The Epiphany Brief

Issue #2 | 26 March 2026

Hey {{person.firstName}},

Strangers in my personal space

Last week I was heading to a consultation in the Hyde Park Corner area. Leaving the tube station, someone stepped right up to me with a vlogging camera. Lens about two feet from my face. They followed me for a few steps, panned across to the next person, then kept going. I stood there and watched them do it to four or five more people before they rounded the corner.

Nobody flinched. Nobody said a word. We've all become so used to being background extras in other people's footage that a stranger filming your face on the tube is just part of the commute now.

That moment kept coming back to me over the past week. Because that image, the person with the camera turning strangers into material, is exactly what most of the founders and professionals I talk to picture when someone says "you need to be more visible online."

The whole thing gives serious ick. Particularly in the UK, where I've lived for over twenty years now. There's something culturally embedded here that recoils at self-promotion. It feels cringey. It feels like becoming one of those people. And when you've spent years building a reputation on competence and letting the work speak for itself, the idea of "putting yourself out there" can feel, in a way, like throwing all of that away.

Last week I wrote about the deal I lost because my online presence was empty when a prospect went looking. That's the cost of staying invisible. But this week I want to talk about something I think is more useful: what actually made it possible for me to start showing up regularly without feeling like I was performing.

I stopped trying to be interesting

For a long time, I thought the hard part was coming up with things to say. I'd sit down, open LinkedIn, stare at the blank post box, and feel that familiar heaviness. What do I write about? Who's going to care? Is this going to make me look like I'm trying too hard?

And then, slowly, something shifted. I realised I'd been sitting down trying to create from thin air, when the material was already all around me.

Back in 2018, my friend Richard Mulhern sent me a book. Gary Vaynerchuk, Jab Jab Jab Right Hook. Richard has always been one of those people who shows up at exactly the right moment with exactly the right thing. The core idea in that book was simple: share useful, interesting things. Be generous with what you know. Build a reputation around that generosity rather than around selling.

I started posting on LinkedIn when organic reach was still wild. I'd combine it with in-person networking, and something unexpected started happening. I'd walk into an event in London or Brighton and people would already know my face. "I saw you on LinkedIn." We'd never met. But they felt like they knew me.

The thing that made it work, the thing that took the ick out of it, was that I stopped trying to be interesting and started pointing at interesting things. Research that stopped me. Conversations that changed how I thought about a problem. Patterns I kept noticing in the businesses I was working with. The material was already there. I just had to know where to look for it.

Rory Sutherland put this better than I ever could in a recent talk. He said: "If you're a marketer, don't sell what you do. Sell how you think." His argument is that the real value of a marketing person in a room full of engineers and finance people is the way they look at problems. Without that perspective, smart people make seriously bad decisions because they're optimising for spreadsheet metrics and completely ignoring how human beings actually behave.

And I think that applies directly to being visible online. The ick comes from assuming you're selling your face. You're not. You're sharing how you think. Your perspective on problems your clients are wrestling with. The way you see patterns that other people in their world don't see. That's useful. That's worth reading. And it feels completely different from performing.

Over the years, I've built what I think of as a source map. A set of specific places I go to every week to find the raw material for exactly this kind of thinking. And this week, I'll share it with you.

Where I actually find things worth sharing

Each of these feeds a different kind of shareable thinking. I've put together a detailed guide with specific sources, links, and notes on how to use each one. You can download the full Source Map here. Below is the short version: what each one gives you and why it matters.

Publications and periodicals

Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, MIT Sloan Management Review, The Economist. These give you the research, the data, the management thinking that your clients respect. When you find something that makes you stop, add your perspective on what it means for the people you work with. A finding from HBR plus your interpretation of what it means for a professional services firm is one of the most useful things you can share. The full guide has my recommended list with notes on what each one is best for.

Newsletters that do the reading for you

These land in your inbox and surface the interesting things before they're everywhere. Morning Brew for daily business news written for humans. Total Annarchy from Ann Handley for writing and marketing. CB Insights for market intelligence and data. Lenny's Newsletter for product and growth strategy. Subscribe to three or four and spend ten minutes scanning them each morning. Half your weekly material will come from these.

Reddit: where your clients talk to each other

This one surprises people. Subreddits like r/consulting, r/Entrepreneur, r/sales, and r/b2bmarketing are where founders and professionals talk about what they're actually dealing with, in their own words. Spending twenty minutes a week reading these threads shows you exactly what your market is thinking about. And the language people use when they're asking for help is often the best language for your own posts.

