Early in Zapnito’s life, somebody offered Charles Thiede a shortcut: buy 20,000 Twitter followers. The company declined. A large audience was available, apparently, by the pallet. Whether anybody in it had anything useful to say was a separate question.
Thiede recalled the offer in September 2017, when he announced that he was leaving Twitter. He had joined reluctantly, at a former boss’s instruction, and found that the people he wanted to hear were disappearing among spam, fake accounts and people collecting followers. For a founder selling expert communities, the experience was awkwardly instructive.
His objection had a practical edge. A network could grow and become less useful at the same time. A count of followers could look impressive while telling him very little about the people behind it. The refusal makes a good entry into his career: Thiede has spent years trying to make professional knowledge easier to find, exchange and put to work. He would rather know who is in the room.
An idea that travelled by bicycle
Before Zapnito, Thiede worked inside established organisations, handling product and technology. His career included senior roles at Informa and Nature Publishing Group. He studied Design and Industry at San Francisco State University, earning a Bachelor of Arts. The combination matters: publishing gave him proximity to expertise; technology gave him a way to change how it reached people.
By his later account, a talk by futurist Gerd Leonhard around 2010 or 2011 helped focus his thinking. Trusted knowledge was being submerged in the growing volume of social media. The internet offered more places to publish, yet the organisations he knew were struggling to make their accumulated expertise count.
The beginnings of Zapnito also involved a conversation with Jon Beer during a training ride for a Scotland Coast to Coast race. The two shared a frustration about the difficulty of finding dependable expert knowledge amid abundant information. It is an apt setting for a community business: two people with a common interest comparing notes, without an algorithm deciding which one deserved to be heard.
After his daughter’s birth, Thiede developed the idea during paternity leave. By September 2013 he was describing niche networks where specialists could share and sell knowledge. Early participants included Leonhard, marketing strategist Dana Reeves and entrepreneur Mark Carter. Their interests differed, but the proposition gave each a place to gather people around a particular subject.
The scale was deliberately modest. Someone with a useful specialism did not need to address the whole internet. A smaller group could give that person’s knowledge somewhere to land. For readers, the promise was similarly concrete: finding a person who understood the problem in front of them.
The customers already had the trust
The original ambition was an expert marketplace. Individuals would find specialists on demand and subscribe to their expertise. In 2014, Thiede and Beer changed course, developing a white-label software platform through which established brands could run their own knowledge networks.
That shift made commercial sense within Thiede’s argument. Publishers, membership organisations and consulting businesses already had relationships with their audiences. Zapnito could supply the technology while those organisations supplied the subject knowledge and the trust they had earned. Creating another destination would have required building those relationships all over again.
He described the decision as a way to help the very brands that newcomers were disrupting. It also changed the founders’ job. A marketplace needs to persuade people to gather under its own name. An enterprise software company needs to help a customer create something useful under the customer’s name. The second task suited their experience.
In June 2017, a partnership with Silverchair put that approach into a publishing context. The companies planned closer integration of Zapnito’s knowledge networks and expert conversation feeds with Silverchair’s platform. Discussions could sit alongside the material that had prompted them. A reader would have a route from a piece of published knowledge to the people capable of discussing it.
A rejection collection, carefully curated
Thiede’s account of starting the business contains little romance about unlimited freedom. This was his first experience co-founding a company from scratch with the founders’ own capital and work. Bootstrapping exposed the gap between a pleasing idea and something customers would pay for.
He recommended Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things to people considering a technology business. He also urged founders to value advisors and angels for their support and confidence, alongside their money. Rejections, he suggested, could become evidence that they were attempting something difficult rather than a verdict on their worth.
His corporate experience remained useful after the leap. A 2018 conversation with GoSquared’s James Gill explored enterprise selling, identifying unsuitable leads early and handling outside advice. These are less picturesque subjects than the moment of founding, but considerably more likely to determine what happens next. An enterprise buyer has a calendar, a procurement process and plenty of reasons to postpone enthusiasm.
For Thiede, the early company was an exercise in making the proposition precise enough to survive contact with those buyers. There is a family resemblance between that work and his view of community: choose the people and problems carefully. Numbers become helpful once they describe something that matters.
