Almost every week I hear a version of the same pitch. A founder has a concept, a deck, and a celebrity name already in the picture. The logic always follows the same path. The celebrity has 20 million followers. If just 5% convert at $50 per product, that is $50 million in revenue. The math sounds compelling on a slide. But the founders running it are solving the wrong problem. They are focused on distribution before they have figured out whether the product is worth distributing.

This week I am breaking down why celebrity co-founders are consistently being used at the wrong stage, what the right stage looks like, and why getting the sequence right is one of the most consequential decisions in celebrity brand building.

We just published our May 2026 celebrity- and creator-founded brand report, covering every launch, raise, equity deal, and milestone in the ecosystem this month.

Inside:
✅ 13 new launches — the celebrity/creator, the story, the product 
✅ 5 funding rounds — how much raised and who invested 
✅ 5 equity deals — celebrities and creators joining cap tables 
✅ 6 milestones — exits, revenue jumps, and category-shaping moves 
✅ Plus more — shutdowns, pivots, and other notable moves

You can find the full report here.

A founder reaches out. They have a concept, a deck, and somewhere in the first few slides, a famous name listed as co-founder. Sometimes it is a signed letter of intent. Sometimes it is a verbal commitment from a manager. Sometimes the celebrity is already publicly attached before a single product has been made or a single customer has been spoken to.

And then comes the logic. The celebrity has 20 million followers. If only 5% convert at $50 per product, that is $50 million in revenue. It feels like the hard problem is already solved. The distribution is locked. The audience is waiting. All that is left is building the product.

This is almost always backwards. The founders running that calculation believe the celebrity will accelerate the zero to one phase, that the famous name will help them find product-market fit faster and more efficiently than they could alone. That is not how it works. The hard problem at that stage is not distribution. It is product. It is figuring out whether what you are building is genuinely good enough that someone who does not know or care about the celebrity would still want it, and come back for it repeatedly. That problem cannot be solved by a famous name. It can only be solved by making something people actually want, testing it with real customers, taking honest feedback, and iterating until the product finds its place on its own merit. A celebrity co-founder does not increase your chances of success in the zero to one phase. In fact, it can make it significantly harder.

Every startup goes through a zero to one phase. It is messy, iterative, and requires the freedom to be wrong without too many people watching. You ship something imperfect. Real customers tell you what does not work. You fix it quietly and try again. The cost of being wrong is manageable because nobody outside a small group of early users knows or cares yet.

Attach a famous name at that stage and the entire dynamic changes. The launch is no longer a quiet test. It is a public event with a famous person behind it, which means higher expectations, broader coverage, and a much larger audience watching every early stumble. Every flaw reaches millions of people. Every negative review spreads further than it ever would for an unknown brand. Every pivot looks like a failure because the original vision was announced to the world with a celebrity standing behind it.

The harder truth is what happens when the product needs to change. And almost every startup needs to change something, often significantly. Sometimes the pivot is small: a tweak to the formula, a shift in positioning. Sometimes it is fundamental: an entirely different product or target customer. That process of honest iteration is how real businesses get built. An unknown brand can go through it quietly. Most people who had a bad first experience simply move on, and the brand earns a second chance because not enough people were paying close enough attention to notice.

A celebrity brand does not get that window. Millions of people have already formed a permanent opinion based on version one. The famous name that drove the launch is the same name that makes quiet iteration almost impossible. The celebrity did not cause the product problem. But the celebrity made it nearly impossible to solve without the whole world watching.

Prime is the most instructive example in recent memory. YouTubers KSI and Logan Paul launched with a combined audience of hundreds of millions. Year one revenue hit $250 million. Year two hit $1.2 billion. By that point Prime had near-total awareness among Gen Z. It was in every store, every school, every conversation. But the celebrity co-founders brought something else with them too. KSI and Logan Paul had spent years building audiences through controversy, boxing feuds, and chaotic content. That existing baggage meant that when a lawsuit alleged the drink contained harmful chemicals, it did not land the way it might have for a faceless brand. It confirmed what a large portion of the internet already believed about the people behind it. The backlash was not just about the product. It was about trust in the founders, and that trust had been complicated long before Prime launched. Prime tried to respond. They launched new formulations and products. But the narrative had already set. The same celebrity that drove a billion dollars in year two made it almost impossible to reset the story in year three. Only 12% of consumers had ever bought it more than once. UK sales dropped 70% and profits fell more than 90%. All that distribution and all that awareness had amplified a product that was not ready for the scrutiny that came with its founders.

Now consider what might have happened if Prime had spent a year finding the best possible liquid, iterating on taste, and proving that customers genuinely came back before KSI and Logan Paul activated their full platforms. The foundation would have been solid before the distribution arrived. The customers who tried it would have returned. Year three would not have been a collapse. It would have been a compounding business that could have scaled to several billion in annual revenue in the years that followed. The celebrity distribution was extraordinary. The product simply was not ready for it.

