Meet The Consultant That Makes Anyone Go Viral

Addy Kinsman said her content operation is generating about 1.3 billion organic views per month, and she described that figure as conservative. The School of Hard Knocks hosts, James, Jack and Josh, also described her as making millions of dollars and having built a major creator-media business.

Kinsman argues that virality can be deliberately engineered rather than treated as luck. Her teams plan videos around hooks, retention, suspense, audience reactions and even the comments they want viewers to leave.

Her career began in music rather than social media. She started playing guitar around age 10, loved writing lyrics and entertaining people, but did not initially consider herself much of a singer or musician.

While attending Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, she mostly performed through Wednesday-night karaoke before her sorority sisters dared her to audition for The Voice. She drove through the night on energy drinks to take the audition because she loved music, wanted to visit Nashville and was inclined to accept the dare.

Appearing on The Voice unexpectedly changed the direction of her life. Before that opportunity, she had envisioned working for the nonprofit To Write Love on Her Arms, which works with people dealing with depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide.

Her interest in that nonprofit was deeply personal because her father was struggling with those problems. She said she was trying to replace anger toward what he was experiencing with empathy and hoped to encourage other people facing similar struggles.

Kinsman attributes part of her confidence to receiving encouragement when she was young and discovering things she genuinely enjoyed doing. She believes early validation can give people enough belief in their abilities to withstand later setbacks.

She also deliberately controls the people and information influencing her because she considers mindset highly malleable. She said she is more susceptible to outside influence than she would like, so she tries to surround herself with constructive conversations and inputs.

Her central response to repeated failure has been unusually strong self-belief. She described entrepreneurship as sometimes requiring a degree of “delusion”: continuing to believe the future will work despite long periods when circumstances provide little evidence for that belief.

After The Voice, Kinsman entered what was presented as a record deal but which she now characterizes primarily as an investment arrangement. The investor had a record label and was a college friend of her mother, which made the relationship initially feel familiar and trustworthy.

She signed the agreement before she understood the music business or believed she had meaningful negotiating leverage. Moving to Nashville appeared to be an opportunity, and she did not then appreciate how restrictive the agreement could become.

Kinsman said the contract gave away the commercial rights to her name for life and left her owning essentially nothing. She characterized the agreement as extraordinarily one-sided and said she believes it would not have survived a court challenge.

As her career gained momentum, the contract became a practical barrier rather than merely a bad financial arrangement. She said she could not attend important meetings without the investor and eventually realized that her future depended heavily on maintaining a relationship with him and his family.

The experience contributed to Kinsman going bankrupt, but she does not say she wishes it had never happened. She believes it forced her to become resourceful quickly and taught her how business actually works.

Her main lesson for creators is to delay giving away ownership or control when they already have a viable path forward. She recommends holding off on management, agencies and major partnerships for as long as practical and avoiding all-or-nothing arrangements.

When partnerships are necessary, she believes contracts should contain reasonable ways to leave. Her experience made her skeptical of arrangements in which another person controls a creator’s access, decision-making or future.

The School of Hard Knocks hosts said they have themselves declined or resisted approaches from major agencies because of the ownership and decision rights involved. They see early outside validation as potentially intoxicating when a creator still has substantial room to grow independently.

Kinsman warned specifically against making major business agreements emotionally when success and outside attention first arrive. Early recognition can make an offer feel more valuable than its actual terms.

Both Kinsman and the hosts regard painful failures as unusually valuable business education. Their view was that some mistakes cannot be adequately learned from theory because the consequences themselves teach judgment.

Kinsman does not consider college necessary for many modern entrepreneurial paths. She valued Oklahoma State partly as a protected transition from living with parents to adult independence, but questioned the cost of using college primarily as social training.

The hosts argued that the city surrounding a university can sometimes be more valuable than the institution itself. They cited places such as Austin and Nashville because proximity to ambitious people, industries and opportunities can create education outside the classroom.

