Episode 6: Building Your Personal Brand with Shruti Kapoor

Last year I decided to build a Twitter following. In spite of racking my brain, I couldn’t figure out what I should post about. I gave up after a few weeks of half-hearted attempts that consisted of mostly retweeting (although I did have one original tweet about Indian Matchmaking that I am quite proud of). As of today I have 19 followers on Twitter. You can be the 20th by following me @FindParul.

In contrast, Shruti Kapoor has around 12k followers on Twitter. In talking to her, I realized that she had faced the same obstacles that I had - having to figure out her niche, getting over the feeling of "but I am not an expert”, and the fear of rejection. However, in spite of these fears, Shruti got started and kept going. In this episode, she shares her experience of building an industry brand - writing her first article, giving her first talk and finding her support squad.

Shruti is a Senior Software Engineer at PayPal and works on the Checkout product. She spends a considerable amount of time on her JavaScript and GraphQL side projects, speaking at conferences and meetups internationally, writing blogs and articles for the developer community. She livestreams coding work sessions on Twitch where she invites folks to bring their side hustle and work together in Pomodoro focused sessions to keep each other motivated and accountable. You can often find her tweeting DevJokes on Twitter: shrutikapoor08.

You can also connect with Shruti on Twitch, LinkedIn or read her blog posts on GitHub.

You can find my talk about conflict that I refer to in the episode here.

If you have any comments about the episode or would like to share your own story, please share below. I would love to hear from you!