that they need a strong brand, but they don't really know what that means. Just this week, I was on a call with a longtime customer of uh Hay Levi, and he was telling me that he just signed up for Brandify, but he also a month ago signed up with um a branding expert. Um, and so I thought it was interesting because I asked him, like, what is what is this branding expert doing for you exactly? What kind of branding? Um, and he was like, Well, she's doing my logo and colors, and but then also my messaging. And then she's also positioning me as a thought leader. So I was like, that sounds like a big mix of a lot of different things that shouldn't necessarily be mixed together. And if this is her like single package, I'm sure she knows what she's doing. I'm this isn't I'm not trying to throw shade to anybody, but what worries me is that founders are looking for branding experts, going with somebody who is like, oh, I'll do all the branding for you. Um, and then giving them something where their personal brand is just now completely muddied up with their business brand. And now you can't differentiate between the two and they don't know any better.

Dr. William Attaway:

I think that language is perfect, muddied up. That's exactly it's just all a big mud pile. And how do you separate mud? You know, once the dirt and the water mix, you're never gonna separate them again. That is so often the branding. So let's say one of our listeners is like, okay, I wanna I want to start this personal brand thing. I need to do this. It has been muddy, it's been, it's been all like put together. How do I begin? Where do I start? What would you say?

Ruheene Jaura:

I think the first thing you want to think about is that when you're building your business brand, want, I mean, both both brands are are all about earning your ideal customers' trust. At the end of the day, that's really what it comes down to. I think on a on a business brand level, you really want to think about how that trust converts into sales, right? It's not a hobby, it's a business. You want to make sure that everything that you're doing for your business is converting into some sort of revenue for your business so you can keep the lights on, right? And continue to scale. With you as a personal brand, you want to think less about how you're gonna immediately convert that into sales. And you wanna think about how do you stay top of mind, you as a person, not your company, but you. So if I have Hey Levi, I have Brandify now. Brandify does personal branding, Hey Levi does business branding. That's the difference between the two. And then there's me, Raheen, right? And really what I want people to think about is hey, I need I have a branding problem. My personal brand, like I need a system that's gonna help me scale my business brand, establish me as a thought leader, get me featured on podcasts like this one, on the right stages, you know, at events that my customers are going to. I need a system that's gonna do that and I'm willing to spend money on it. Well, I want them to think of Brandify, right, as a platform. But let's say they have a question and they're not really sure. They know they need a brand, they know they they're kind of stuck in their business, they want to scale, they're not sure if they should be speaking on stages or not, they're not sure what they should be doing. There's so many different things that they're being told, and now they don't know what to do next. They really just need someone to clarify it for them. At that point, I want them to think of me, right? So I want to be the expert, if you will, that comes to mind when you have a question about brand-led growth, product-led growth, how the two can work for your business. What does branding mean? What is the difference between business branding and personal branding? At what point of my journey should I focus on one versus the other? Those kinds of things you don't necessarily want to spend money just to get an answer, but you want somebody who you feel like is in your corner who will help you navigate that and figure out what you need to do next.

Dr. William Attaway:

And that's the expertise of a professional, somebody who's got the track, who's got the experience, who can speak using that language and that that knowledge base and bring it to bear for the questions and the challenges that you're facing. And I love that you have stepped into that space for yourself and said, hey, this is who I want to be. So when you made that decision, what were some of the things that you began to do differently?