Kinsman also questioned taking on large student debt before someone knows what career they actually want. She noted that many people will not be doing at 25 what they imagined doing at 18 or 19 and said she knows people whose student debt became extremely difficult to escape.

The group concluded that entrepreneurial ability is partly innate or developed early, but can also be strengthened later. Consistent action, learning from mistakes, adapting and becoming better at spotting opportunities were treated as trainable skills.

Kinsman described herself as having gone through roughly eight very different versions of herself before reaching her current position. Looking backward, she sees a consistent thread: trying to create her own opportunities rather than waiting for permission.

She views opportunity recognition as a muscle that improves through deliberate practice. Her recommendation is to repeatedly ask what opportunity exists in the situation immediately in front of you and become a student of identifying it.

Her decisive move from music toward digital media came after a bizarre Facebook video involving chickens went massively viral. The video emerged during a period when she was bankrupt and working with a Nashville meme network.

Jonathan Burden, who ran Be Viral and became a close friend, encouraged Kinsman to stop waiting for traditional music-industry gatekeepers to decide whether she was allowed to succeed. That appealed directly to her frustration with labels and publishers controlling access to opportunity.

Kinsman initially tried to learn internet video by studying and copying successful Vine-style content, but those attempts performed badly. She concluded that viewers could sense that the material was derivative and did not reflect her actual personality.

The breakthrough happened after an entire day's footage became corrupted shortly before a 6 a.m. deadline. At about 1 a.m., exhausted and upset, she took her boyfriend’s suggestion to make something with the chickens in their backyard because the animals made her happy.

She improvised a comedy sketch involving chickens with names such as Ellen DeHeneres, Oprah Henfrey, Chick Norris and Bruce Henner. The production was simple and born from desperation rather than a sophisticated viral strategy.

The resulting Facebook video generated about 19 million views overnight and more than 100,000 new followers. Kinsman considers that moment one of the most important lessons of her career because success arrived when circumstances finally forced her to stop imitating other creators and act like herself.

That experience remains her reference point whenever she starts comparing herself with competitors or thinking she should copy another successful format. She believes her strongest results come when she protects her own distinctive lane rather than becoming a weaker version of someone else's work.

Kinsman believes many current creators prioritize appearances and quick wins over developing a real craft. She contrasted apparently effortless viral content with the roughly 10 years she has spent refining the ability to entertain and hold attention.

Facebook remains central to her business even though many creators treat it as obsolete. She called Facebook her operation’s “bread and butter” and argued that creators routinely underestimate its reach and monetization potential.

During the interview, she said a four-minute Facebook video posted four days earlier had already accumulated roughly 8 million views.

Kinsman said she had been told she was the most-viewed female producer in Facebook/Meta and Snapchat history. She clarified that much of this reach does not depend on her personally appearing on camera; her company commissions, directs and circulates content through a network built over about seven years.

She said one Facebook video alone generated more than $250,000 according to a screenshot from Facebook Business Manager, despite taking less than an hour to produce. She believes its true lifetime revenue is higher because the same content was reposted more than 40 times, distributed elsewhere including Snapchat, and continued earning.

At its peak, her operation was producing roughly 18 Facebook videos per day with about 15 actors employed full time. This illustrates the industrial scale her company eventually applied to formats that had initially begun as individual experiments.

Kinsman does not interpret a single viral hit as a sustainable career by itself. Its real value, in her view, is showing the creator what is possible; lasting results still require repeated execution and improvement afterward.

Her advice to new creators is to assume they have at least 100 bad videos that must be made before their skills become reliable. A breakthrough could happen on video 17, 76, 100 or 712, so the more important requirement is staying in the game long enough to discover what works.

For creators who do not know their niche, Kinsman recommends what she calls the “5-6-30 method.” Pick five subjects you could genuinely enjoy covering, make six videos in each category, and publish the resulting 30 videos over 30 days without becoming emotionally attached to individual results.

During that first 30-day test, she advises creators not to delete weak posts or obsess over their analytics. At the end of the month, they can compare both performance and how sustainable each category felt, then concentrate the next month on the strongest combinations.

