The Red Carpet

Here's what triggered this analysis: MrBeast quietly launched ViewStats in December. No PR campaign. No celebrity endorsements. Just one tweet. Within 48 hours, thousands of creators were paying customers. 

But MrBeast isn't alone. Grace Beverley is building an AI-powered talent manager. JeromeASF is revolutionizing streaming ad tech. Xiaoma is scaling AI language tutors. These aren't creator side projects. They're venture-scale tech companies with built-in distribution to millions.

The data shows this isn't a coincidence. It's a systematic shift in how celebrities and creators think about value creation. While others fight for shelf space at Sephora, the next generation of celebrities and creators are building software that scales infinitely. Let me show you why this changes everything.

The Director's Cut

The Insight That Originally Got Me Into This Industry

Let me tell you why this trend matters to me personally.

I've spent the last decade helping European tech companies expand to the US and raise from American VCs. Then around 2020, I watched the first wave of celebrities launching brands. And I was frustrated. Here were people with 50 million followers, massive influence, and unlimited resources. And the best they could do was launch another tequila? Another beauty brand? Another apparel line in completely oversaturated markets?

The math never made sense to me. Even wildly successful celebrity consumer brands cap out at $1-2B valuations. But tech companies? They scale to $10B, $50B, $100B. Completely different physics.

I kept thinking: Why aren't celebrities building software? Why aren't they solving real problems? Why are they limiting themselves to physical products with supply chain nightmares when they could build infinitely scalable digital solutions?

That frustration led me to launch Influencer Capital, helping celebrities and creators do equity deals with promising tech companies. We pioneered the model of celebrities/creators as strategic investors, not just brand ambassadors. The results validated my thesis: celebrities/ creators brought massive value to tech companies through distribution, credibility, and user insights.

Influencer Capital became the launchpad for HotStart VC. Because I realized we weren't just facilitating partnerships, we were witnessing the birth of a new founder archetype. Celebrities and creators who could build technology companies with advantages that traditional founders could only dream of.

Today, the future I envisioned is becoming reality. And the examples I'm about to share will show you why this is just the beginning.

The $100B Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight

The 2020 celebrity-founded brand playbook was predictably boring:

• Pick crowded market (tequila, beauty, fashion)

• Add celebrity face

• Hope for retail distribution

• Fight for same customers as 200 other brands

• Cap out at $1B if lucky

The results:

• 400+ celebrity liquor brands (70% failed)

• 250+ celebrity beauty brands (85% gone)

• Market saturation before launch

• Brutal competition for shelf space

• Limited scale potential

Meanwhile, these same celebrities and creators faced real problems daily across every industry they touched:

• Athletes juggling 5 different apps for sleep, nutrition, training, recovery, with no unified dashboard to see how they connect

• Celebrities dealing with public meltdowns at 2am with no therapist available, just Twitter and anxiety

• Musicians losing 30% of touring revenue to currency exchanges and cross-border payment fees

• Influencers manually tracking brand deals across spreadsheets, emails, and WhatsApp messages

• Actors memorizing scripts with no AI-powered scene partner to practice with at midnight

• Fashion designers sourcing fabrics through outdated catalogs and phone calls instead of streamlined platforms

• Wellness gurus creating meal plans on paper when their clients need real-time adjustments based on travel and availability

Problems that software could solve. Problems worth billions. Problems that have nothing to do with follower counts or content creation. Just broken systems that need better solutions.

The Tide Is Finally Turning

But that's slowly changing. Celebrities and creators are now thinking differently about building businesses. They're looking at the problems they face daily, not just in content creation, but in sports, entertainment, fashion, wellness, education, and asking: "Why isn't there a technology for this?"

At HotStart VC, we're incredibly excited about this shift. Because when someone with 50 million followers decides to solve a real problem with technology, they're not building a company that caps at $1-2B, they're building something that can scale to $10B, $50B, even $100B+. That's the kind of outcome that changes portfolios, changes industries, and creates generational wealth.

Take MrBeast, for example.

ViewStats: The Perfect Creator-Product-Market-Fit

For a decade, MrBeast obsessed over YouTube optimization. Which thumbnails convert. Why certain titles outperform. How to maximize retention. He built internal tools, hired data scientists, turned content creation into a science.