Ruheene Jaura:

So that's where this whole journey started, right? I realized that just simply, you know, telling people about this amazing product I had built that was going to solve all of their branding problems wasn't actually going to do it. Um, and so I really had to dig deep to understand, first of all, like understanding what is my who is my audience, right? Like who am I really targeting? It can't be like all founders across the world for every company. It was, you know, who am I really speaking to? Who can I who who do I have the ability to help? Right? I don't have any experience in e-commerce, for example. So if you have an e-commer business, I could tell you about business branding and personal branding. I can help you build your thought leadership. But when it comes to really doing product led versus brand led sales for your business, I may not be the best person. But if you're a tech founder, if you are a SaaS founder, if you're in the software space, then I can help you because that is my experience. So yeah. So so one part of it is just understanding who am I really talking to, who am I speaking to, who can I help really help, and who do I want to be helping? The next thing is understanding, not just, you know, a lot of people will say, well, this is my audience, this is the demographics, these are their pain points, and so this is my solution. Right? That's the customer journey. But there's so much more that goes into it because what are they really buying when they buy from you? What are they really looking for when they come and see you at a conference and they want to have a conversation with you? There's a lot of nuances, and you really need to understand what it is that they're looking for. How can you really serve them in a meaningful way? And to understand that, it really comes down to understanding what is keeping them up at night, what are they searching for? What are they looking for? Where are they looking for these answers?

Dr. William Attaway:

And this goes back to the buyer psychology processes. You're really trying to get inside their head and trying to think how and trying to discover how they think so that you can intersect their problem with the solution that you can bring so that you can serve them.

Ruheene Jaura:

Exactly.

Dr. William Attaway:

But understanding the question, the right question is essential to being able to provide the right answer.

Ruheene Jaura:

Yes, exactly. And again, what you just touched on is a little bit of both things. So from your business brand, you want to be thinking about what their decision-making journey looks like? What is what do they base their decisions on?

Dr. William Attaway:

Right?

Ruheene Jaura:

Understanding that, really diving deep into their what people call psychographics, but I think it's so much deeper than just psychographics. It's really understanding who they are as a person, what drives them to, what motivates them to make decisions. That's what you want to understand at the business brand level, because you want to understand A, is this person the right fit for to be a customer for what you can offer? And B, what's going to help them, what's going to help them make the next step and buy from you. But in a business, you know, when you're speaking to somebody at an event, for example, I don't just start talking about, hey, Levi and Brandify. I'm talking about, I'm I'm waiting to see what their question is about where they're struggling in their business, where they're struggling in their own positioning and thought leadership. So I can help answer questions for them and I can be of service to them because that way I'm going to be top of mind next time they think about a question like this, or their their friend has this problem, or their business partner has this problem. They're like, hey, you know, Raheem really helped me. You should go talk to her. That's a little, a little differentiator between they're aligned. What your business does and what you do is probably aligned, but they need to be rated and the goal is different.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love that mindset and that perspective that you begin, you lead off by serving. You lead off by saying, How can I help? instead of, hey, here's my thing. Do you want to buy it? Which is where I think so many entrepreneurs mess up. Yes. They start with a big ask instead of starting by serving. And I love that you brought that out. I think that's something that I hope every listener who's hearing this is jotting down as a growth area because I think it's a growth area for every one of us. So you've launched Brandify, brand new. Tell us a little bit about it. Like what is it, what is it, how does it intersect this problem? How can people jump into this? And and what is this, what do you see this doing in the markets, particularly the small business market?

Ruheene Jaura:

Yeah. And so I like that you asked specifically about the small business market because something that me and and my co-founder, who's also my husband, we've both worked with, and in his case, for larger companies like Apple and Amazon. And one thing that we had in common, and the reason why we we feel so passionately about what we do and what we create together, is we've always looked at how these bigger brands do things. And our brains have always gone to well, how do we democratize this and how do we bring this to more people who don't have those resources and the big budget that these big companies do? Um, you know, because they make it look so easy. They make growth look so easy, they make branding look so easy. Like, how how can you replicate that and bring those tools and frameworks to small businesses? And so that's what we did with Hey Levi. We really did it's a business branding tool that helps you really dig deep into your customer avatars and validate your offers and build a brand level presence for your business. Um, and then of course do all the copywriting and content that comes with it. Something that we shifted our focus to this year, like I said, is personal branding. And we realized that it's a whole, it's a it's a very different shift, right? You can't just apply the same things to your personal brand because we saw a lot of people actually signing up for Hailey Vi and trying to create content that would position themselves as a thought leader. And we realized it wasn't gonna work that way because it's the frameworks you use are very different. The approach you use is very different. And so when we really started to pull apart like what has worked for me over this past year and a half, I'm still a growing personal brand. I'm definitely not where I want to be. I'm still very, like very much midway, I would say, to where I want to be. But a lot of what has worked is just spending the time on research. Now with AI, AI is, you know, this magical tool that will do everything for you. And I see a lot of people just jumping into ChatGPT and saying, This is what I do, this is who I do it for, write me my next 30 days of content. Right?