The method is intended to replace prolonged niche-selection anxiety with actual market evidence. A creator may discover that the topic they expected to love is exhausting, while a less obvious category both performs better and is more enjoyable to produce.

The School of Hard Knocks hosts said their interview format emerged through exactly this kind of experimentation. They tried roughly 30 types of business content before an interview generated about 100,000 views and showed that viewers preferred hearing from experienced businesspeople rather than from the young hosts themselves.

The hosts said their Instagram account once published approximately 400 times while remaining below 50 followers. It later grew to about 7.3 million followers, which they offered as evidence that poor early performance need not predict the eventual ceiling.

One host had previously grown a personal TikTok account from zero to roughly 800,000 followers in about 10 months during 2019–2020. That experience convinced him that short-form content could achieve enormous distribution if the creator continued experimenting.

Their shared principle is that quantity initially produces the repetitions needed for quality. Early creators need enough volume to gather data, identify winning patterns and discard approaches that consistently fail.

Kinsman recommends making personal brands multidimensional rather than reducing a person to a single professional identity. People can remain anchored in an area of expertise while also showing humor, relationships, beliefs, finances, mistakes and other aspects that broaden their relevance.

She used fitness-business coach Brian Mark as a case study. She said he was producing about $6 million annually, with roughly 95% of sales coming from Instagram, but his content had become narrowly associated with aggressively yelling business advice at the camera.

Kinsman’s team focused mainly on changing Brian Mark’s top-of-funnel content rather than rebuilding his underlying business. By showing his humor, marriage, sales systems, finances and other parts of his personality, she said they doubled his following and increased annual revenue from roughly $6 million to $10 million in under six months.

Kinsman says the COVID period dramatically expanded the reach of her media operation. She said weekly views climbed from roughly 20 million before the surge to more than 200 million per week, after which the organization built systems that eventually sustained more than 1 billion monthly views.

A mentor advised her not to niche down too early but instead to become broadly known first and specialize later. Kinsman now repeatedly encourages experts to identify the larger human issue behind their narrow professional expertise.

One of her early content mentors was Rick Lax, a magician who operated a large Facebook network. She credits his background in magic with teaching her practical lessons about directing attention, withholding information, creating engagement and keeping an audience focused while something else is happening.

Kinsman believes tiny details can separate a one-million-view video from a ten-million-view video. Animals, background activity, a visual object, movement or another seemingly minor element may materially affect curiosity, comments or retention.

Her team deliberately “designs the comment section in reverse.” Before producing a video, they try to predict what viewers will notice, debate or comment on and plant elements that increase the probability of those reactions.

She said her operation has produced more than 75 individual videos exceeding 100 million views. Studying this unusually large sample of extreme performers allowed the team to identify recurring features and turn intuitive production knowledge into a teachable system.

For Kinsman, the hook is the first indispensable component of viral storytelling because everything else is irrelevant if viewers never stop scrolling. The opening should create curiosity, emotion or an unresolved question strong enough to make the viewer continue.

She uses “anchors” to connect the beginning of a video to a later payoff. An object, claim or glimpse of something in the opening seconds can promise a future reveal, creating an unresolved loop that encourages viewers to stay.

Kinsman sees these tactics as old storytelling principles rather than inventions of social media. She compared them with television and film: if central conflicts were resolved halfway through Friends or Taken, the audience would have little reason to continue watching.

She studies other creators for roughly an hour a day because platform behavior and winning formats change quickly. She said tactics that worked four or six months ago may already be weaker today, making continuous observation necessary.

Her approach is to understand existing rules before trying to break them. She encourages creators to study proven formats, understand why they work and then alter them with their own perspective rather than merely copying the visible surface.

One early technique Kinsman used was taking ordinary, relatable relationship situations and exaggerating them dramatically. If she wanted a dog and her husband did not, she might transform the apartment into a barnyard; if they could not take a vacation, she might put a hot tub in the living room.

