When carbon dioxide started building up on Apollo 13, NASA couldn’t ship the crew a better filter. Ed Smylie’s team in Houston had to work out a fix from what was already on the spacecraft: a spacesuit hose, a sock, a plastic bag, cue cards and duct tape.
A CEO asking for “more thought leadership” puts you in a far less deadly version of that spot. The thought leadership examples you’ll find online are mostly the better filter, because they run on McKinsey’s research budget or Seth Godin’s name, and nobody’s shipping either one to your team.
So I sorted these B2B examples by what you likely have on board already. They start with what nearly every SaaS company has, an executive with an opinion and experts with 30 minutes to spare, and end with what only some do, a customer dataset big enough to publish. Each section shows the smallest version your team could copy this quarter.
What counts as thought leadership content?
Thought leadership content changes how your buyers think about a problem, and it does that with something only your company could contribute, such as your data, your people’s experience or a stance you’ll defend in public. Good content marketing can teach a reader plenty without doing any of that.
Before you copy an example, ask whether another company in your category could publish the same piece by swapping the logo. If one could, you’re looking at content marketing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It just won’t do what your CEO is asking for.
The examples at a glance
| Example | What it’s made from | Smallest version you could copy |
| Amanda Natividad on zero-click marketing | An executive’s stance | Name a pattern your buyers already see |
| Dharmesh Shah’s simple.ai | An executive’s stance | One short idea a week |
| Peep Laja on LinkedIn | A CEO’s stance and a small survey | One post with one number |
| First Round Review | Long conversations with operators | One expert and one named framework |
| My Zapier article | Practitioner interviews | Two or three quotes in a search-led article |
| Basecamp’s Shape Up | How the company builds software | One process, written down |
| GitLab’s handbook | How the company runs | One public page |
| Emily Kramer’s MKT1 | Years of doing the work | One framework you reuse |
| My count of 22 articles | Public pages | An afternoon of counting |
| Superpath’s salary report | A survey of 316 people | A short survey with its limits stated |
| Orbit Media’s blogging survey | A survey of 1,042 people, run yearly | The same questions every year |
| Gong Labs | Sales emails and calls | One odd question |
| Carta’s Data Minute | Cap table data | One chart a week |
| ChartMogul’s reports | Anonymised revenue data | One cut with an outside analyst |
I read each of these in November 2026, so subscriber counts and report dates may have moved since.
Thought leadership examples when you have an executive with an opinion
The person who asked for thought leadership is probably your first raw material. Every SaaS company has an executive, and this route costs the least, since all it takes is some of their time and a willingness to say something out loud.
Ask what your CEO believes that their peers would argue with. If nothing comes to mind, skip to the next section, because a post with no claim in it reads like generic opinion with an executive’s name on top.
Amanda Natividad on zero-click marketing
Amanda Natividad, SparkToro’s Chief Evangelist, named something marketers could already see in their feeds. Platforms bury links, so posts that deliver everything inside the post tend to travel further. The book’s site dates the name to 2022, and Rand Fishkin’s whiteboard credits Amanda with coining it.
Years of making the case came next. In The Case for Zero-Click Content, Amanda describes going from 1,000 to 10,000 followers on Twitter in about 18 months by posting this way, and seeing 8x the reach on LinkedIn posts that leave the link out. The idea has since become a podcast and a book written with Rand.
This is one of my favorite examples on the list, because none of it needed a research budget. The raw material was one person’s observation, a name people could repeat, and the patience to keep repeating it.
Dharmesh Shah’s simple.ai
Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot’s co-founder and CTO, writes simple.ai, a newsletter on AI that reports 2.5 million subscribers. Posts take four to seven minutes and argue one idea, like Stop Hunting for AI Use Cases. Start With Problems.
HubSpot’s audience won’t transfer to your CEO, so ignore the subscriber count and copy the shape. A named executive makes one argument per post, under a title that states it.
Peep Laja on LinkedIn
For thought leadership examples on LinkedIn, Peep Laja’s posts are the ones I’d forward to a CEO first. This one opens with “Market research is the flossing of B2B marketing.” Peep, the CEO of Wynter, then reports that 76% of 100 B2B marketing leaders said they research buyers who aren’t customers, while only 32% mentioned doing it when asked to describe their last attempt. The last word of the post is “Floss.”
Wynter sells buyer research, so the post also makes the case for the product, and it still reads as a view first. A small survey, one everyday comparison and a clear opinion fit in a single post.
Smallest version your team could copy. Book 30 minutes a month with your CEO, pull out one claim they’d defend in public, and draft a post they can edit in their own words.
Examples when you have experts with 30 minutes
Your product managers, engineers and customer-facing teams know things that aren’t published anywhere, and they rarely have time to write them down. Writing was never the part you needed from them.
