The irony is impossible to ignore. Every week, I write about how creators and celebrities build businesses on top of audiences they spent years earning before anyone asked them to buy anything. The audience comes first. The business gets built on top of it. That is the core thesis behind every investment we make at HotStart. It is also, without me planning it that way, exactly how HotStart was built.

This week, I'm pulling back the curtain on how content became HotStart's most valuable asset, why I'm now doubling down with a $100,000 personal investment, and why I think we're still in the very early innings of what this space becomes.

Four years ago, I launched Influencer Capital. The idea was simple: help startups structure equity deals with celebrities and creators instead of paying cash for endorsements. I believed deeply that celebrities should be co-owners of the brands they helped build, not just faces on the label.

But when I pitched the idea to celebrities, creators, and their managers, I kept getting the same response. Why would I bet on some startup I've never heard of when Nike is offering me $1 million for three posts? The financial case for equity wasn't obvious yet. The space wasn't ready.

So I started thinking about how to accelerate it. The answer I kept coming back to was education. If I could show celebrities, creators, and their teams why equity beats cash, with real data and real case studies, the market would move faster. So I started posting on LinkedIn. How equity deals get structured. Why celebrities who take ownership build more wealth than those who take fees. What the Ryan Reynolds model actually looks like on a cap table. Case studies of the ones working and honest breakdowns of the ones failing.

I didn't have a content strategy. I had a point of view, a LinkedIn account, and enough conviction to keep posting every single day for years.

Then something unexpected happened. The content started reaching the people I was trying to reach. Celebrities, creators, and their teams began sliding into my DMs, not to push back, but to ask for help structuring their own startup equity deals. Founders who wanted a celebrity co-founder reached out wanting advice and my help. The inbound started compounding.

I wasn't marketing. I was educating. The inbound was a side effect.

Four years later: 36,000 LinkedIn 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 wasn't the plan. It became the foundation.

This is where it gets interesting. Because what content built for HotStart is structurally identical to what I've been writing about for four years.

The core idea: if you can build an audience of people who trust you, you have an unfair advantage over everyone starting from zero.

The examples are everywhere. Just two weeks ago, Alix Earle launched Reale Actives, her acne skincare brand, and hit $1 million in sales in under five minutes. Not because the products were the most innovative in beauty. Because she had spent years building genuine trust with an audience who had watched her skin journey in real time. The content came first. The customers followed.

Without fully realizing it, HotStart launched as a creator-founded brand, with the creator being me. Exactly the model we invest in. I didn't raise a venture fund and then try to earn credibility in the celebrity brand space. I earned credibility through content, and the fund was built on top of that foundation.

I've spent years writing about why celebrity- and creator-founded brands succeed. The reason they succeed is the same reason HotStart is growing. When people trust you before you ask them to do anything, everything downstream gets easier.

After seeing the strategy work on LinkedIn, I knew I had to expand. So I launched this newsletter, the HotStart VC podcast, and short-form video on Instagram and TikTok at the end of last year. Early results across all three channels confirm the same dynamic: consistent, specific content about a space people care about attracts exactly the right people, specifically the founders, LPs, and operators I need to make HotStart work.

So now I'm doubling down deliberately. This year I'm personally investing $100,000 to scale the content operation. Professional short-form video production across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. A dedicated newsletter growth strategy. New equipment. Expert advice. Distribution infrastructure.

Done correctly, this starts a flywheel that becomes HotStart's most durable competitive advantage. Here's the logic, in the right order:

1. Attract Better Deal Flow To invest in the next SKIMS, Feastables, or Rhode, you first need to know they exist. That sounds obvious. But most funds don't hear about the best celebrity brand deals until they're already oversubscribed or publicly announced. HotStart gets the call early because founders have been reading our content for months before they raise. They reach out because they identify us as the investor who understands this space better than anyone else. Content turns cold sourcing into warm inbound. In venture, that's the difference between fighting for allocation and getting offered it.

