When I moved to New York City, I couldn’t stop noticing the dog walkers.
Not because I’m unusually obsessed with dogs (though in NYC, you kind of have to be). It was the business model that got me. Dogs are everywhere here. Dog walkers are everywhere too. And at first glance, it looks like a “low-skill” job: show up, clip a leash, walk around the block.
Then I asked a few dog-owner friends what they pay.
I did the math.
And I had that quiet, annoying realization that changes how you see everything: some dog walkers can earn six figures, not because they’re the cheapest, but because they’re the safest choice. People are literally giving them keys to their homes and access to their fur babies. They’re paying for certainty.
That’s when it clicked for me:
People don’t buy based on price. They buy based on trust.
This isn’t a new idea. Marketing research has been saying versions of this for decades: trust is a core mechanism behind long-term customer relationships and commitment. What is new is how badly most modern content strategies ignore it.
We’re in an era where anyone can produce infinite content, run ads, and “look legit.” Attention is easier to manufacture than ever. Trust isn’t. In fact, consumer behavior keeps screaming the same thing: recommendations from people we know are still the most trusted input, with Nielsen reporting 88% of global respondents trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel.
So if trust is the actual bottleneck, here’s the question I care about (and the question most founders never measure):
Is your content building trust that compounds into demand… or just creating momentary attention?
That’s what this article is for: not to convince you trust matters (you already know that), but to give you a way to build it on purpose and track whether it’s working.
Here’s my simple definition:
ARC is the trust engine. It’s what makes strangers become buyers.
I call it “capital” because it behaves like an asset. You can build it, it compounds, and it creates leverage. When your ARC is high, you don’t have to reintroduce yourself from scratch every post. People already carry a stored belief: I know her. I trust her. I’d probably choose her.
And yes, trust as an idea isn’t original. But I’ve been applying it specifically to growth marketing and founder-led storytelling, because “trust” is usually discussed like a philosophy. Everyday brands need it to be a system.
Seth Godin describes “permission marketing” as “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.” That word — privilege — matters, because trust is essentially permission.
And on the other side of the coin: yes, attention still matters, but chasing platforms isn’t the game. Gary Vee puts it bluntly: “I don’t focus on the newest app. Instead, I focus on what the hell people are doing.” ARC is how you turn that attention into something durable.
Also: this isn’t just “soft stuff.” Trust shows up in measurable outcomes at scale. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer reports that 80% of people trust the brands they use to do what is right.
So the practical question becomes: How do we build trust through content, predictably, without turning into “inspo content”?
If I had to reduce trust-building content into one line, it’s this: trust is built when your stories consistently signal both relatability and competence. Relatability is the part that makes someone feel understood, like you’re speaking directly to the thing they’ve been carrying. Competence is the part that makes someone feel safe, like your thinking is sound, your standards are high, and you’re not just guessing your way through it. The mistake most founders make is treating these as two separate content “types,” then picking one lane because it feels more comfortable.
So you get the founder who posts mainly relatability: honest reflections, struggles, raw moments. The audience likes them, but when it comes time to pay, they hesitate, because the content hasn’t built enough certainty. Then you get the founder who posts mainly competence: strategy, lessons, proof, wins. The audience is impressed, but the relationship stays cold, which means the trust never deepens into readiness. The point of ARC isn’t to choose between being human or being credible; it’s to make your audience feel both in the same breath.
That’s why ARC comes from the weave, a story where the audience recognizes themselves inside it, and also recognizes your ability to lead. When you hit that, you’re no longer just producing content; you’re building an asset that compounds.
Virality is mostly a distribution event. It tells you your content travelled, that the algorithm carried it farther than usual, but it doesn’t tell you what actually matters: whether the content created belief. And belief is the thing that moves someone from “this is interesting” to “I’d choose her,” from watching to buying, from consuming to committing.
That’s why I’m careful about celebrating reach as if it’s the goal. You can go viral and still be forgettable. You can get a flood of views and walk away with nothing but noise. In fact, the higher the exposure, the more dangerous it becomes if trust isn’t keeping pace, because you end up attracting attention without establishing certainty, which usually leads to shallow engagement, mismatched leads, or an audience that likes you but never actually moves.
The simplest way I can say it is this: exposure without trust is dangerous at worst, wasted at best. That’s exactly why I built a metric that tracks trust signals instead of vanity metrics, because views tell you you were seen, but trust tells you you were chosen.
The ARC Score is not the goal. It’s the instrument panel.
Instead of tracking “how many people saw this,” the ARC Score tracks the signals that predict demand:
memory (people remember you)
familiarity (people return)
intent (people move toward working with you)
Time window: last 30 days.
Memory (0–10)
Do people reference your ideas or connect posts over time? (“I remember when you said…”, “This reminded me of…”)
Familiarity (0–10)
Do the same names come back? Repeat commenters, repeat DMers, repeat viewers who speak like they “know” you.
Intent (0–10)
Are you getting inbound that signals action? Questions about working together, pricing, timing, referrals, next steps.
Add them up:
0–10: attention-rich, trust-poor
11–20: compounding
21–30: gravity
Now the important part:
Scoring is not the work. Scoring is the diagnosis.
So what do you do next?