The purpose of that exaggeration was to preserve relatability while increasing spectacle. Viewers could recognize their own relationships in the underlying situation while the outsized execution made the story more entertaining and shareable.

Kinsman considers relatability one of the strongest foundations of a durable personal brand. Creators often become less relatable as they gain wealth and access, even though the audience originally connected with them because they seemed familiar and accessible.

She argues that creators should evolve without abandoning the audience responsible for their growth. Her principle is essentially that “how you get somebody is how you have to keep them”: growth is possible, but the audience needs to be carried through that evolution rather than discarded.

Taylor Swift was cited as a model for maintaining audience participation while becoming enormously successful. Kinsman pointed to longstanding fan interaction and hidden “Easter eggs” as mechanisms that make followers feel they participated in the journey rather than merely observing a distant celebrity.

The School of Hard Knocks hosts face the same tension as their own access improves. They said viewers sometimes object when the channel features increasingly famous guests because many followers originally came for interviews with unknown people encountered in everyday settings.

Their solution is not to let every negative comment dictate strategy, but to distinguish isolated criticism from a broad recurring audience signal. If feedback is overwhelmingly consistent, they regard it as evidence worth testing; criticism of something essential to the brand does not automatically justify removing it.

Kinsman rejects “shadow banning” and algorithm changes as the default explanation for declining performance. Her first question is whether the content itself has become less compelling.

Her strongest distribution principle is that creators cannot simply make what they personally want to watch. If the objective is mass distribution, they need to learn what the intended audience actually wants to consume.

Kinsman acknowledged spending roughly three and a half years making Facebook formats she personally would not choose to watch because audience data showed that those formats held attention. Some included deliberately provocative or “rage bait” material and attracted hostile reactions, including death threats.

She treats willingness to be disliked as part of the creator’s apprenticeship. The objective is not to make work the creator hates, but to stop making personal approval or fear of criticism the main measure of whether content should exist.

A useful test proposed in the discussion is whether a complete stranger, with no existing knowledge of the creator, would care enough to watch, save or share the video. Personal attachment to a clip is irrelevant if the viewer has no reason to care.

Kinsman and the hosts insist that creators should assume almost nobody knows who they are. Even with millions of followers, every post should function as a self-contained “hero” video rather than requiring viewers to understand last week’s episode, an inside joke or an unfamiliar person's name.

Suspense is one of Kinsman’s highest-priority retention tools because viewers can leave within a fraction of a second. Every production decision is intended to remove opportunities for that moment of disinterest.

Her apparent instinct for ideas is the result of large numbers of repetitions and analytical study rather than spontaneous genius. She said she has broken successful videos down shot by shot, studied opening-frame details and repeatedly altered edits after examining retention graphs.

Watch time is the metric Kinsman considers most important across social platforms. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube all benefit when creators keep users consuming content, so creators who reliably increase time on platform have a structural advantage.

She said her content generated about 52 million views during one recent week even while she was posting relatively little. Her current approach is to publish fewer pieces she believes are strong enough to keep the account “hot,” whereas an early-stage creator may need multiple daily posts to accumulate the same learning and watch time.

The School of Hard Knocks account similarly moved from quota-driven posting to fewer, more dependable releases as its audience matured. The hosts said their last Instagram post below one million views was in April 2024.

The hosts said the channel now generates roughly 250 million views per month across platforms. At their current scale, videos attracting only one to three million views may add relatively few new followers.

In the early phase, the three School of Hard Knocks founders rotated responsibility for publishing three different content ideas per day. If the person responsible failed to post all three, that person had to Venmo each of the other two $25, a system designed to force consistency and experimentation.

Kinsman describes successful social media as a marriage of art and science. Craft matters, but creators cannot declare their own work successful when audience behavior says otherwise.

She also separates commercial performance from artistic or social value. A video can generate hundreds of millions of views and substantial revenue while still not being something she considers particularly meaningful or beneficial.

Kinsman said she did not begin as a strong business operator; her early strengths were entertainment, people and sales. She believes she became better at business by finding her strongest skill, serving people well, protecting her reputation, delivering promised value and consistently solving problems.

