I was doing a routine review, going through the hundreds of celebrity and creator-founded brands I have spoken to about potentially investing in over the years. Many are pre-market, pre-revenue, early stage companies we are evaluating. And I started tracking which ones had actually launched and which ones had not. The number that came back surprised me. 28% had never launched. Not a single product shipped. Not a single customer acquired.

This week I am breaking down what is behind that number and what it tells you about how to evaluate a celebrity brand deal before you write a check.

Every single one of those deals that never launched came with the same pitch when I first spoke to them. This is the celebrity's life work. They are more passionate about this than anything they have ever done. They will go above and beyond to make this successful. The commitment is total.

I have heard that pitch hundreds of times. It is almost word for word identical across deals. And when someone says it with enough conviction, it is genuinely compelling. You want to believe it. The celebrity sounds motivated. The opportunity looks real. The deck is polished.

And then the brand never ships a product. 28% of the time, the company described as a celebrity's life's work never made it to market.

When I dug into the patterns behind that 28%, things got more interesting. It was not random. Several of the brands that never launched were attached to the same celebrity. In one case, the same person was listed as co-founder of three separate companies in my CRM, across three different categories, with three different founding teams, none of whom knew the others existed. All three never launched.

In one week, I was pitched a hydration brand by an athlete. Later that same week, a completely different founding team pitched me a coffee brand. Same athlete at the top of the deck. Neither team knew about the other.

Another week, I was pitched a pet food brand by the model married to a well-known athlete. A few days later, a separate team in a completely different category also listed her as their celebrity co-founder.

This is not one or two edge cases. It is a pattern. Celebrities and their teams are saying yes to multiple opportunities simultaneously, often without telling any of the founding teams about the others. Every one of those deals gets pitched to investors with the same language. Life's work. Total commitment. Going above and beyond.

Most of them will never launch.

There are a few structural reasons behind it.

The first is capital. Investors have gotten smarter about celebrity brands. A famous name in a pitch deck does not close a round the way it used to. Founding teams know this, so they try to secure the celebrity commitment first and raise on the back of it. But because capital is harder to raise, many of those teams never get funded. The celebrity, who often commits conditionally, moves on. The brand dies before it starts.

The softer version of this is that celebrities have started making very loose commitments. I will be your co-founder, feel free to name me in the deck, but I will not lean in until the round is closed. Which sounds reasonable until you realise that the round is being pitched largely on the strength of the celebrity's involvement. It is a circular problem that quietly kills a lot of deals.

The second reason is time. Building a brand takes years. Celebrities live in a world where attention moves fast and new opportunities arrive constantly. A celebrity who was genuinely excited about a supplement brand in early 2023 may have had three other major projects come along by 2024. The brand they committed to is still in product development. Their focus has moved on. The founding team is still waiting for a commitment that is never coming.

The third is personal change. Life shifts. A celebrity who drank when they committed to a spirits brand no longer drinks. Someone who was publicly focused on fitness has moved on to a different chapter of their life. A person who seemed perfectly aligned with the brand's identity has gone through something that makes the fit awkward. These things happen over the twelve to twenty-four months it takes to actually build a company. And when they do, the deal quietly dies.

None of this means you should not invest in celebrity-founded brands. It means you need to ask a different set of questions than most investors are asking, specifically around the celebrity themselves.

Evaluating the product, the market, and the unit economics matters enormously. We have written about all of those in depth. But none of that due diligence is worth much if the celebrity attached to the brand is not actually going to show up. And the only way to know that is to sit down with them directly and ask the questions that actually matter.

Why does this matter to you personally? What else are you working on right now? How many other brand commitments have you made in the last twelve months? Where does this rank among your current priorities? What does your calendar look like for the next eighteen months? How are you personally contributing beyond attaching your name? What has changed in your life since you first started talking about this brand?

The answers to those questions tell you more about whether a deal will actually happen than almost anything else in the diligence process.

And this brings it back to the pitch that comes with every single one of these deals. This is my life's work. I am more passionate about this than anything I have ever done.

If that is genuinely true, a $3 million seed round is not what stands between this celebrity and building their brand. The ones who mean it find a way regardless. They bootstrap the first version. They fund the first samples themselves. They show up to meetings without being asked. They are already doing the work before a check arrives.

The 28% who never launched all said the same thing. The difference between them and the ones who did was not the pitch. It was whether they showed up when nobody was watching and nothing was guaranteed.

A brand in a pitch deck is not a brand. An LOI is not a commitment. A celebrity saying this is their life's work is not due diligence. It is the starting point of due diligence.

The most important thing you can evaluate in any celebrity brand deal is whether the person attached to it is genuinely building something or collecting options. The pitch will always sound the same. The difference shows up in how they answer the questions nobody else thought to ask, and whether they were already doing the work before you showed up.

28% never launched. Every one of them sounded exactly like the ones that did.

About HotStart VC

HotStart VC is launching a new fund to invest in brands founded by celebrities and creators. We’re building the go-to platform for creators and celebrities launching brands, providing capital, strategic support, and the infrastructure to scale.