Dr. William Attaway:

Poof, there it is.

Ruheene Jaura:

And I see, and it and it, it, it bothers me because I feel like people are get being fed this narrative, this promise that, hey, just ask ChatGPT and you'll you can have 30 days of content, and now you can post three times a day, five times a day, ten times a day, and the algorithms will love you, you'll you'll further your reach and you're done. Except that's exactly what everybody else in your industry is doing too. That's right. So unless there's something different about what you're doing or what you're telling ChatGPT, which there may be because your story is different from somebody else's, but most people are not focusing on what that differentiation factor, right? They're they're just saying, This is my expertise, this is who I help write me compelling language. And so, yeah, it's like if you put that in your prompt, it's suddenly gonna be very compelling. But again, that's what everyone else is doing. And so how do you really stand out? You're not gonna be top of mind if you're just doing what everybody else is doing. Again, the algorithm might love you, that might be true. You might increase your reach. I just increased my reach today, and I don't even post every day, by the way. But but the the important part is are you attracting the right kind of people? Are the right kind of people seeing your message? And are they reaching out to you to have conversations? And I can say yes. Ever since I was I started becoming really, really mindful about making sure that my post, my content is about what I I know I can help people with, and not just putting something up there for the sake of putting it up there, um, just for the to have my, you know, have the algorithm be happy with me. I notice that I I may not on the front of it, I don't have like, I have a couple of, I don't know, like a couple of million followers on Facebook, but like not like a like 10 million like a lot of people have. So it's not huge and my reach is still growing. But I have the right people in my DMs asking me to have conversations with them. I'm having really good Zoom conversations, I'm converting people on a very regular basis. We're just one week into Brandify, and we already have um, I don't want to share its specific numbers here, but like we already have or a much larger group than I was expecting of early adopters on the on the platform. So I know that my content is doing its job. And so um to answer your question of like how, um, it's really about understanding that AI can do much more than just write your content for you. Right? I talk about research. AI has the capability of doing deeper research than you, that than you as a human could be doing. I don't know if deep research is a term that most people are familiar with, but um, for those that aren't, um, deep research simply means looking at all the available resources on the internet to to pull them all together and to see what the actual answer to something is. What we do is we'll go to Google or ChatGPT now and ask a question. It'll pull up some five to ten resources that we'll maybe skim over, pick one that we like, and go with it. But that's not deep research, right? That's not scouring tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of articles to really gather the information that you need so you have a fuller, bigger picture of what you need to understand about your audience. And so that's what Brandify does. It really helps you, it does a lot of deep research. It has multiple agents that will go out, do their deep research on your audience, help you understand who they are, what kind of content they're consuming, what are their search terms every single week, which events are they going to, which podcasts are they listening to, what third-party blog sites are they reading, and how you can feature yourself on in each of these places.

Dr. William Attaway:

That is so powerful. I love that distinction of deep research. You know, when I was working on my dissertation, I mean, reading hundreds of articles and books and you know, diving so deep to have a tool like what we have at our disposal with AI back in those days would have been astounding.

Ruheene Jaura:

Exactly.