She now spends substantial time doing the less glamorous operational work required to turn attention into a company. She joked that successful content creation eventually talked her into a desk job because building systems and a business around the content can be harder than making the videos themselves.

The School of Hard Knocks founders learned the danger of assuming that audience attention automatically reveals what people will buy. Roughly a year to a year and a half into the business, they invested about $20,000 in a motivational canvas-art store because viewers came to them for inspiration, but sold only a handful of canvases.

Their lesson was to ask an audience what problem it actually wants solved before building a product. A fitness audience, for example, may follow workouts but actually be far more willing to pay for meal or diet guidance.

Kinsman believes creators should often build the audience before deciding exactly how it will be monetized. Starting with a product and turning every interaction into a sales pitch risks creating the online equivalent of a friend who constantly tries to sell something.

Her preferred model is to create an entertaining world in which the product exists naturally rather than continually interrupting the audience with pitches.

Hot Ones was used as an example of content creating a world around a commercial product. Kinsman cited its reported $86.5 million exit and argued that the show made its hot sauces integral to an entertaining interview format without repeatedly having to advertise them directly.

The discussion concluded that entertainment can earn the right to educate and eventually sell. The product becomes much easier to monetize when people already value the surrounding media experience.

The hosts advised a creator with roughly 4,000 followers not to rush into manufacturing a product. Their preference would be to build a recognizable brand and a group of genuine fans first, even if that requires years.

Kinsman acknowledged important exceptions to the audience-first rule. She had recently met a creator who reportedly earned about $40,000 in one month from only 2,000 followers because that creator served a highly valuable market and communicated closely with a concentrated audience.

She distinguishes narrow “contextual relevance” from broader cultural relevance. Experts can use the knowledge underneath their profession to discuss larger problems relevant to far more people.

Texas trial lawyer Jefferson Fisher was her example of this approach. Rather than limiting his content to legal procedure, he discusses communication problems—such as what to say when somebody gaslights you—which Kinsman said helped him reach roughly 6 million Instagram followers while also supporting his book and law practice.

Realtors were another recurring example of experts thinking too narrowly about potential audiences. Kinsman argued that a realtor who posts only property tours reaches people mainly when they are actively house hunting.

A broader realtor content strategy could cover restaurants, family activities, neighborhoods, local humor and other reasons people care about a city. Someone might follow because of a restaurant video years before eventually needing the creator’s real-estate services.

Kinsman describes today's organic platforms as an unprecedented supply of effectively free advertising. Her analogy was that if a business were offered one free billboard or 100 free billboards, it would obviously choose 100; broad organic distribution should be treated similarly.

She believes the competition for attention is intensifying because creators and businesses now have AI, mass clipping, synthetic content and other tools for dramatically increasing output. Remaining narrowly known while competitors use those tools can become a commercial disadvantage.

The School of Hard Knocks hosts said Facebook's Reels bonus program once paid them approximately $30,000–$35,000 per month during the 2021 period. The money helped fund the business, but they ultimately concluded that platform ad revenue alone was too unstable to be the foundation of a company.

Kinsman sees private communities and direct ownership of the audience as one promising monetization route for early creators. Her recommendation is to become genuinely useful at something and serve people a few steps behind where the creator already has expertise.

She is considerably less confident about the long-term economics of ordinary user-generated-content work because AI can increasingly replicate generic UGC. She estimated that only a small minority of creators produce work differentiated enough to resist that substitution easily.

Her alternative recommendation is for talented creators to become the recognizable face of established companies. Many businesses know they need creator-style content but do not have an executive or founder suited to being the on-camera personality.

An in-house creator can gain a reliable paycheck, production support and leverage while developing a personal brand and improving their skills. Kinsman expects demand for these creator-employees to grow as conventional companies learn that their social accounts must behave more like creators than corporations.