The chief executive, available for correction
In 2019, Thiede described a flat company in which a marketing executive could check whether he had finished something, just as an investor could. He encouraged it. The chief executive’s job included listening to colleagues whose seniority might have kept them out of the conversation elsewhere.
He was also candid about the personal adjustment: he had to learn to be himself. Running the company demanded patience, resilience and a willingness to accept rejection. Another lesson was turning down work that fell outside the vision, even when it offered revenue.
That account puts an everyday shape around his interest in collective knowledge. If useful contributions can come from different people, the founder has to leave room for disagreement inside his own organisation. Permission to correct the chief executive is a fairly convincing way to demonstrate the point.
The same thread appeared in his August 2023 leadership conversation: authenticity, humour and empathy, with space for other people to be themselves. Humour has a practical advantage in such a setting. It allows an ambitious company to remember that its participants are people, including the person whose name appears at the top of the organisation chart.
“In this job, I’ve also had to learn the skill of being myself.”
Charles Thiede · 2019
The club needs something worth returning for
Thiede’s advice to publishers in December 2021 used a useful image: treat the community as a members’ club. An opening celebration might attract attention, but members needed reasons to return once the excitement passed. He urged publishers to identify their core participants and make the experience valuable to them.
The idea changes the editorial question. Publishing a piece of content is only one part of the job. People might need to ask about it, compare their experience with somebody else’s, or learn how to apply it. A community gives those activities a place, provided somebody takes the members’ interests seriously.
Thiede’s position also requires businesses to act on what participants tell them. Having a channel for feedback is a start; allowing feedback to influence decisions is the harder part. A club whose management never listens soon becomes a room with chairs.
In June 2021, Zapnito announced a £3.3 million Series A round from Octopus Ventures. The investment marked a change from its earlier self-funding and angel-backed growth. Plans included developing virtual-event capabilities, analytics and integrations, alongside expansion of sales, marketing and support and growth in the US.
The customer list included Springer Nature, Wiley, the OECD and Sova Assessment. These names illustrate the range of organisations with a reason to gather people around knowledge. The funding gave Thiede and Beer more resources to pursue that work; it did not remove the need to make each gathering useful.
Investment from Octopus Ventures for Zapnito’s next stage.
Eight rabbit holes and a question about AI
By 2024, Thiede was addressing another familiar frustration: a business website’s resources section could send a customer down multiple disconnected paths. A guide he introduced argued for easier ways to discover relevant material, experts and peers. The customer should spend less effort navigating and more effort learning.
The human side of that argument appeared again in his reflections after a customer event in April 2024. AI could take on repetitive questions and help with moderation, he observed, potentially giving teams time to deliver more proactive value. He wanted those efficiencies to help businesses get closer to customers.
In January 2025, he interviewed Georgia Leybourne, chief marketing officer at Linnworks, about its customer community. Their discussion concerned learning, sharing practical experience and customer advocacy. Thiede was doing the thing his platform enables: asking somebody with direct experience to explain how it works.
His June 2026 conversation with Laurent Cochet returned to expertise and trust in the age of generative AI. The discussion explored verified experts, knowledge validation and the challenge of plentiful machine-generated content. The old problem had acquired a new production system. Finding material could be easy; deciding what deserved confidence still required judgement.
Thiede had been considering the relationship between people and AI much earlier. In October 2017, he argued that expert interpretation and debate belonged alongside data and analytics. His conclusion was succinct: “So bring on the bots, and bring on the AI, but don’t forget the people.”
Who else belongs in the room?
In April 2026, Thiede asked fellow community practitioners for their views on Khoros and the next phase of knowledge communities. The question appeared in Zapnito’s own knowledge hub. It was a small example of the continuing work: bringing a relevant problem to people who might have something useful to contribute.
For all the changes in the business, the original concern remains recognisable. Thiede began with expert discovery, moved towards software for trusted organisations, and now discusses how human knowledge can retain its value amid AI-generated material. The route has changed as the market has changed.
His own behaviour supplies the more personal through-line. He asks customers and peers for their experiences. He talks about accepting correction. He has made a public case for smaller, purposeful communities while declining a ready-made crowd. Those choices put some weight behind the sales proposition.
Twenty thousand followers would have made a respectable number on a screen. Thiede’s more demanding ambition is to make an exchange worth having. A question, an experienced person, somebody willing to listen: the room can be small, and still contain quite a lot.