I’ve run more than 15 expert interviews for clients including Zapier, HubSpot and SimpleTexting. Some gave me everything I needed in 15 minutes, and others felt like pulling teeth. Either way, the expert gives up an hour at most and someone else does the writing.
First Round Review
First Round Review turns long conversations with operators into articles that read like field manuals. Its piece with Wes Kao, a co-founder of Maven, is built around a framework Kao calls personality-message fit. The idea grew from noticing that a co-founder could say things that wouldn’t land the same way coming from Kao.
What carries over to your blog is the named framework, which readers can repeat, and the deal where the expert gets the credit and the publisher gets the reader. First Round is a venture firm whose newsletter advertises 200K+ subscribers, so expect your version to start smaller.
My Zapier article on email personalization
My article for Zapier is a search-led guide, and it still carries practitioner input you won’t find in the other results. Gift Arku, a marketing associate at Smile ID, says segmentation-driven personalization often starts with a “deep cleanup of the list.” Gerardo Teijeira, GTM Team Lead at ColdIQ, argues that people are already fatigued by AI personalization.
Thought leadership and search don’t have to sit in separate budgets. A short interview can give a search-led article the lines that set it apart from every other page ranking for the same term.
Smallest version your team could copy. Book one 30-minute call on a question your buyers keep asking. Preparing the interview from your outline keeps that call from wandering, because every question fills a specific gap in the article.
Examples when you have a way of working others would copy
Every SaaS team has this one, and few think it counts. How you ship, hire or run a process can be the thing your buyers wish they could steal, and writing it down costs far less than a study.
Basecamp’s Shape Up
Shape Up is Ryan Singer’s book on how Basecamp builds software, free to read online with a print edition for sale. It covers six-week cycles and how the team shapes work before anyone builds it, and it opens with problems any founder or product manager will recognize from watching Basecamp grow from four people to over fifty.
The book calls itself “a guide to how we do product development at Basecamp,” and that’s all the pitch it needs.
GitLab’s handbook
GitLab’s handbook is the extreme version. As an all-remote company, GitLab takes a “handbook-first” approach, and the public site covers operating principles, hiring, engineering, marketing and finance.
Your legal team will have views on publishing everything, so don’t. One process page is a far smaller ask, and it can show a buyer how you think before sales gets involved.
Emily Kramer’s MKT1 newsletter
Emily Kramer’s MKT1 newsletter is the small-team version, and one I’d happily show a CEO. After 15+ years at startups as a first marketer, head of marketing, advisor and investor, Emily turns that work into frameworks, with two issues a month to more than 85,000 subscribers.
My best advice for sponsoring B2B creators comes from working with 60+ MKT1 sponsors. It even tells readers not to copy the creator program everyone was discussing that month, because Wispr Flow’s market looks nothing like a typical B2B company’s.
Smallest version your team could copy. Find the internal doc people outside your company keep asking about, clear the names and numbers with legal, and publish it.
Examples when you have an afternoon or an email list
Original research sounds like a budget line, and it can be much smaller than that. Costs run from an afternoon for a small analysis to weeks for a survey, and these three examples run in that order.
My count of 22 ranking articles
In September, I searched three topics a B2B SaaS content team might write about, compared the headings of the 22 articles I could read in full, and published what they had in common. Thirteen shared one skeleton, with a definition, a section on benefits and a list of steps. Five onboarding articles asked “Why is customer onboarding important?” almost word for word.
The analysis took an afternoon, with no survey and no budget, and the post says plainly that it isn’t a scientific study. Emily Kramer ran a bigger count on 1,100+ marketing job posts and found that only 47% of B2B startup job posts mention AI skills. Public pages gave both of us something to argue about.
Superpath’s salary report
Superpath’s report rests on 316 full-time content marketers, and it says outright that 316 “may not be technically statistically significant.” That sentence makes the rest easier to trust.
The latest edition I found is from January 2025. It’s ungated, a sponsor supports it, and volunteers at Redpoint Content helped clean up the survey and analyze the data. If your company has an email list, that’s a usable template. Ask people what they’d want to compare themselves against, then give the answers away.
Orbit Media’s blogging survey
Orbit Media’s survey asks 1,000+ content marketers 24 questions every year, and Orbit is a web design agency, so you don’t need to be a research firm to do this.
Asking the same questions every year gave Orbit its best finding yet. For a decade, 20% to 30% of marketers said their blog delivers strong results, and in 2026 that fell to 13.9%, an all-time low. A one-off survey couldn’t have shown that. The page also tells other writers how to cite it, and I’d copy that line too.
Smallest version your team could copy. Count something public in an afternoon, then state your method and what it can’t prove. If you’d rather run a survey and have no list, Wynter sells access to verified B2B respondents, and its own studies show what a sample of 100 marketing leaders can say.
Examples when you have customer data
Not every spacecraft carries this one. You need enough customers to anonymise, a legal team that agrees, and someone who can query the data, so it comes last even though it gives you numbers nobody else can publish.
