Platform refactoring and Angular migration for a creator economy platform

Google ended long-term support for AngularJS on December 31, 2021. Since then there have been no official security patches, no browser compatibility fixes, and no new releases. Yet plenty of successful products still run on it, because they were built when AngularJS was the obvious choice and they've been busy growing ever since.

That's a quiet kind of risk. Nothing breaks on the day support ends. Instead, each year gets a little harder. Libraries stop supporting the old framework, fewer developers want to work in it, and every new feature has to be squeezed into a codebase that was never meant to last this long.

At some point the question stops being whether to migrate and becomes how to do it without stopping the business.

ThoughtLeaders connects brands with YouTube creators for sponsorship deals. The platform covers the whole workflow, from matching brands with the right creators to proposals, contracts, production, and live campaign reporting. By their own count, it has handled more than 25,000 collaborations and over $50 million in creator deals, across a network of more than 10,000 creators and 300 brands.

A platform with that much going through it can't be paused for a rewrite. Brands expect their dashboards, creators expect their deals to move, and the sales team expects new features to keep coming.

But much of that platform was built on AngularJS, and parts of the codebase had become hard to work in. Changes took longer than they should, and every one carried the risk of breaking something nearby. The team needed two things at once: relief in the code they had, and a realistic route to the code they wanted.

We started with the part of the platform people use most: the grid pages. These are the tables where brands, creators, deals, and campaign results get listed, searched, and compared, and there are a lot of them.

We refactored the shared layout behind all of them, including full pagination, search, and filtering. Then we made the whole thing configurable, so any grid-like reporting page can reuse the same component instead of carrying its own copy of the logic. A new report becomes a matter of configuration, not another page built from scratch.

That paid off straight away. A fix or improvement to the grid now lands everywhere at once, and the pages behave the same way wherever a user finds them. It also made the eventual migration smaller, because one well-built, reusable component is far easier to move than many pages that each do things slightly differently.

A full rewrite is where many teams get into trouble. The classic mistake is to freeze the old system, disappear for a year, and hope the new one matches everything the old one quietly did.

So we planned the migration from AngularJS to Angular around the business, not the other way round. The plan sets out what moves first, how old and new parts of the platform live side by side in the meantime, and how each step can be tested and shipped on its own. Users keep working throughout, and the team always has a working product to fall back on.

With the plan agreed, we initiated the full rewrite in Angular and TypeScript.

Angular is the actively supported successor to AngularJS, and TypeScript brings type checking that catches a whole class of bugs before they ever reach users. Together they give ThoughtLeaders a foundation that's easier to hire for, easier to upgrade, and much easier to trust when the next big feature comes along.

Across 2024 and 2025, we helped ThoughtLeaders turn a hard-to-change legacy codebase into one the team can work in, and set the platform on a clear path off an unsupported framework.

The grid refactoring made today's development faster and safer. The migration plan made the rewrite manageable, and the first stage of that rewrite is in place. For a platform that brands and creators depend on every day, that's the right order to do things in: stabilize what's running, plan the move carefully, then build what comes next.