I will be walking you through three examples of this, including my own: what drove each of them to content, what happened when they committed to it, and why I think more founders should be asking themselves the same question.

100 celebrity- and creator-founded brands. How much they raised, who invested, and at what valuations.

Want access? Available here in our latest database.

Here's what's inside:
→ Celebrity name + type (A-list, athlete, creator, etc.)
→ Brand, vertical, and one-liner
→ Exact amount raised + the stage (pre-seed through growth)
→ Which investors actually wrote the check
→ Latest valuation, where it's public

When most people talk about creator-founders, they picture the same thing. Someone who spent years building an audience, figured out what their followers wanted, and then launched a product to sell to them. Think MrBeast with Feastables or Emma Chamberlain with Chamberlain Coffee. That model is real and it works.

But there is a second type. The entrepreneur who already had a business and no meaningful following, hit a specific problem they could not solve any other way, and discovered that content was the most efficient solution available. They did not set out to build an audience. They set out to solve something. The audience showed up because the solution worked.

Three examples of such creator-founders below illustrate this, including my own.

Three years ago, Ford Coleman was running a recruiting agency placing early career candidates into jobs. His entire pipeline came from networking events and word of mouth. People referred clients because they knew who Ford was. That worked until he wanted to grow beyond the circle of people who already knew him.

His question was simple: how do I get more people to know who Ford is? Social media was the obvious answer. He was not trying to build a personal brand. He was trying to solve a lead generation problem for an agency he was already running.

He started sharing what he actually learned doing the work: how to interview well, how to rewrite a resume so it gets callbacks, how to stand out in a market where thousands of people are applying to the same roles. The audience started growing and so did the agency, which he scaled to $500,000 in ARR.

Then the audience started telling him something he had not expected. He was getting hundreds of DMs a day from college students all describing the same failing strategy: mass applying to thousands of jobs and hearing nothing back. He already knew from years of agency work what actually got people hired. The demand signal was impossible to ignore. Runway, a job search platform built around the system he had already proven by hand, was the obvious next step.

He now has a combined following of around 400,000 across platforms, 35,000 students using his company Runway, and 75,000 newsletter subscribers. He did not build an audience and then look for something to sell. He built an audience to grow a business he already had, and the audience pointed him toward an even bigger opportunity.

Another creator-founder with a similar story is Haley Pavone, founder of Pashion Footwear. She founded the company in 2016 after a stiletto impaled her foot at a sorority formal. She spent years building the world's first fully convertible heel, a shoe that transforms into a flat in seconds. She had patented technology, a genuinely innovative product, and a problem: without someone explaining how it worked, nobody understood it.

The proof came from a test at Von Maur, a mid-size department store chain across the US. On days Haley or her team demonstrated the shoes in store, the try-on-to-purchase rate ran near 100%, and they beat sales targets by 300%. On days they left the shoes on the shelf without explanation, the product barely sold. The bottleneck was clear. The message worked. The message did not travel without her there to deliver it.

Her plan was to hire influencers to make educational videos demonstrating the product. But on a startup budget, she refused to pay for content before knowing what worked, so she made a TikTok account herself as the free test. She posted product demos, showing the heel twisting off, the flat popping in, the whole transformation in seconds. The first viral video took her from 2,000 to 250,000 followers in under 24 hours. She never commissioned the influencers. She put on the influencer hat instead.

The content then evolved beyond product demos. Her audience kept asking what it was like to run a business as a young female founder, so she leaned into radical transparency: metrics, rejections, the losses. That compounded. The following she built is 97% women and almost perfectly matched to her customer, because it was built on the product story rather than personal fame. Today Pashion is an eight-figure brand with nearly 1 million TikTok followers, zero ad spend, and 95% organic customer acquisition.

Haley was not trying to be a content creator. She was trying to figure out how to get the product message to travel at scale without her physically being in every room. The audience was the side effect.

My own story fits the same pattern. When I started working with celebrities and creators in 2021, helping them structure equity deals with startups, the thesis was simple: celebrities should be co-owners of the brands they helped build, not just paid faces on the label.

But when I pitched celebrities, creators, and their managers, I kept getting the same response. Why would I bet on some unknown startup when Nike is offering me a million dollars for three posts? The case for equity was not obvious yet. The market was not ready for it.

I could not change that one conversation at a time. So I turned to content. Not to build a personal brand. To educate a market. I started posting on LinkedIn about how equity deals get structured, why ownership creates more wealth than fees, what the Ryan Reynolds model actually looks like on a cap table. I had no content strategy. I had a point of view and enough conviction to keep posting every single day for years.

Then something happened. The people I was trying to reach started finding me. Celebrities, creators, and their teams began sliding into my DMs asking for help structuring their own equity deals. Founders who wanted a celebrity co-founder reached out for advice. The inbound compounded. I was not marketing. I was educating. The inbound was a side effect.

Four years later, I have over 50,000 followers, 30 million content views, and a venture fund actively investing in some of the largest celebrity- and creator-founded brands in the market. The content was never the plan. It became the foundation.

Ford needed more people to know who he was. Haley needed to get a message to travel at scale without her physically delivering it. I needed to educate a market that was not yet convinced. Three completely different problems, three completely different businesses. But the same underlying story.

None of us set out to be content creators. We all hit a specific wall that content turned out to be the most efficient way to climb. And in each case, the audience we built while solving that problem became one of the most valuable things in the business. For Ford, it first helped him scale his agency and then pointed him toward an entirely new product. For Haley, it became her customer base, her product development team, and her entire marketing engine. For me, it became the deal flow and LP pipeline that makes HotStart work.

The conventional wisdom about creator-founders is that you build the audience first and then figure out what to sell it. But some of the best businesses being built right now are going in the other direction. The product came first. The problem came second. The content was the solution. And the audience was what happened when the solution worked.

Which raises a question worth sitting with if you are a founder reading this and not yet creating content. You subscribed to this newsletter because you are interested in the advantages that come with building an audience: the trust, the distribution, the ability to activate people the moment you have something worth sharing. Why not start building that yourself?

The best content creators are not always people who wanted to be famous. Some of them had a problem that content turned out to be the most effective answer to. They posted because they had to, not because they planned to. And the ones who kept going long enough discovered that the audience they built along the way was worth more than whatever problem they originally set out to solve.

If you are building something right now and hitting a wall that feels impossible to climb, it is worth asking whether content is the tool you have been avoiding. Not because you want followers. Because it might be the most effective thing you have not tried yet.

This week, I'm joined by Giselle Orentas, a creator entrepreneur with hundreds of thousands of followers and the founder of Balangy, a premium body care brand formulated to support hormonal wellness using only organic ingredients.

Giselle breaks down how 20 years of hormonal migraines led her to discover wild yam and build Balangy, why she spent two years searching for a manufacturing partner who could honor her commitment to fully organic ingredients, and how her content audience of hundreds of thousands of followers became the foundation for driving sales without spending a single dollar on ads. We also talk about her upcoming overnight deodorant that cleans your underarms while you sleep, and why she turned down acquisition offers because she wanted to learn every aspect of building the company herself.

Now available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

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.