Vivi spent five years at Squiggly Careers, where she helped grow the podcast from 100,000 downloads to 5.6 million on almost no paid advertising. She’s now an independent consultant, and writes about personal brand consistency on her Substack, Stories and Signals.
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Your track record is a shop
Vivi’s talk was built around one idea: your track record is a shop. You built it, you stocked it, everything on the shelves is yours. The name above the door belongs to whoever you work for at the time, though, and when you leave, their sign comes down.
That’s why posting can feel strange. Most people aren’t trying to get LinkedIn famous. They’re trying to get their own name above their own door, and along the way they tend to treat the shop window like a CV: everything they’ve done, in reverse order, hedged. A CV is a receipt, proof you were paid for something in the past. A window is what you want to do next.
Her exercise: open your profile, look at your last nine posts, and ask whether a stranger could tell what you sell. If the answer’s no, that’s not really a confidence problem, in Vivi’s view. It’s a merchandising one, and by her account, a Friday-afternoon fix.
The post that nearly didn’t happen
Vivi started an Instagram account in April 2020, on maternity leave, writing about non-fiction books to no one in particular. For the first ten posts, the only like came from her husband. By post 17 she wanted to stop, and wrote it anyway mostly because she’d already read the book.
That post was about The Squiggly Career by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis. Months later, Helen got in touch with a brief, no job ad, no interview process, and Vivi worked on the podcast for the next five years. Post 17 wasn’t her best post; it got roughly the same quiet response as the sixteen before it. What made the difference was that it existed, and that anyone reading it could tell what she was about.
Reach and reputation are two different jobs
Vivi’s most viral post was about her car being stolen outside a wedding, laptop inside, the night before a proposal was due. It reached over 200,000 people and brought in hundreds of comments and thousands of followers. It brought in no work at all.
Her read: likes tell you how many people wanted to be seen agreeing with you in public, not how many people found what you said useful. The signals worth tracking are the quiet ones, saves, profile views, DMs, comments. Her suggestion for anyone tracking what’s working is to write down how new contacts found you for three months and look at the pattern.
Once a week, for years
A friend once told Vivi she was one of the most consistent people she knew, even though her posting gaps sometimes ran to a month. What made it consistent wasn’t frequency. It was shape: the same voice, the same handful of obsessions, recognisable wherever she turned up. By her own numbers, once a week for two years beat every day for six weeks, by some distance.
It’s also how she’s approached her own redundancy, since July. Rather than force daily job-hunt content, she’s leaned back into her own interests (reading, mainly) and mentioned the job search every couple of posts, not every one.
How she works with AI
Asked whether she works from a formal brand document, Vivi said no, though she’s used ChatGPT as a mirror to describe her own brand world back to her, correcting it along the way (“it’s not Waitrose, it’s M&S”). For drafts, she talks her first thoughts out loud using Whisper Flow, then hands the transcript to AI using a method she calls CRIT: context (the draft), role (who’s reading and why), an interview (questions back before it writes anything), then the task. She edits whatever comes back at least three times.
The twenty seconds
Vivi doesn’t think anyone left the session with new information. Most people already know the shop is a shop, that likes aren’t the point, that consistency matters. What’s missing, on her account, is about twenty seconds of doing it anyway, once a week, pressing publish on something you’re not completely sure about.
Post 17 is what closed that gap for her. She had no idea at the time.