That is the sequence that makes celebrity co-founders genuinely unstoppable: bring the famous name to a product that has already earned the right to be distributed at scale. Once you have a product that works, data showing customers come back without being prompted, and early proof that the business has real legs, the celebrity changes everything.

They compress years of awareness building into a single afternoon. They open retail doors that would take an unknown brand a decade to access. They generate press, credibility, and distribution at a speed no marketing budget can replicate. But all of that is only worth something if the product has found genuine product-market fit. The celebrity gets millions of people in the door. The product has to keep them there. Used at the right stage, that combination is genuinely extraordinary. Used too early, it just accelerates how fast the wrong product reaches the wrong conclusion at the largest possible scale.

One of the brands that best illustrates how to do this correctly is Once Upon a Farm. Most people assume it was co-founded by Jennifer Garner, the actress best known for her roles in Alias and 13 Going on 30. That is half the story.

The brand was founded in 2015 by Cassandra Curtis and Ari Raz. They spent two years building a genuinely good product, organic cold-pressed baby food that parents trusted, and earning real repeat customers who came back because the product worked. By 2017 they had proof of product-market fit. What they lacked was distribution and the resources to scale.

Garner was not looking to start a company. She was a mother trying to find healthy food for her kids. She found founders who had already done the zero to one work and had the data to prove it. She joined as co-founder to solve a different problem entirely: scale. She used her platform to put a proven product in front of millions of parents who had never heard of it, and helped get the brand into Walmart, Target, and Kroger.

Earlier this year Once Upon a Farm IPO'd on the NYSE at a $724 million valuation. The company is now in more than 25,000 stores and guiding to $313 to $323 million in revenue for 2026. The celebrity solved the one to ten problem. The founders had already solved the zero to one problem before she arrived. That sequence is the reason it worked.

The advice I give most often to founders thinking about when to bring a celebrity on board is simple: wait longer than you think you need to.

Use the early stage to figure out the product. Talk to real customers without a famous name making them feel obligated to be polite or too cautious to give you an honest reaction. Take feedback that is raw rather than filtered through the weight of celebrity involvement. Iterate until the product finds genuine traction with people who would buy it regardless of who made it.

That phase is uncomfortable and slow. It does not generate the press coverage or investor interest that comes with a famous announcement. And in a space where it feels like everyone is onboarding celebrity co-founders earlier and earlier, the pressure to follow the same playbook is real. But just because the rest of the market is doing it does not mean it is the right move for the stage you are at. The founders getting it right are the ones willing to be patient with the product before they are aggressive with the distribution.

The mistake is not bringing a celebrity on board. The mistake is bringing them in before you have earned the right to use their distribution. Fame amplifies what is already there. If what is there is an unproven product, fame amplifies the failure just as fast as it would have amplified the success.

A celebrity co-founder is one of the most powerful assets in consumer brands. But it is a one to ten tool, not a zero to one tool. It solves the awareness problem, not the product problem. And every founder who confuses those two ends up using the most powerful distribution channel in the industry to test a product that was not ready to be tested at that scale.

The brands that get this right prove the product first. They find product-market fit before anyone famous is involved. They build the foundation quietly, in the dark, without the pressure a famous name brings. And then, once the product is genuinely ready for the scrutiny that comes with a celebrity behind it, they bring in the distribution and let it do what it does best.

Build first. Scale second. Get the order right and a celebrity co-founder is worth everything. Get it wrong and you have paid a very high price for the world to watch you figure out something you could have figured out in private.

This week, I'm joined by Sherry Wong, a creator entrepreneur who has been posting content since 2011 and the founder of Roster, an AI hiring platform for the creator economy already trusted by some of the world's biggest creators including the Stokes Twins, Airrack, and Preston.

Sherry breaks down how she built Roster after running into the same hiring problem every creator faces, how their hiring challenge feature helped creators find the right person in as little as 72 hours by turning job applications into a competition, and why every company from startups to Stripe is now essentially a content production house that needs creative talent. We also talk about how being a creator herself shapes every product decision at Roster and why naive ambition is sometimes the best thing a founder can have.

Sherry has also been so kind to give our audience a free job listing if you use this link and/or code HOTSTART.

Roster is an AI-powered hiring platform for the creator economy and modern media. Their platform helps companies hire creative talent by analyzing their creative direction and thousands of candidate portfolios to recommend talent based on style fit, platform fluency, niche relevance, and proven creative experience. Roster’s talent network spans 150+ countries, and creators with over 1 billion combined followers have hired on Roster. The likes of Mark Rober, Airrack, and Nick DiGiovanni leverage Roster to scale their content operations.

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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.