[coldtea]

>Building a "personal brand" helps create a following around you so that when you build something new, you have people that are interested in it. Maybe "audience" is the better word.

That's mostly for snake-oil salesmen, influencers, etc. People can just "have people interested in what they build" by building stuff. Dan Abramov e.g. didn't build any personal brand before creating Redux. Linus wasn't depending upon some pre-developed personal brand when he created Linux.