Reading comments from happy users is so much more fulfilling for me than any amount of social media likes. So it totally made my day when I received this email from Deepak at Pearl Lemon, an SEO agency in London.

Over the years, my team and I have used Kinopio across a range of client and internal campaigns (sometimes directly, sometimes through team accounts).

I asked a couple questions about how Kinopio works for agencies and got some amazing feedback:

How We Found Kinopio

We discovered it through a mix of Product Hunt browsing, Reddit threads, and a couple of internal team members who love visual thinking tools.

What caught our attention was its loose, non-linear, “thought playground” feel, very different from the rigid structure of mind-mapping tools.

From an agency perspective, anything that makes async ideation faster and less “template-heavy” tends to get adopted pretty quickly.

Alternatives we considered (and why we chose Kinopio):

• Miro (too heavyweight for early ideation)
• Whimsical (clean but still feels like structured diagramming)
• FigJam (fun but gets busy fast when collaborating with clients)
• Notion whiteboards (still feels like working inside a document)

Kinopio Won Because

• It’s zero friction. You open a space and start dropping cards instantly.
• The playful aesthetic lowers the barrier for clients. People are way more willing to brainstorm when the space itself feels “light.”
• It works beautifully for messy thinking, which is exactly how early agency strategy often happens.

How We Use It Internally (And With Clients)

Kickoff Ideation

We dump everything from goals, user profiles, SEO angles, outreach hooks, competitor notes, constraints, and campaign ideas into a single space.

Strategy Shaping

We cluster insights into early “directions,” e.g., SEO themes, PR angles, funnel ideas, messaging buckets. This saved us ~50–70% of the time we’d normally spend in Google Docs trying to force structure too early.

Client Onboarding

When we present initial thinking, clients love moving things around themselves. It creates a shared mental model instantly, faster than slides or documents.

Async Collaboration

Team members leave cards, riffs, comments, and reactions over a 24-hour cycle since we work across 10+ time zones. Kinopio functions like a roaming whiteboard that’s always “alive.”

Creative Exploration

We use it to capture angles for PR stories, content clusters, niche research, or quirky ideas before they get formalized.

Impact We’ve Seen

• Reduced early-stage planning time by roughly 60% because no one is fighting structure.
• Higher client engagement in kickoff and strategy calls because the interface feels un-intimidating.
• Better idea retention. Random thoughts don’t die in Slack or voice notes. They land in one shared visual space.
• Improved async creativity. The team adds ideas in a more natural flow instead of feeling the pressure to write polished notes.

Who We Recommend It To

• Agencies running SEO, PR, content, or lead gen who need a space for messy planning. -Creative teams who ideate in bursts and collaborate asynchronously. -Founders / strategists who think in webs rather than linear lists.
• Clients who are overwhelmed by “corporate” tools and need something more inviting.

Clever or Unexpected Uses Inside Pearl Lemon

• Building “story worlds” for client PR narratives. Cluster themes, potential headlines, supporting facts, and credibility assets.
• Mapping out hiring funnels and onboarding workflows visually before we port them into our internal SOP system.
• Capturing voice-note transcriptions and dropping them into clusters to build a strategy from conversational thinking.
• Creating little “idea gardens” where clients leave inspiration, notes, screenshots, and scrappy thoughts that lead to campaign pivots.

What I Liked Most

Kinopio fits our culture extremely well, fast-moving, highly async, and comfortable with chaos during the early strategy phase. Most agency tools are built to organize you, but Kinopio is built to liberate you mentally before you get organized.

And that’s where the value sits for us. It supports agency agility, the ability to turn vague client goals and scattered research into something coherent quickly. It lets junior team members contribute without worrying about formatting, and senior strategists can shape direction visually rather than writing long briefs.

On a personal level, I’m a big believer that creativity happens in motion, walking, talking, sending voice notes, capturing half-formed ideas fast. Kinopio acts as the perfect landing pad for those fragmented thoughts. Instead of losing ideas in WhatsApp or Slack, they land in a space where they can actually evolve.

What Could Be Improved

• Faster onboarding for new users, sometimes clients need 2–3 minutes of handholding before they “get it.”
• Smoother card grouping / auto-arranging options for when a board gets huge.
• Better long-form card formatting, some team members want to drop more text without the card feeling cramped.
• Optional lightweight templates, not rigid ones, just starting points for people who freeze at a blank canvas.

Thanks again Deepak! That feedback is super helpful for shaping Kinopio, and I’ve got some ideas, and even some early prototypes, to address those areas for improvement.