Key Takeaways
- Adley Kinsman says the fastest way to more reach is to stop making content for the people already ready to buy from you.
- Her rule: entertain the masses, educate the interested, sell to the committed. Top of funnel earns you the right to teach.
- A views problem is almost always a retention problem. If nobody gets past three seconds, nothing else in the video matters.
- Aim to be culturally relevant, not only contextually relevant. Build a world around the product, not a brochure for it.
- Attention is the first domino, not the last. It only becomes money if something catches the lead after the view.
Most local business owners post the most useful thing they know and watch it get forty views. Then they post it again next week. HighLevel ran a masterclass called "1B Views Later: How to Win on Social Media" with Adley Kinsman, hosted by Paulson Thomas, and her answer is uncomfortable. Your content is not failing because it is bad. It is failing because it is aimed at people who already want what you sell, and almost nobody is in that group on any given day.
Kinsman founded Storyhouse and Viralish in Nashville. She has averaged over a billion organic views a month since 2020, roughly 75 billion to date, and has built content for Land Rover, TikTok and Raising Cane's. We run marketing automation in San Jose and Los Gatos for businesses with the opposite problem, so this one was worth sitting through twice.
Make What People Want to Watch, Not What You Want to Make
This is the line she asked the room to write down. There is a wide gap between what people say they watch and what they stop for. Her heartfelt content got ten thousand views. Her silly content got hundreds of millions. Nobody opens Instagram to learn your trade, so the order is entertain the masses, educate the interested, sell to the committed. Entertain first and you earn the right to teach anything.
She showed an ad for a company that pays drivers to put a magnet on their car. It does not open with "here is how to make money in your free time." It opens with a man ordering 97 free Chick-fil-A sandwiches and stacking them on his hood. He hands them out. People are confused. Only at the end does he explain the magnet paid him $600 that week. The offer never changed. The packaging did.
She calls the wider goal cultural relevance. Being the plumber they think of in San Jose is contextual, and it is a small room. Hot Ones sells buffalo sauce and built an interview show around it instead of ads, then sold for $82.5 million. In growth mode she wants half your content aimed at discovery, not at your buyer.
You Do Not Have a Views Problem, You Have a Retention Problem
Solve retention and views take care of themselves. Her target is 90 percent retention on the first six seconds, which she admits is very hard. Eighty percent is still strong. She sets the bar high on purpose so that falling short still lands somewhere good.
The golden rule underneath it: the first three seconds must create an itch you do not scratch until the last three. If Liam Neeson rescued his daughter halfway through Taken, everyone stops watching. Give the payoff in the middle and the thumb keeps moving.
She also flagged a shift worth knowing. Shares by DM are now the strongest signal, and platforms track whether the recipient engaged too. Long watch time with no shares burns out.
What One Change Did for a Coach Doing $6 Million
Brian coaches fitness trainers. He was at $6 million a year, 95 percent of sales through Instagram, and plateaued. His content was one note, the guy who yells at you about the gym, talking only to people already sold on being coached.
Kinsman gave him one hour a week. The change was more top of funnel content and showing other sides of himself. He doubled his following in six months and had four back to back million dollar months, finishing near $10 million. Those are his numbers and her account of them, not ours, and he could already sell.
Why This Matters for Marketing Automation in San Jose and the Bay Area
Attention is the first domino, not the prize. Kinsman is blunt that views alone do not put cash in the bank for most business owners. More views means more leads, and more leads means more revenue, but the chain only holds if something catches the lead when it lands.
That is where most Bay Area businesses lose the money. A roofer in San Jose finally makes a video that travels, and the calls come in after hours, or the form sits in an inbox nobody opens until Thursday. The reach was real and it leaked out the bottom. Kinsman hit the same wall from the other side: attention and no system, until she found HighLevel.
So treat these as two jobs. Reach is a content problem. Catching the lead is a marketing automation problem, and in San Jose the second one is usually cheaper to fix first.
Practical Steps
- Count your last twenty posts. If fewer than half were made for people who have never heard of you, the room is already full.
- Rewrite one hook so the payoff lands in the final three seconds instead of the first ten.
- Pick one repeatable format you could run fifty times, like Hot Ones, rather than fifty unrelated ideas.
- Show the thing instead of explaining it. Visual demonstration beat talking head in every example she showed.
- Make the catching automatic before you chase reach. Instant reply, a booking link, and follow up that runs whether or not you are at your desk.
Watch the Full Masterclass
Final Thoughts
The reframe is the part worth keeping. You are not competing with the other plumber's posts. You are competing with a cat video, and it is winning because it was built to be watched. Being interesting is a skill, and it sits upstream of every lead you get.
On Point Tech Solutions is a Go High Level consultant in Los Gatos serving San Jose and the Bay Area. We build the websites, funnels and marketing automation San Jose businesses use to catch the attention once they earn it, and you own everything we build. Done for you, or taught to your team with an SOP. See what we do at optechsol.llc.