Joshua Kalms Built an Audience Before He Built His Client Pipeline

The Multiply CEO turned years of public advertising analysis into media brands reaching hundreds of millions of people, creating a visible body of work that became a source of new business for his creative performance agency.

Long before many prospective clients speak with Joshua Kalms, they have already seen how he thinks. The CEO of Multiply, a creative performance agency specializing in fintech and AI, has spent six years analyzing advertising in public and explaining why particular creative choices work. Instead of relying primarily on an agency pitch or established network, Kalms built a body of work that allows companies to evaluate his thinking before a conversation begins.

That public platform now includes Brilliant Ads, which has more than 1.5 million followers on LinkedIn, and Ad Professor, followed by more than 195,000 people on X. Another 25,000 people subscribe to the newsletter. Kalms says the media brands collectively reach more than 400 million people annually through organic distribution.

“Most agencies have to tell prospective clients what they are capable of doing,” Kalms says. “I became much more interested in showing the thinking publicly and letting people decide for themselves whether it was useful.”

Kalms built that audience by breaking down why particular advertisements work and developing a consistent way of explaining the creative decisions behind them. The approach became more structured over time, eventually leading him to create the Ad Professor Pattern Library, a collection of frameworks intended to help marketers understand and build effective creative.

His breakdown format has also been copied and adapted by others on LinkedIn. Kalms sees that imitation as a different kind of validation from follower numbers because it suggests people are using the underlying method, rather than simply consuming the content.

“A follower count tells you that people are interested enough to stay connected,” he says. “When people begin using the structure themselves, that tells you the method has become useful beyond the original post. They have taken the thinking and applied it to their own work.”

The public analysis reflects a larger belief Kalms has about advertising. He does not view effective creative as something that can only be produced through instinct. Patterns can be identified and taught, even though judgment still determines how those principles are applied.

“Creative can feel like a black box because people often discuss the final idea without examining how anyone got there,” Kalms says. “I want to make the reasoning more visible. You can teach people what to look for and give them a method for thinking about the work.”

That emphasis on method is especially relevant to the categories Kalms has chosen to focus on. Multiply works exclusively with fintech and AI companies, where he says complex products and regulatory requirements can make clear, memorable advertising difficult to produce.

Kalms believes one of the most common mistakes is trying to make a single advertisement explain too much. Fintech companies in particular may attempt to fit features, benefits, differentiators, and disclaimers into the same piece of creative. His preference is to identify the strongest idea and give it enough room to land.“

Restraint is harder than it sounds,” he says. “When a company has built something complicated, the natural instinct is to explain all of it. Advertising usually gets stronger when you decide what deserves the audience’s attention first.”

The reach of Kalms’ own LinkedIn profile provides another measure of how far his ideas travel. His personal account has approximately 12,000 followers, but his posts generated 8.4 million impressions over the previous 12 months and reached nearly 2 million people. According to Kalms, 96 percent of those impressions came from outside his existing network.

“The most interesting number to me is how much of the reach comes from people who do not follow me,” Kalms says. “That means an idea has to move beyond the audience that already knows who I am. The work itself has to earn the next person’s attention.”

The audience has also become part of how clients discover Multiply. Kalms says companies including Visa, Ramp, Scale AI, and Gamma have found the agency through the public work. Multiply has also worked with HackerRank and more than 40 Y Combinator companies.

Kalms views that relationship between publishing and client acquisition differently from traditional agency marketing. The objective is not simply to attract attention. The public analysis gives prospective clients a substantial sample of his thinking before they decide whether to make contact.

“That changes the first conversation,” he says. “Someone has often watched how you break down creative decisions before they ever contact you. They have a much better sense of what you value and how you approach the work.”

His advice to others in the field follows directly from that experience: build an audience before there is an immediate business reason to need one. Kalms says the years required to establish credibility and consistent reach are precisely what make the result difficult to reproduce quickly.

“It takes a long time, and there is no shortcut that suddenly gives you six years of accumulated work,” he says. “That is also why it becomes valuable. You are building proof over time rather than trying to manufacture attention when you suddenly need it.”

That philosophy is now moving into another stage as Multiply establishes a US headquarters. The majority of the agency’s clients are already in the United States, and Kalms plans to build a team on the ground there.

For someone who built much of his reach without depending on physical proximity, the expansion creates a different opportunity. The public work can continue introducing Kalms and his ideas at scale, while the new headquarters places him closer to the companies already working with Multiply.“

The internet gave us the ability to show our thinking to people anywhere,” Kalms says. “Now we are building a presence in the market where most of our clients already are. The public work will keep opening doors, but being closer to those companies changes what we can build once we are through them.”