About Us

What we do

At ThoughtLeaders, We help brands to leverage the power of content to reach new audiences and grow their business. We help creators to monetize their content and establish strong relationships with brand partners.

Origin story

How we started

ThoughtLeaders started with two friends, David Tintner and Dan Conn. Here's the story of how the company grew from their double act to team of almost 50 people, spread across different countries and continents but all united in a single mission...

January 2016
David left his job as a developer at a top marketing intelligence company to become a full time content creator. His passion project was Hacking UI, a blog that went on to spawn a newsletter, which eventually turned into a podcast.
June 2017
With a rapidly growing audience, brands started to get interested in sponsoring this content. David turned to Dan, a former colleague from SimilarWeb, to help scale this project. Dan quickly began to make relationships with other content creators in order to meet the demand from eager advertisers.
August 2018
ThoughtLeaders was officially founded. Michal, another SimilarWeb alumni was brought onboard to build a tech platform to support the growing needs of the nascent company. In addition to newsletters, blogs and podcasts, we began to sell sponsorships on YouTube.
April 2019
With a steady stream of new clients (that included Fetch Rewards, Monday.com, MongoDB and Curiosity Stream) and an expanded network of creator partners, we started to really hit the ground running. Within the span of one year, ThoughtLeaders grew four fold, and we are proud to say that growth was fully bootstrapped (and continues to be until this day!)
June 2020
With the corona virus lockdowns, our company moved to fully remote working, along with the rest of the world. However, the pace of innovation did not slow down: we launched a data intelligence platform tracking sponsorships across longform digital content, whilst continuing to strengthen our media buying agency.
December 2021
This year we added a fifth content channel to our platform, with the introduction of Twitch. Our data capabilities increased dramatically as we found a way to automatically transcribe all podcast episodes and YouTube videos as we added them to the platform. We used this to develop a proprietary AI model that uses NLP to accurately detect which mentions of brand names were sponsored and which were organic. On top of all of that, we also achieved $8 million in annual revenue!🎉
May 2022
By this year, our headcount in Israel had grown so much that co-working spaces were no longer effective. We moved into brand new offices in the center of Tel Aviv, with our very own podcast studio that we offer free of charge to any local creators who want to come and use it. (You can book a slot here).
Today
As we continue to grow and innovate, we always try to bear in mind that all of this started with a content creator pursuing their creative vision. Content creation is at the heart of our origin story. We continually strive to help other content creators on their journey of turning their side hustle into a sustainable business.
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