One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand: Founder and Venture Identity Work on Social Media Platforms

Despite visibility being crucial for social media-based entrepreneurs, they have remained nearly invisible to entrepreneurship research. Particularly, insights are scarce on what digital platforms entail for the identity work of individuals and ventures operating on them, offering no guidance for one of the crucial processes at the very root of entrepreneurship. Drawing on an online ethography of an Italian content creator operating on an algorithmically shaped social media platform, this study examines how founder and venture identities are continuously and simultaneously worked on thanks to and constrained by the affordances of the platform. To work on their multiple identities, while moving within an algorithmic space, social media-based entrepreneurs unblur their work for and with the platform, and interact with their community. Findings underscore how, at an individual level, the entrepreneur must balance being a professional and a user of the platform. At the venture level, the platform-dependent entrepreneur must create and share original content while undertaking value-generating marketing activities. With no choice but to remain entangled with their venture, the two identity processes are inextricably intertwined, and the identities are refracted, rather than reflected, to and from the community by the algorithms shaping the platform.