Kevin Hart has 180 million social media followers. His tequila brand recently crossed $200 million in cumulative retail sales and became one of the fastest-growing in the category. His vegan restaurant chain closed all four locations without warning. His media company has been through three CEOs, laid off nearly a quarter of its workforce, and this week was the subject of a Bloomberg investigation into a year of internal chaos.

Same celebrity. Same platform. Same reach. Three completely different outcomes. This week, I am breaking down exactly why, and what it tells you about how celebrity brands actually succeed and fail.

Every time I write about a celebrity brand hitting $100 million in revenue or selling for a billion dollars, the same reply shows up. Sometimes it is a one-liner. Sometimes it is a paragraph. But the sentiment is always identical. Of course it worked. They have 50 million followers. Anyone could sell a product with that kind of reach. The celebrity is the whole story.

I understand why people think this. The launch numbers are staggering. The press coverage focuses on the famous face. The narrative writes itself. Celebrity launches brand. Millions of fans buy it. Brand succeeds.

But then you look at the actual data and the story falls apart immediately. For every SKIMS, there are dozens of celebrity brands that launched to identical fanfare and disappeared within two years. For every Gran Coramino, there is a Hart House. And in Kevin Hart's case, both of those examples belong to the same person with the same 180 million followers.

If follower count determined brand success, everything Kevin Hart touches should work. It does not. And that is the most instructive thing about his portfolio right now.

Gran Coramino, Kevin Hart's tequila brand co-founded with 11th-generation tequila maker Juan Domingo Beckmann in 2022, crossed $200 million in cumulative retail sales last month. It grew 100% in volume in 2025 alone, in a year when the overall tequila category declined 4.1%. It climbed from the 31st to the 22nd biggest tequila brand in the US out of more than 3,000 competitors. In a crowded, declining category, it became one of the standout growth stories in the entire spirits industry.

Hart House was Kevin Hart's attempt to solve a problem he experienced personally. After shifting toward a plant-based diet, he noticed how difficult it was to find quality vegan options in the fast food lane, right in between a McDonald's and a Burger King. So he built one. Four locations across Los Angeles. A mission to make plant-based food accessible, affordable, and genuinely good. The ambition was real. The vision was clear. But in September 2024, less than two years after opening, all four locations closed simultaneously without a public explanation.

Hartbeat, his media company, was built on an even grander vision. Hart looked at what Reese Witherspoon had done with Hello Sunshine and what LeBron James had built with SpringHill and believed he could do the same. In 2022, he merged his existing entertainment businesses, raised $100 million from private equity at a $650 million valuation, and set out to build a company that could produce films, own digital channels, and develop talent beyond himself. Three CEOs later, with multiple rounds of layoffs and a Bloomberg investigation published this week detailing a year of internal conflict and stalled projects, the gap between that vision and the current reality is significant.

Three businesses. Same founder. Same platform. Three completely different stories.

The cynics would say Hart's tequila succeeded because of his reach. But that explanation collapses the moment you look at how many celebrity spirits brands have launched and failed with equally famous founders behind them. There are more than 650 celebrity spirits brands in existence. Most are struggling or already gone.

Gran Coramino worked for reasons that have very little to do with Hart's follower count. He did not licence his name to an existing product. He co-founded the brand with Juan Domingo Beckmann, whose family received the first licence from the King of Spain to produce tequila commercially. That is not a marketing story. That is genuine product credibility brought in at the foundation. The liquid itself won more than 55 international spirits awards. Hart showed up not just for launch campaigns but for trade events, sales calls, retail activations, and distributor meetings across the country. He treated it like a business he was building, not a brand deal he was cashing.

The category was also right. Premium tequila has been one of the strongest performing spirits segments of the last decade. Consumers in that space are discerning enough to repeat purchase when they find quality. The fundamentals underneath Gran Coramino were strong enough that the celebrity amplified a real business rather than substituting for one.

Hart House failed because the celebrity-product-market fit was broken from the start. Hart's brand is built on comedy, relatability, and hustle. His audience follows him for laughs and motivation, not lifestyle guidance or dietary choices. When he posted about Hart House, the response was nothing like his comedy content. The audience alignment simply was not there.

The category compounded the problem. Fast food restaurant chains operate on brutally thin margins with high labour costs and intense competition. Vegan fast food specifically was contracting in 2024, with established plant-based chains closing locations across the country. These are structural headwinds that no amount of celebrity attention can overcome when the underlying economics do not work.