Dr. William Attaway:

What you're doing is is leveraging that power for the benefit of a small business who probably doesn't have the the deep pockets that the larger ones do. You're gonna help them to build this brand in a powerful way. I can't wait to see where this goes. I think this is gonna be amazing. I mean I know we're very early in the journey, yes, but in a little bit we're gonna talk about how our listeners can jump into this, how they can engage. Before we do that, though, I want to talk about you for just a minute. You are having to lead your companies now at a higher level than you did just a few years ago. More is demanded of you, and three, four, five years from now, more will be demanded yet. How do you level up as a leader? How do you make sure that you are keeping your shaw as sharp as possible so that you can meet the demands of your team, your clients, and the businesses that you lead?

Ruheene Jaura:

Yeah, it's a great question, and probably one that I'd be able to answer much better when I'm not one week into a software launch, I will say it.

Dr. William Attaway:

Fair enough.

Ruheene Jaura:

Probably not my best self right now, but with that, I think in general it just comes down to making sure that you never stop talking to people. I think one of the reasons why my team has faith in me, and I've um I'm super grateful and humbled to have a team where both me and my husband have been told that they don't care where we go or what company we're starting, they just want to go with us because they know it's gonna be a good ride. That is extremely meaningful, and and we don't take that lightly at all. And so I think so good. Yeah, and it's interesting that you're asking this question because it made me think about well, we're doing something right, but what is that? What are we doing right so we can do more of it? Um, and I think it comes down to how do you handle difficult situations? How do you handle uh stressful situations? I mean, for those of you that are doing software, you know that there are bumps on the road and they never stop. You know, when you're launching a new product or service or software, uh, in our case, there are a lot of things that will go wrong right at the last minute. How do you handle that? Or when you have think it's gonna, you're gonna do something and then there's a curveball or you know, somebody may have, you know, may have promised you something and isn't able to deliver on that. Like, how do you continue on? Who do you blame? It's so easy for us to be like, well, it happened because you failed on this, right? And so I think really making sure that no matter how tired and stressed you are, you're always grounded in reality. That grounding in reality means that these things are bound to happen. Lame it is not the way to go. It's really understanding where we failed, what we can do next to make sure we don't feel like that again, and what impact has it really had to our business and what does that mean for us next? What do we need to do next? Right. I think and a lot of that just comes again from me talking to customers. That's a part of my job that I will never give up is just talking to people to really understand where are we meeting their expectations so that when something goes wrong, you know that you're still solving a very real problem for very real people and you know the impact it's having, and that's what you take back to your team. Those are the stories you tell your team.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's so good. I love the the evaluative aspect of that, how you are asking the right questions so that you grow and you get better. I think that's so, so important in the life of every leader. Love that you're doing that. And I think your team's response that wherever you guys go, we want to go, that speaks volumes to y'all as leaders. Way to go.

Ruheene Jaura:

It's huge. And we we carry that with us and we remind ourselves and each other. My husband and I remind each other of that when things go get hard.

Dr. William Attaway:

Is there a book that has made a really big difference in your journey that you would recommend to the leaders who are listening?

Ruheene Jaura:

Yeah, there are actually quite a few books, but the one book that comes to mind specifically for the way I handle business, and again, this is very specific, not really myself, but business, is a book called Working Backwards. It's actually modeled on Amazon and how Amazon came to be and how their culture came to be. Um and it's been one of those books. There aren't a lot of books on my bookshelf that I keep going back to. There are a lot of books on my bookshelf that I mean to keep going back to.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's good.

Ruheene Jaura:

Probably only one or two books that I actually find myself bookmarking and going back to and looking for those pages over and over again. Um, and working backwards would be that one book that I go back to very, very often.

Dr. William Attaway:

I've not read this and now I'm going to, but thank you for that.

Ruheene Jaura:

Yeah, yeah, check it out.

Dr. William Attaway:

So, last question. You know, people, people look at you and they think, oh my goodness, what a rocket ride of a journey. You know, hearing your story from Hollywood to the companies that you run now, I mean, my goodness, your journey's just been up and to the right. You m you you don't have any of the same challenges I deal with. You don't struggle like I do as a business owner. And of course, we know that's silly. You know, we can't look at somebody's highlight reel and think it tells the whole story. So in light of that, I want to ask you this. If I had the ability to snap my fingers and solve one problem in your business right now, what would you like that problem to be?