Gong Labs
Gong Labs turns Gong’s sales data into research, and the pieces I’d copy start with odd little questions. One looked at 27.4 million English emails and found em dash use climbing from 3.3% of sales emails to 26.2%, then falling to 14.3%. Emails with an em dash were about half as likely to get a reply, and the article calls this a straight comparison rather than a controlled experiment. It signs off with “For the record, this article uses exactly two em dashes. Both are in the headline.”
Another piece found a 3.8% lift in sales follow-up the week after clocks fall back, across sellers at 1,724 companies. Neither one needed a flagship report, only access to the data and a good question.
Carta’s Data Minute
Carta’s Data Minute promises “one compelling chart per week” from across its 50,000+ startups and VC funds. Series A liftoff, for example, charts 5,470 Series A rounds and shows the top 5% raising at over half a billion in valuation in Q2.
Peter Walker, Carta’s Head of Insights, writes it, so the voice belongs to an insights lead rather than the CEO. A weekly chart also asks far less of your team than an annual report.
ChartMogul’s reports
ChartMogul publishes research from aggregated, anonymised revenue data across more than 2,500 SaaS businesses. Several 2026 reports carry the name of Kyle Poyar, its Analyst-in-Residence, who also writes the Growth Unhinged newsletter. One found that customers add seats at nearly 10x the rate in month one as in month 11.
If your own byline has no audience yet, you can borrow that move and bring in an analyst whose name already has one.
Smallest version your team could copy. Pick one odd question your product can answer, pull one anonymised cut, make one chart, and show legal before you show anyone else. If you don’t have enough customers to anonymise, one named customer can still give you numbers nobody else has, and a case study sales will use is a smaller place to start.
The famous names on other lists
Other lists of thought leadership examples lean on Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, McKinsey’s State of AI and Microsoft’s Work Trend Index. That’s good work, and it’s also the better filter from the top of this post. A famous name took years to build, and those research reports run on budgets your team probably doesn’t have. Show them to your CEO as inspiration, then plan from what’s on board.
Which example to show your CEO
Start with an inventory and skip the wish list. Go through the sections above in order and note what’s on board at your company right now, then put one page in front of your CEO with these five things on it.
- The example. Pick one from this list and include the link. One example is easier to say yes to than a swipe file of 14.
- What you’d use. Name the person, dataset or process you’d start from.
- The smallest version. Say what would ship this quarter.
- What you need from them. Ask for a specific amount of time, which is likely 30 minutes.
- How you’ll know it worked. Use the signals in the next section.
If your CEO wants a reason to try it, Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2025 report, based on nearly 2,000 professionals, has some useful numbers. 53% of B2B decision-makers say brand recognition counts for less when a company’s thought leadership is strong. Among hidden buyers, the people in finance, legal and procurement who can block a deal, 86% favor perspectives that challenge their assumptions. Edelman sells this work and LinkedIn sells the ads around it, so treat those numbers as a reason to test the idea, not a forecast.
How to tell if thought leadership is working
Expect this to be harder to measure than a campaign. Organizations in Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2024 report call their thought leadership under-resourced, misused and not measured appropriately, and nearly one in five marketers in Orbit’s survey can’t say whether their blog delivers results.
Agree on the signals before you publish, because they usually show up in conversations before they show up in dashboards.
- Sales mentions. Ask reps to note when a prospect brings up a post or a person by name.
- A “How did you hear about us?” field. Free text on your demo form catches what attribution tools miss.
- Replies and subscribers. People who answer a post or sign up for the next one are telling you it landed.
- AI citations. Original numbers and named frameworks give AI answers something to cite, so check whether you show up in ChatGPT for the topic.
These signals usually take months to build, so give one format a fair run before you judge it.
Thought leadership FAQs
What does thought leadership mean?
Thought leadership means publishing a view or evidence that changes how people in your market think about a problem, from someone with the experience to back it. The term describes the effect on the reader more than a format, so a LinkedIn post, a survey and a public handbook can all qualify.
What’s the difference between thought leadership and content marketing?
Content marketing is the broader practice, and thought leadership is one of the types of content marketing you can choose from. A how-to guide can be excellent content marketing without any new view or new evidence in it. An article built on an expert interview can do both jobs at once.
What are thought leadership articles?
Thought leadership articles are built on something the publisher alone can contribute, such as an expert interview, original data or a stance they’ll defend. The First Round, Orbit and Gong pieces above are all articles, and each one would be hard for another company to copy by swapping the logo.
Start with what’s already on board
The fix on Apollo 13 was a hose, a sock and duct tape, and it helped get three astronauts home. Your first piece of thought leadership has a much lower bar to clear. Pick the first section in this post that describes your company, copy the smallest version, and publish it before anyone orders a research report.
If your experts know things your buyers need to hear and none of them has time to write it, book a call with me. You can also see how the interviews and articles work, and what they cost.
