An agency published its founder-visibility formula. The formula does not hold.

INPUT Global, a communications agency working with emerging tech brands, expanded its Voice personal-branding framework in late July and did something the genre almost never does: it published the arithmetic behind the score at the end of it ^[1][2]. The Voice Index rates a founder from 0 to 100 by multiplying a logarithmic median-reach figure by a quality multiplier of roughly 0.85 to 1.10 ^[3], and because the formula is on the page, it can be checked.

Start with the defensible parts. Reach uses median views rather than averages, anchored on whichever platform the founder is loudest on, with each additional platform contributing a fifth of its own weight ^[4]. The agency justifies the median with research showing 35 median views against a 2,335 mean on X, and the top 1% of posts absorbing three quarters of all impressions ^[5], a mean roughly 67 times the median ^[6]. Followers are excluded outright as purchasable and uninformative ^[7]. The curve is steep: 12,500 median views on X scores 40, and 100 arrives only at 350,000 ^[8], which works out to about 41 points per tenfold gain in reach ^[9].

Quality is assembled from five weighted signals: Presence at 15%, Distribution at 25%, Resonance at 20%, Authority at 25% and Signature Show at 15% ^[10]. The band is narrow deliberately, and the published worked example moves a mid-scale founder only three points when two signals climb from average to strong ^[11]. At a reach score of 40, the entire quality range spans ten points ^[12], roughly a quarter of what a single tenfold increase in reach buys ^[13]. This is a reach metric with a garnish, which is worth knowing before anyone buys work aimed at the garnish.

Then the seams, as set out in The Next Web's review. The January version of the Index used five differently weighted components on a 0 to 1 scale, leaving figures from the two systems impossible to compare ^[14]. A founder holding a baseline from the first half of the year holds a number with no successor. Second, INPUT Global designs the Index, computes the score, sells the service meant to raise it, and reports the improvement, with no outside party verifying any step ^[15]. Third, Distribution carries a quarter of the quality weighting and paid placements count toward it ^[16], which sits awkwardly against the claim that a strong score cannot be bought ^[16].

Those three findings generalise into an audit any operator can run on any vendor visibility metric. Does this quarter's number convert to last quarter's. Who verifies the inputs. Which components can be purchased outright.

The wider field has the same marking problem. Golin's CEO Impact Index, launched in 2024 and updated twice a year, scores Fortune 250 chief executives on eight visibility criteria, and Golin reports that its top fifty averaged 80% higher annual share-price growth than comparable Fortune 250 peers ^[17]. A 2025 Administrative Sciences paper argues that personal branding still lacks a standardised way to measure brand equity ^[18]. Co-founder Oleg Bevz said in March that most founders navigate on likes, conference compliments and instinct ^[19], which is a fair diagnosis attached to an unfinished instrument.

Three things would change the assessment: a published mapping between January and July scores, a Distribution signal that separates earned from paid, and a score computed by someone who is not selling the remedy.