Hartbeat illustrates a third failure mode, and arguably the most instructive one for anyone thinking about celebrity-founded companies.

Media companies built around a single talent face a structural tension that is almost impossible to resolve cleanly. The company needs the celebrity to sell deals, anchor projects, and provide the platform that justifies its valuation. But for the company to grow beyond the founder, it also needs to operate independently of them. Those two things pull in opposite directions constantly.

When the celebrity is too involved, the company can only do things the founder cares about. When the celebrity steps back, the commercial rationale for the company weakens. Hartbeat appears to have cycled through both problems simultaneously, with leadership trying to scale the business while the founder remained the gravitational center of everything it did.

It is the same tension that has made celebrity media companies one of the hardest structures to get right. The famous name is both an asset and the liability at the same time.

Kevin Hart is not an outlier. The same pattern appears across many major celebrity portfolio.

Selena Gomez has 429 million Instagram followers. Her company Rare Beauty is one of the most successful celebrity brands ever built. But Wondermind, the mental health platform she co-founded in 2021 with the mission to make mental fitness tools more accessible, raised $5 million from investors including Serena Williams' VC fund and launched with genuine purpose behind it. Despite Gomez's unmatched platform, Wondermind struggled with engagement, growth, and revenue, and recently went through a significant round of layoffs. Same founder. Same 429 million followers. Completely different outcomes determined entirely by the fundamentals underneath each business.

MrBeast's Feastables did $250 million in annual revenue in year three and is becoming a genuine challenger to legacy chocolate brands on supermarket shelves. MrBeast Burger became one of the most high-profile celebrity food failures in recent memory, undone by quality control problems and eventually shut down. Same creator. Same 480 million subscribers. The product and operational execution determined everything.

Here is what surprises people when I tell them. HotStart VC invests exclusively in celebrity and creator-founded brands. It is our entire thesis. And yet the celebrity is probably the fourth or fifth factor we evaluate when looking at any deal.

We look at the market. Is the category growing? Is there genuine room for a new entrant? Are the unit economics survivable? Hart House launched into a contracting category with punishing margins in one of the most expensive cities in the country. No platform fixes that.

We look at the product. Is it genuinely competitive on quality? Will people come back after the launch moment fades? Gran Coramino spent serious time on the liquid before a single bottle hit a shelf. Hart House had decent food but not a compelling enough reason to exist over the alternatives already available in Los Angeles.

We look at the team. Who is running this day to day? Do they have the experience to scale it? Gran Coramino had an 11th-generation tequila maker as co-founder and a seasoned spirits executive managing distribution and trade relationships. Those are not decorative hires.

And there are many more factors beyond those three. We broke them all down in a previous edition of this newsletter. The point is that the celebrity, despite being our entire investment thesis, is just one of the ingredients. And no person illustrates that more clearly than Kevin Hart. The same 180 million followers showed up for all three businesses. The fundamentals underneath each one told three completely different stories.

The cynics who say celebrity brands succeed purely because of follower count are wrong. The same person with the same 180 million followers built one of the fastest growing tequila brands in America and closed a restaurant chain in the same year. Fame is a constant. The fundamentals are the variable.

But the people who dismiss celebrity involvement entirely are also wrong. Gran Coramino did not reach $200 million in a declining category on product quality alone. Hart's presence at trade events, his genuine commitment beyond launch day, and the awareness his platform generated all mattered. The celebrity was a real accelerant. The product, the market, and the team were the engine.

The brands that win are the ones where a committed celebrity co-founder meets a growing market, a product worth coming back for, and a team that knows how to build. When those things align, the famous name becomes a genuine competitive advantage. When they do not, it becomes an expensive reminder that fame was never enough on its own.

That combination is what we look for at HotStart. It is rarer than the believers admit and more demanding than the cynics think.

This week, I'm joined by Aris, the creator entrepreneur behind The European Kid, a viral French rich kid character that built him 3 million followers and 3 billion views. That platform became the foundation for Storytime, a hyper-local marketplace matching businesses with creators in their neighborhood where creators pay with content and businesses pay with experiences.

Aris breaks down how he built Storytime after spending hours in DMs trying to set up brand deals that should have taken minutes, why a college student with 4,000 local followers is more valuable to a restaurant than someone with 100,000 followers in Brazil, and how he closed deals with Cava, Joe & The Juice, and Oakberry by DMing their founders directly. Storytime is now live in over 1,000 locations across New York City and just expanded to Miami.

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.