The conversation identified globalization as another major growth opportunity. Neil Patel was cited as arguing that the future includes translating and localizing successful content into multiple languages and markets, a strategy already used by MrBeast and other large creators.

The School of Hard Knocks hosts have seen geographic expansion happen directly. When they produced interviews in Dubai, their content began reaching millions of viewers in the Middle East, encouraging them to consider producing content across many more countries.

Kinsman expects creator-owned products to expand, but not only through celebrity-scale launches. She sees significant opportunity for smaller creators with strong relationships inside specialized communities to build products tailored to those audiences.

She said some creators her business works with are earning multiple six figures or seven figures annually after several years of becoming highly skilled at content. Her point was that creators do not necessarily need tens of millions of followers if the relationship and commercial fit are strong.

Even so, she generally recommends choosing the largest reasonable total addressable market around an expertise rather than unnecessarily restricting the audience. The product sold in year one will probably differ from what the creator sells in year four, whereas the trusted relationship with the audience can survive those changes.

Kinsman also expects greater “verticalization” and multi-channel brand structures. Instead of putting every interest into one feed, creators can build separate channels for different formats, languages and audiences.

Her own plans include an “en Español” operation, separate reels and long-form/education channels, and a creator-competition reality format. Keeping those audiences separated can reduce algorithmic confusion while allowing a multidimensional creator to pursue several interests.

Kinsman expects acquisitions of creator-led media brands to continue because attention itself has become a valuable asset. The hosts cited acquisitions involving Hot Ones, meme networks and companies such as Barstool as examples of media businesses being valued partly for their audiences.

She said she was flying to Madrid the following day for discussions with a major music-and-entertainment organization about where large pools of entertainment capital should be deployed. According to her, executives with substantial budgets increasingly want access to people and businesses already commanding significant attention.

One emerging model discussed was the blending of entertainment, creators, hospitality and physical experiences. Kinsman described a hotel concept in São Paulo adjacent to a soccer stadium in which some rooms function as box suites and contain exclusive merchandise and experiences connected with Universal Music artists.

The larger strategy is to make fans feel closer to artists through limited drops, pop-up appearances, creator-driven mobilization and exclusive physical experiences. Kinsman believes the historical distance between major stars and their audiences will continue shrinking.

She therefore expects artists who insist on remaining remote and inaccessible to face increasing pressure on their relevance. The emerging model rewards participation, community and the feeling that fans have some connection to the world around the creator.

The hosts argued that traditional media distribution is already being displaced by creator-led and social platforms. They pointed to audiences increasingly receiving news through Twitter/X and Instagram and buying products because a trusted creator introduced them.

Kinsman’s longer-term prediction is “shoppable media,” where the distinction between consuming content and purchasing products becomes increasingly thin. QR codes, visual search tools such as Google Lens and wearable devices can turn objects appearing naturally inside media into immediate purchase opportunities.

She expects devices such as Meta smart glasses to make commerce even more continuous and personalized. In her scenario, systems could eventually learn from where someone looks, what captures attention and other behavioral signals to recommend products with extreme precision.

When asked for one principle to leave younger people, Kinsman said current ability matters less than how good someone genuinely wants to become. Her emphasis was on maintaining a vision larger than present circumstances and refusing to treat today's skill level or difficulties as a permanent limit.

She credits her mother with teaching her to look beyond temporary circumstances. Even during difficult periods, Kinsman tries to treat the present condition as temporary and align her actions with the person she intends to become.

Her interpretation of the “law of attraction” emphasizes behavior rather than wishful thinking. In her formulation, a person first becomes the kind of person capable of the desired future, begins acting and “resonating” accordingly, and only then attracts compatible opportunities.

Asked about legacy, Kinsman said she wants people who watched her or spent time around her to leave feeling more confident. That includes confidence in their silliness, unusual qualities and whatever makes them different rather than pressure to become a polished imitation of someone else.

She ultimately wants her own life to serve as evidence of what can happen through faith, authenticity, persistence and not taking oneself too seriously. Her preferred legacy is having created a path that made other people believe more was possible for them.