Founder who knew she had “lots to say” creates AI tool that helps others say it
The Editor
Thistl is an AI social media assistant that helps new founders and business leaders build the personal brand that grows their business.
A new AI-powered social media assistant launches on 1 October, addressing the common struggle of creating social content that sounds genuinely personal without spending hours on each post. Thistl, developed by marketing strategist Lucy Smith, uses speech-to-text technology to help founders create social content that sounds like them.
The platform tackles a familiar challenge: the disconnect between spoken confidence and the written word. Business owners excel at discussing their expertise in person but struggle to translate that into engaging social media content, spending anything from 15 minutes to hours crafting a single post before settling for generic messaging, or worse, not publishing anything at all.
Thistl uses a self-service onboarding process with speech-to-text and dictation technology to capture how each user communicates. This trains the AI on individual communication patterns, enabling content creation that maintains personal style while cutting time investment.
Alpha testing showed strong user satisfaction with both the onboarding process and platform performance. Users noted that "it avoids the usual AI giveaways like em dashes, rhetorical questions, or clichéd phrases – the content feels more human and less templated." Testers consistently reported being "impressed how it got my tone of voice instantly."
"Thistl is the tool I needed when I set up my own business in August 2024. I knew I had lots to say, but didn't have the confidence to say any of it," said Lucy Smith, founder of Thistl. "I'm hoping I can give more founders and business owners the tools to show up for themselves online, using their voice. We're not about replacing your voice - more about amplifying it."
Unlike generic AI content generators that require complex prompting, Thistl operates simply: users provide context about what they want to communicate, and Thistl creates posts based on that input.
Thistl is available at an early adoption price of £18 per month for individual users until the end of 2025.