Ruheene Jaura:

I think it would be like we just launched a new software, and I think it would be if you could fast forward the next three years for us so that we don't have to go through all the painful growth phase. That would be what you what I would you felt that's a big ask. That's to say that I don't have bad days or bad times. I have bad years and they don't stop. As long as you're growing, you're doing difficult things, and it just depends. It all comes down to what you're focusing on. Um and again, it those are the days the way you remind yourself of who are you helping. And if you know that you're actually making a difference in somebody else's life, it helps you push through. And so good. I'm not gonna lie. I mean, yes, I talk about Apple and Amazon, all these big brands, but like I said, nobody cared when I was done with that and I wanted to start my own thing. Nobody cared about that. That didn't make customers come knocking at my door saying, Can I buy your thing? Because you worked at Apple and Amazon.

Dr. William Attaway:

Right.

Ruheene Jaura:

You know, like nobody cared. And so to for me to really accept that and accept that I was a nobody when I when I started getting into the the small business worlds and the startup worlds, I was a nobody. Nobody cared about me, nobody cared about what I had to say. Accepting that and then figuring out how to get past that, how to grow past that has not been easy. I'm still struggling through it. I'm still only halfway there, like I said. So I have lots of hard days, lots of hard weeks and months and years.

Dr. William Attaway:

So appreciate your transparency. You're spot on. People don't care about what you used to do. You know? Uh I've said for a long time, people's favorite radio station is W-I-I-F-M. What's in it for me? You know? And that's what we listen to, most of us.

Ruheene Jaura:

Yeah, I mean, if you've been in marketing, you've heard this, right? Like everything you talk about, it's like, so what?

Dr. William Attaway:

So what?

Ruheene Jaura:

So what? Because that's what your audience is thinking. So what?

Dr. William Attaway:

That's right. That's so true. Reena, I just want to thank you for your generosity today, of your time and of the transparency you've brought into this conversation about your journey, things you've learned so far on that journey. I know our listeners are going to want to stay connected to you and learn more about Brandify. What is the best way for them to do that?

Ruheene Jaura:

The best way would be to just check out the software. We have a free tier that it does for free. It will take your story, it will go run the agents for you, it will do the deep research on your audience, tell you what they're searching for this week, where they're hanging out, what kind of uh content they're consuming. And also how your story fills in some of the market gaps for those search terms and what they're looking for, how you can position yourself, how you can tell your story. It will do all of that for free. Just yeah, just uh get all the value that you can out of it. So um the website is brandif.ai. Um and I'm gonna say that one more time because we call it brandify because of the AI at the end. Unfortunately, we've had a lot of people go to brandify with a why, and that is not our domain. Brandif.ai.

Dr. William Attaway:

So good. We'll have that link in the show notes. And I know people are gonna want to step beyond the free tier and say, hey, okay, I want to really take this to a different level. And you have that option as well.

Ruheene Jaura:

Yeah, we have a couple of different plans, and it really comes down to what uh what kind of a power user you want to be. So all the research that it does for you, all the search terms that it'll help you find, yes, you can go plug that into something like ChatGPT and or Claude, and you can get a lot of runway out of it. But if you really want the system to help you create content using your expertise, using those search terms week after week or month after month, which are the two different plans, then yeah, and you wanna position yourself on podcasts and uh events and stages and get your articles featured and third-party publications that your audience is actively reading. That's the kind of stuff that it will take you to. It'll take you to that next level and it'll do it on an ongoing basis because we all know that thought leadership isn't born from one week's worth of content.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's so true. So well said. Rain, thank you so much for your time today.

Ruheene Jaura:

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. This was a fun conversation, and I hope your your audience got something out of it that they can apply immediately.

Dr. William Attaway:

I know they did. I know I did.

Ruheene Jaura:

Awesome.

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Dr. William Attaway

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