From side-hustle to a multi-million dollar SAAS company — David Tintner // ThoughtLeaders

Quotes

• “I got into the space as a creator myself, doing a podcast, newsletter, and a blog called Hacking UI with a friend and former co-founder of a previous startup. To monetize it, we started selling directly to brands. That was kind of where everything kicked off for us.”

• “We built the ThoughtLeaders prototype back in 2014. We collected content purely for curating content and producing new content from it. We started to realize, collecting this data, that there were also many other insights more valuable than we ever thought before.”

• “It started with the notion of first trying to do something for ourselves. And then we offered the service to other creators. We then realized that as a data offering and as a platform, we can do this for essentially an infinite amount of other creators.”

• “ThoughtLeaders grew from a side project or a passion project to being a real business when we started selling directly to brands. We started making a lot more money. That led us to believe it was something we could really do full-time and turn into a business.”

• “Brands want to be tightly integrated into the content itself. From the beginning of actually picking the content and creator. And even the level of the specific episode that they're going to be featured in, but also how the content is transitioned seamlessly into the ad. ”

• “The best creators doing sponsorships are making sponsorships that are so valuable that the sponsorship itself is actually a welcomed piece of content or welcome segments of content within their episode.”

• “As it relates to privacy, like what Apple is doing with iOS 14, if we can kind of enforce some stricter privacy regulations, then we can get back to doing sponsorships or ads that people actually care about.”

• “Understanding the dynamics of sponsorships as a marketing and advertising vehicle is something that's very nuanced and evolving. And I think that understanding what brands are looking for is something that most content creators don't really understand.”