Trend discovery tools

Exploding Topics spots rising search trends before they peak. SparkToro shows you where your specific audience spends time online, what they read, who they follow. Google Trends is free and powerful for confirming whether a topic has real momentum behind it. Feedly pulls all your publication and newsletter feeds into one place so you can scan everything in five minutes. These tools turn "I wonder what's trending" into here's something I want to share with others.

LinkedIn follows: people doing this well right now

Sometimes the best way to find material is to watch how other people share theirs. Chris Walker on demand creation and dark social. April Dunford on positioning (her book Obviously Awesome is worth your time). Todd Caponi on transparency in selling. Adam Robinson on building in public. Dave Gerhardt on raw, direct B2B marketing. Follow five or six people whose approach you respect and notice what they do: how they open, how they frame ideas, what makes you stop scrolling. That's a masterclass you can study every morning for free.

The full Source Map guide has every source listed with links and notes on how to use each one. You can grab it here.

Why this matters right now

Sprout Social surveyed over 2,000 people across the UK, US, and Australia earlier this year. The thing people want most from the professionals and brands they follow is human-created material. Real thinking from real people. At the same time, 56% said they're seeing AI-generated material regularly on social media. And boomers in particular said they'd be very unlikely to engage with it at all.

I think that's worth sitting with for a moment.

The gap between people who share genuine, grounded perspective and people who don't is getting wider. And the material that fills that gap doesn't need to be invented. It's sitting in the conversations you're already having, the research you're already reading, the patterns you're already noticing. The source map is a way to collect it. Everything after that becomes a lot easier.

News and Intelligence

Trust is pulling inward. And that's good news if you have a small following.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found what they're calling an "insular trust mindset." Seven in ten people are hesitant to trust those who differ from them in values or background. Trust is contracting toward smaller circles. A professional with twelve thousand followers who genuinely shares their readers' values will be trusted more than someone with two million who doesn't. If you've got a modest following and a clear point of view, the environment is moving in your favour.

UK readers will punish you for being performative. Fast.

Sprout Social's 2026 UK research found that when brands jump on a trending topic without a genuine track record of caring about it, UK readers "instantly clock it as performative." The backlash, they found, is often worse than having said nothing. I think the same applies to professionals. The people who follow your work want considered positions on the things that actually matter to what you do. They don't need you to have an opinion about everything.

Rory Sutherland on why most businesses get visibility completely backwards.

In a talk worth twenty minutes of your time, Sutherland lays out something I think every founder needs to hear. Most businesses operate as if the only valuable thing they can do is deliver a service at the lowest possible cost. Marketing, trust-building, being visible: all treated as expenses to minimise. He calls this the "Doorman Fallacy." A hotel replaces its doorman with an automatic door, claims the cost saving, and nobody is held responsible when the regulars stop coming and the rack rate drops. His point: the human element of any business interaction is almost always the thing that determines whether someone trusts you, comes back, and tells other people. It's also the first thing that gets cut because it's the hardest thing to measure.

One thing to try this week

Pick two sources from the Source Map. Just two. Subscribe to one newsletter and bookmark one subreddit or publication. Then, every day this week, write down one thing that stops you. A stat, a conversation, an idea, a question someone asked you. Keep it in a note on your phone called "things worth sharing."

By Friday, you'll have five to seven items. Look at the list. I'd bet at least three of them are worth turning into a LinkedIn post, an email to a client, or the opening of a conversation.

The shift is simple. You stop trying to create from nothing and start collecting from everywhere. Once you have sources, the "what do I post about" question answers itself.

That's Issue #2. Thanks for being here.

Last week was about the cost of going quiet. This week was about making it easier to show up. Next week, I want to talk about what to do once you've found the material: how to turn a rough idea into something people actually want to read. We'll get into structure, format, and a few things I've learned from getting it wrong more times than I can count.

If you try the "things worth sharing" experiment this week, I'd like to hear what comes up. Reply to this email and let me know.

Kevan Smith

Founder, Epiphany Content

I help B2B founders turn their expertise into material that shortens sales cycles. If you're watching deals stall or getting ghosted in your pipeline, I built a few free tools that might help:

→ Trust Velocity Diagnostic (5 min)

→ Friction Audit Canvas

→ Content ROI Calculator

→ What's Your Leadership Style? Take the Quiz

P.S. I'm testing something new. A VELO online audit that maps where your visibility, evidence, and trust signals stand right now. It normally costs £297, but I'm looking for five people to run the test with for free so I can make sure it delivers before we launch properly. If you're interested, reply to this email and I'll set up a short call to see if it's the right fit.

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