The company’s primary focus is on feel-good shareable lifestyle content, and their primary audience is millennial to middle-aged women. The company hasn’t raised any venture capital, but has operated at a profit every year.

The vast majority of LittleThings’ ad revenue has come from programmatic sales, but, says Joe Speiser, cofounder of LittleThings, they now have the cash on hand to build out a direct sales team and start going after more brand partnerships.

“The last thing we were going to do [early on] was build a large sales force. Over time, we kept investing into that programmatic platform and now we have one of the most sophisticated header bidding systems out there,” he says.

New hires include Chris McLoughlin, formerly of Undertone, who will join as SVP of sales and marketing at LittleThings. Joining him will be sales veterans Maureen Mooney, Mary Gallagher, Brenda Kras, Kate Chapman and Kate Calabrese all of whom have experience with Internet news and lifestyle verticals. Andrea Rothchild will make an internal move to round out the team.

“The cart came before the horse in terms of traffic and brand. We don’t have much brand recognition, but we have massive traffic,” says Speiser. With the addition of direct sales, Speiser says he plans for LittleThings to start building brand recognition as well.

“Right now, we’re still 99% programmatic, but by Q4, we’ll see substantial contributions from that sales team,” he says.