2. Win Better Deals Capital is not green. In the best deals, founders choose investors based on what they bring beyond the check. HotStart can offer something most funds genuinely cannot: a media platform with a highly engaged audience of celebrities/creators, founders, operators, and investors who are interested in exactly what the founder is building. When two similar checks are on the table, and one comes with distribution, a built-in launch platform, and access to the most plugged-in community in this space, founders choose that one every time. Content is what gives us the opportunity to invest in the best deals.

3. Be a Stronger Value-Add Partner Once we're in, the platform compounds the investment. Through content, we can put eyeballs on a portfolio company at the moments that matter most, whether that's a product launch, a new fundraise, or a key hire. That direct exposure to the most engaged audience in this space helps our companies scale faster.

4. Generate Returns This is the whole point. The goal of a venture fund is to return capital to LPs, and everything above is designed to do exactly that. Better deal flow means we see the best opportunities first. Being a genuine value-add means we win the right to invest in them. And because we help portfolio companies scale faster, we can invest in the most successful ones and help them exit at higher valuations, returning more capital to LPs. Better exits build a track record, and that track record closes the flywheel back to step one by attracting the next wave of celebrity and creator founders.

There is a second dimension worth naming. As the audience grows, the content operation generates its own revenue through sponsorships and brand partnerships, revenue we can reinvest to grow the platform faster. It also continues to attract LPs who discover HotStart through content, which means we can raise more funds ourselves, write larger tickets into portfolio companies, and eventually have more impact. 

It becomes a media platform that funds itself while simultaneously driving deal flow, deal wins, and fund credibility, which is a moat that gets harder to replicate the longer we build it.

Here's the underlying assumption behind the $100,000 investment: there is no dedicated media platform for the celebrity and creator-founded brand space yet.

No Bloomberg for celebrity- or creator-founded brands. No publication that serious founders, investors, and operators treat as essential reading when a new celebrity or creator brand launches or raises. That gap exists not because nobody saw the opportunity, but because the category is still early. Until recently, there simply weren't enough celebrity or creator brands to sustain a dedicated platform.

But that's changing fast. SKIMS is valued at $5 billion. Rhode sold to e.l.f. Beauty for $1 billion. Feastables is doing $250 million in revenue in year three. Alix Earle did $5 million in a single afternoon last week. These outcomes are not being ignored. Every celebrity with a manager and every creator with an audience is now actively figuring out what brand they should launch.

I predict there will be 5-10x more celebrity and creator-founded brands three years from now than there are today. The category is going from niche to mainstream. And when that happens, the platform that was already there, with the audience, the archive, and the credibility, wins by default. That is the gap HotStart is positioning to fill, not because we planned it from day one, but because we have been building here consistently for four years and are now getting intentional about it.

I spent four years writing about how celebrities and creators build businesses on top of audiences they built before anyone asked them to buy anything. The thesis is simple: distribution built through trust is the most durable competitive advantage a founder can have.

Without fully realizing it, I proved it on myself. HotStart became a creator-founded venture fund, which is exactly the thesis we invest in. The content came first. The credibility followed. The businesses were built on top of that. And now we are investing $100,000 to make that intentional rather than accidental.

The celebrities I write about don't see content as marketing. They see it as infrastructure. The most important asset they own. I've come to see HotStart the same way.

Content is the moat. The audience is the asset. I'm just getting started building mine.

This week, I'm joined by Jackie Fast, General Partner at Sandbox Studios, a fund that exclusively invests in celebrity-founded brands, with a portfolio that includes Dr. Bombay by Snoop Dogg and Safely by Kris Jenner. Before launching Sandbox, Jackie founded Slingshot Sponsorship, helping brands like the Rolling Stones, Prince, and Elton John leverage celebrity influence to reach new audiences.

Jackie breaks down why she believes every brand will have a recognizable face attached to it within five years, how she structures celebrity deals to avoid the mistakes most investors make, and why she would never invest in a celebrity holding company despite what other funds are doing. We also dive into how Safely by Kris Jenner generated 1.2 billion views and moved 120,000 units in Target, and what most investors get completely wrong when evaluating celebrity founders.

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.