A startup founder wanted Abraham “AB” Lieberman’s list. Around a hundred young creators, already recruited, already willing to make videos: a useful shortcut for an app that needed people on its screen. Lieberman had another proposal. Hire him to manage them. The names came with relationships, and the relationships came with work.
The founder initially declined. Three months later, he came back. Recruiting a small population of willing strangers had proved harder than acquiring a spreadsheet. Lieberman got the job, and an early outline of Clicks Talent emerged: someone had to connect the people building social platforms with the people who made those platforms worth opening.
It is an unusually practical origin for a business associated with TikTok. Before the brand campaigns and creator rosters, there was a coordination problem. Someone needed videos. Someone else could make them. Lieberman found himself in the middle, insisting that the middle had value.
A business hiding in the spare hours
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Lieberman moved to Israel with his family at ten. He joined the military at eighteen. During his service, he began looking for freelance work, including web design and English-Hebrew translation. The early tools were ordinary: websites, job platforms, messages to people who might say yes.
His chronology begins in August 2016 with Upwork assignments. By December, he was recruiting creators for Scorp, a Turkish social platform. Its American operation closed in February 2017. The assignment disappeared; his experience of finding and organizing creators survived it. That distinction would matter more than the original job.
A friend then connected him with Lifeslice, a Tel Aviv social app led by Alex Bouaziz. In his account, Lieberman joined in April 2017 to manage his creator network. A second client, Holla, followed in August. He began presenting the work under the name Clicks before there was a formally incorporated company.
The sequence suggests a founder discovering his business through repeated requests. Several apps had the same problem. Each needed a flow of content before a new user had much reason to stay. A platform could have functioning software and still feel like a party whose guests had all missed the address.
The syllabus was unusually persuasive
Lieberman did briefly try the conventional business education. He enrolled at IDC Herzliya to study business and marketing, then left after two weeks. A class on opportunity cost helped prompt the decision: time in lectures was time away from the company and its employees.
There is something pleasingly awkward about a business lesson that persuades a student to stop attending business lessons. The idea had done its job rather efficiently. Lieberman’s choice also reflected an existing commitment. He already had work competing for those hours, rather than a hypothetical business waiting somewhere beyond graduation.
His early growth had another, less academic venue. An army friend helping him manage creators was talking about the work in a Tel Aviv nightclub bathroom. The DJ Skazi overheard and arranged an introduction to a music-video app. Lieberman says he pitched the company and secured the work. Networking had found a room that conference organizers rarely put on the floor plan.
He financed the company through its clients. Paying work preceded spending on the website, logo and domain. That order gave him a concrete test of demand: a customer’s willingness to pay. His refusal to sell the creator list looks more consequential in that light. Keeping the relationship meant keeping a reason to be hired again.
Then the creators became the channel
During 2018, Clicks shifted recruitment toward Musical.ly. The service would become part of TikTok, and the agency’s relationships developed alongside the short-video format. The work broadened from supplying content to platforms into helping brands reach the audiences those creators had assembled.
Clicks’ early positioning emphasized vetting followers, understanding engagement and maintaining close contact with both clients and creators. A large audience made an appealing number, but the proposed service involved choosing the people and arranging the work behind it. Someone still had to turn a campaign request into something a creator could deliver.
Music promotion became another opening in 2019. Lieberman was living in China, where restricted access to the social platforms his business relied on complicated operations. Looking for new clients, he turned to music artists interested in TikTok promotion. He describes signing more than ten. The offer adapted as artists began treating short videos as a way for songs to travel.
By 2020, Clicks had expanded to Los Angeles and opened a Beverly Hills office. Brand sponsorship campaigns on TikTok joined the offering. The company later moved its headquarters to Hollywood. For Lieberman, the geography followed an expanding set of commercial relationships: app companies, creators, artists and brands were now part of the same working network.
The unfashionable appeal of doing what you promised
Lieberman’s public advice to creators can sound almost stubbornly ordinary. Be reliable. Publish consistently. Follow through. Decide what you can deliver before agreeing to deliver it. The glamorous part of the business may be the video; the repeat booking also depends on what happens around it.
“If you say you’re going to do something, do it.”
AB Lieberman, on working with brands
His advice to brands begins with deciding what a campaign is supposed to accomplish. Set the measures before the work begins. Otherwise, a successful-looking video and a disappointed client can coexist quite comfortably. Both may be responding to different definitions of success.
In his later discussion of creator partnerships, Lieberman stresses audience relevance, content style and performance history. He argues for giving creators room to speak naturally to their communities. A partnership depends on the audience recognizing the person they chose to follow. A brand can purchase a placement without improving the conversation happening inside it.
He also describes looking beyond the immediate click: comments, changes in sentiment, organic mentions and returning visitors all enter his account of campaign evaluation. These are his stated methods, rather than a guarantee attached to every campaign. They reveal an operator interested in what remains after the sponsored post has moved down the feed.
Sapir, systems and the work behind the work
Lieberman is direct about his wife Sapir’s contribution. He credits her with building structure and processes, saying that without her he would have remained a one-person operation barely breaking even. It is a useful correction to the solitary-founder portrait: the person making deals also needed someone who could organize a company around them.
He describes doing the job properly even when that means accepting a financial loss. The claim fits his emphasis on relationships, but it is also a demanding promise for a business to repeat. Good intentions need schedules, responsibilities and a way to make sure the next person can carry them out.
Away from work, his suggested Los Angeles itinerary has a brisk entertainment budget: a quick trip to Las Vegas, Universal Studios, a movie and ice cream at The Grove. His leisure recommendations allow considerably more spectacle than his operating advice. Clients get consistency; visiting friends may need comfortable shoes.
A quarter-million dollars aimed at the waiting
In July 2025, Clicks disclosed a $250,000 investment of its own capital in Zano, a platform led by Sapir Tori. Its purpose addressed a familiar irritation: finding suitable creators through agencies could mean repeated messages, delayed information and another PDF to request.
Clicks Talent’s own capital committed to Zano.
Zano brought rosters, creator information and casting calls into a shared system. Agencies could present their talent; brands could search and request submissions. Lieberman’s ambition was to make the relationships easier to work through. His year-ahead targets included 500 talent-agency users and $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Those figures were goals.
By March 2026, his published writing was extending that argument into measurement and automation. He advocated assessing creator partnerships through longer-term customer value, including whether buyers returned. He also outlined a future in which software agents take on more campaign administration. The proposed direction is clear: less time retrieving information, more ability to act on it.
Read together, those positions connect his earliest work with his current interests. Recruiting creators meant organizing people. Running campaigns meant organizing commitments. Building software means trying to make parts of that organization repeatable. The available tools change; the hours lost between a request and a useful answer remain an inviting target.
The founder who wants fewer questions
Lieberman’s more recent public reflections turn the same scrutiny on himself. He describes a company that once depended too heavily on his knowledge: clients, talent, pricing decisions and the history behind deals. Being the person with every answer can feel satisfying. It also leaves everyone else waiting for an answer.
“I’m actively trying to make myself less necessary.”
AB Lieberman, on building the company
He wants routine operations to continue without every decision returning to his desk. Payroll, client service and deals should function through the organization. That remains an ambition he describes working toward, rather than a finished transformation.
Writing down a price is straightforward. Recording why it made sense, and when a colleague should question it, takes more care. That is the less visible work behind a founder’s wish to step back.
The contrast with the creator list is instructive. Early on, Lieberman insisted that his involvement was worth paying for. Now he is trying to build a business whose daily work can proceed without his constant involvement. Both decisions concern where the value sits. The first kept relationships together long enough to become a company. The next asks whether the company can carry them forward.