PERSONAL BRANDING
PERSONAL BRANDING
BACKGROUND

Alex Ponomarev is a software engineering leader with 25+ years of experience across engineering, design, and marketing. He founded Volt and scaled it to multiple 7-figure projects.
CHALLENGE

Alex wanted to build a personal brand—Thriving in Engineering—to position himself as a thought leader and grow an engaged audience through a newsletter. The main obstacles: high competition, limited resources, and starting from scratch.
BACKGROUND

Alex Ponomarev is a software engineering leader with 25+ years of experience across engineering, design, and marketing. He founded Volt and scaled it to multiple 7-figure projects.
CHALLENGE

Alex wanted to build a personal brand—Thriving in Engineering—to position himself as a thought leader and grow an engaged audience through a newsletter. The main obstacles: high competition, limited resources, and starting from scratch.
Our approach focused on four pillars:
  • Differentiating Alex from competitors
  • Tackling real industry pain points with practical advice
  • Positioning Alex as a trusted industry leader
  • Building clear, consistent messaging
  • We began with in-depth interviews to define Alex’s vision: sharing real experiences to help others overcome the same obstacles he had faced. Based on this, we created a distinct brand identity, tested and refined across Substack, Medium, and Instagram.
  • Our approach focused on four pillars:
    • Differentiating Alex from competitors
    • Tackling real industry pain points with practical advice
    • Positioning Alex as a trusted industry leader
    • Building clear, consistent messaging
    We began with in-depth interviews to define Alex’s vision: sharing real experiences to help others overcome the same obstacles he had faced. Based on this, we created a distinct brand identity, tested and refined across Substack, Medium, and Instagram.
EXECUTION HIGHLIGHTS
  • Consistent Publishing
    3x weekly content on Substack and Medium, funneled into newsletter growth
  • Content Repurposing
    Transformed content into eBooks, PDF guides, and workshops to maximize reach and value
  • Competitor-Driven Insights
    Analyzed competitors to emphasize practical, experience-based content over generic or overly technical posts
  • Performance Optimization
    Tracked results continuously and scaled high-performing topics for maximum impact
RESULTS
  • Substack
    • 42% open rate
    • 1,600+ subscribers
    • 55,000+ total views
    • Grew to 20,000+ monthly views
  • Instagram
    • 1.55M accounts reached
    • 1.81M impressions
    • 500+ new followers per month
  • Medium
    • 169,900 views
    • 94,500 reads (55% avg. read rate)
    • 20,000+ monthly views
    • 26 posts boosted by Medium staff

    (100% organic)



KEY TAKEAWAYS
  • Execution beats perfection
    Thriving In Engineering outperformed expectations, and a large part of this was its willingness to actually execute. Too often, brands build for perfection instead of execution. Thriving In Engineering did the opposite, creating a solid strategy and then implementing it, learning from it, and refining it to get the results it was.
  • Content is leverage
    One newsletter guide could be repurposed into multiple social media posts, smaller blog posts, multiple PDF guides, a workshop, and become part of an eBook. It can also be reworked into a future newsletter guide. Thriving In Engineering quickly learned just how far one piece of content could go, and it made that a core part of its overall strategy.
  • Connection drives retention
    Alex had a tremendous amount of value to share with his audience. What mattered most was ensuring his advice connected strongly with said audience. That meant testing different ways of phrasing things, different styles, and different forms of delivering the information. This testing paid off, as readership and retention were high.
Made on
Tilda