Today we’d like to introduce you to Adrian Hallberg.
Hi Adrian, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Your Story — VoyageUtah Inspiring Stories
Adrian Hallberg — Founder, Kindred Content
I’ve spent about ten years learning how to make things get seen, and about that long watching my own work disappear.
I started in marketing in 2016, at a translation company in Utah. I was a specialist, then a coordinator, then a manager — three titles in two years, mostly because I said yes to everything nobody else wanted to do. From there it was a sign manufacturer, then a global customer experience company, and eventually building marketing teams from scratch, hiring them, and running them. I still work in marketing. That part of my life has been good to me and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.
But somewhere in those ten years I learned something that turned out to be uncomfortable. My entire job was understanding how attention gets bought, ranked, and distributed — which posts surface, which ones die, what a platform actually rewards versus what it says it rewards. I got good at it. And the better I got, the clearer it became that the people making the thing everyone shows up for are the only ones in the transaction not getting paid.
I knew that because I was one of them.
The whole time I was doing this, I was shooting film. Still am. Mostly 35mm and medium format, which is an absurd way to make pictures in 2026. You get a limited number of frames. There’s no screen on the back. You don’t know if you got it for a week, sometimes a month, and by then you can’t go back and fix anything. Every part of it is slower and more expensive and less forgiving than the alternative.
That’s exactly why I do it. Film makes you decide before you press the shutter instead of after. You stop taking a hundred versions of something and start taking one. The work gets better because the constraint is real, and there’s a satisfaction in that I’ve never gotten from anything instant.
Then I’d post it, and it would be gone in four hours.
A few years ago I sold the stable setup and moved into a fifth wheel full-time. I boondock — off-grid, on public land, usually somewhere without cell signal. That decision changed more about my work than I expected, because living off-grid is essentially a long series of problems nobody is going to solve for you. I wired my own solar system. I figured out how to source, haul, filter, and treat water in places that don’t have any. You get used to a particular sequence: this thing doesn’t exist out here, so I guess I’m building it.
That habit carried into the rest of my life. I started a small consultancy, TIMP Digital, working with contractors and local service businesses around Utah — and the through-line of that work is that I build systems they own rather than renting them an agency forever. Same instinct. Build the thing, hand them the keys.
The moment it all connected was less dramatic than it should have been. Work that used to pull hundreds of likes was pulling forty — not because it got worse, but because something upstream changed and nobody told me. I’d posted a photograph I was genuinely proud of, one I’d waited on and driven for and gotten right in a single frame, and it did nothing, while that same week something thoughtless and loud did enormous numbers. None of that was new information. What was new was realizing that the only audience I actually owned was the roughly five thousand people on my email list, because that was the one place where nobody could quietly change a setting and take them away from me.
Every creator I know is renting their livelihood from a company that can evict them without notice, for reasons it will never explain.
So I built the alternative. Kindred Content is a creator-first social platform — everything I loved about the early internet, with the parts that broke it left out. No engagement-bait ranking deciding whose work deserves to exist. Real monetization built in from day one, so creators earn from the people who actually value what they make instead of hoping a brand deal materializes. Authenticity over algorithms, which sounds like a slogan until you’ve spent a decade on the other side of the glass watching the algorithm win.
I built it myself. I’m a marketer who learned to ship software because the thing I wanted didn’t exist and waiting for someone else to make it felt like a bad plan. A lot of nights, a lot of things I had to learn from scratch, most of it from a trailer somewhere with a solar panel and a hotspot.
We launched this fall and we’re recruiting our first 1,000 founding creators now.
If you’re someone who makes real things and you’re tired of a feed deciding whether they count — that’s who this is for. That’s who it’s been for the whole time.
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*Kindred Content: kindredcontent.app*
*Photography: @ahlightcapture · Adventure: @adrianexplores*
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The hard part hasn’t been any single disaster — it’s been the arithmetic.
I’ve been building Kindred alongside a full-time job and a consultancy, from a trailer that’s often hours from reliable internet. No team, no outside funding, no runway. Nights and weekends for a long stretch, and anything I don’t already know how to do, I have to learn before I can ship it. I’m a marketer who taught himself to build software, which means problems an experienced engineer would clear in an afternoon have taken me a week.
Living off-grid adds its own tax. Power and bandwidth are finite in a way most people never think about. I’ve driven forty minutes to find signal so I could push a fix.
And the thing that started all of this — good work getting buried — didn’t politely pause while I built the alternative. It’s still happening, to me and to every creator I’m building this for. Some days that’s discouraging. Most days it’s the reason I’m still awake at 1am doing it.
We’ve been impressed with Kindred Content, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Kindred Content is a creator-first social platform. It’s the app I wanted to exist and eventually got tired of waiting for.
The premise is simple: creators should be paid by the people who value their work, and the work itself should decide what gets seen — not a ranking system optimizing for how long it can keep a stranger scrolling. So monetization is built in from day one rather than bolted on after you’ve hit some follower threshold, and the feed isn’t engineered to reward whoever posts the most. Authenticity over algorithms. I’ve spent ten years on the other side of that equation, professionally, and I know exactly what I’m building against.
What sets it apart is mostly who built it and why. I’m not a venture-backed team that identified a market opportunity. I’m a film photographer and a marketer who watched his own work get buried, did the math on what that costs every creator I know, and then learned to ship software from a trailer. Every decision in the product comes from having been the person it’s for.
The thing I’m proudest of brand-wise is the name. Kindred means the people who are like you — and that’s the whole bet. Not reach, not virality, not a bigger number. Finding the people who actually want what you make and building something durable with them.
We launched this fall and we’re recruiting our first 1,000 founding creators now. If you make real things and you’re tired of a feed deciding whether they count, that’s who this is for.
kindredcontent.app
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
I’m building a social platform and I’m barely on social media.
Most days I don’t have cell signal. I’m somewhere on public land with a solar setup and no service, and my phone is a camera and a flashlight. I’ll go a week without opening a feed. People assume the guy building this must be permanently online, chasing trends, posting constantly — and the truth is I built it precisely because I know what that does to you. I’ve watched it flatten work I cared about and turn making things into feeding something. The distance is the point. It’s hard to design a healthier version of something you’re still addicted to.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://KindredContent.app
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ahlightcapture/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ahphotography