He shared this knowledge everywhere. Speaking at VidSummit, appearing on podcasts like Colin & Samir, posting optimization threads that went viral. Every creator wanted his secret. His DMs were flooded with questions about analytics, strategy, optimization.

But sharing knowledge has limits. Creators needed tools, not just tips. So MrBeast went one step further: ViewStats. A B2B SaaS platform that gives creators the same analytical power he used to become the world's biggest YouTuber.

Here's the funny thing: I expect many people reading this have no idea MrBeast co-founded ViewStats. Everyone's focused on Feastables, his chocolate brand. But while Feastables might become a nice $1B CPG company, ViewStats could be the real $10B+ opportunity hiding in plain sight.

Think about the positioning: Who better to learn from than the creator who turned YouTube into a science? When MrBeast says "this is how I analyze performance," millions listen. When he says "this is the tool I built to do it," they buy.

The math is staggering. Let's be conservative:

• 100,000 creators pay $50/month = $60M ARR

• At 15x SaaS multiples = $900M valuation

• Scale to 1M creators at $100/month = $1.2B ARR

• At 15x multiple = $18B valuation

Think 1 million users sounds crazy? Figma has 13 million users and did an IPO at a $20B valuation, which increased to $56B in just days after. Canva has 220 million monthly active users and recently did a secondary sale at a $49B valuation. These are design tools for creators. ViewStats is analytics for creators. The market is just as large.

YouTube has 61 million creators today, and thousands more start channels every single day. More creators mean more demand for professional tools. If ViewStats captures just 2%, it's a $10B+ company. The path is clear. The market is massive and growing. And MrBeast already has their attention.

The launch was pure creator economics: One tweet. Zero marketing spend. Thousands of paying customers in 48 hours. When you've spent a decade teaching creators how to succeed, selling them the tools to do it is effortless.

MrBeast Isn't Alone

Across industries, celebrities and creators are identifying problems they've personally faced and building tech solutions.

Grace Beverley (2.3M followers) spent years juggling brand deals, agency relationships, and campaign negotiations as a creator. She knew firsthand how broken the talent management industry was: agencies taking 20% for outdated services, creators getting terrible deals, brands struggling to find the right partnerships. Her solution? Retrograde, an AI-powered talent manager that handles everything from outreach to negotiation at a fraction of traditional costs. With 6,000+ creators and 3,500+ brands already on the platform, she's proving that the best founders are the ones who've lived the problem.

JeromeASF (8M followers) has been streaming for 16 years. He's watched the entire ecosystem evolve, seen brands struggle to advertise effectively on streams, witnessed the massive gap between billions of hours watched and actual ad dollars flowing to creators. NexTide isn't just another ad tech company; it's infrastructure built by someone who understands streaming at a cellular level. Patent-pending AI for brand safety. This is what happens when domain expertise meets technical execution.

Xiaoma (10M followers) built his following by learning languages and sharing the journey. He experienced firsthand the anxiety of practicing with native speakers, the cost of tutors, the scheduling nightmares. Teacher AI solves all of this with AI tutors available 24/7 at a fraction of traditional costs. It's not just language learning software, it's a solution designed by someone who's actually learned 10+ languages and understands every pain point intimately.

Why Tech Is the Smarter Play

Here's why we believe celebrities and creators creators should focus on building tech companies instead of consumer brands:

The economics are fundamentally different. Consumer brands fight for physical shelf space, manage complex supply chains, and deal with returns, spoilage, and inventory risk. Tech companies scale infinitely with near-zero marginal costs. One line of code can serve a million users or a billion, the infrastructure cost barely changes.

Don't believe me? Let's look at the numbers.

The valuations tell the story. Look at the most successful celebrity-founded consumer brands:

• Rihanna's Fenty: $2.8B valuation

• Kim Kardashian's SKIMS: Reportedly IPO'ing at $4B

• Jessica Alba's Honest Company: IPO'd at $1.4B (now worth a fraction)

• George Clooney's Casamigos: Sold for $1B

• Hailey Bieber's Rhode Beauty: Sold for $1B

• Jennifer Garner's Once Upon a Farm: Reportedly IPO'ing at $1B

These are the winners. The outliers. The brands everyone points to as massive successes. And they should be celebrated. Building a billion-dollar brand is incredible.

But even the absolute best celebrity-founded brands (Fenty and SKIMS) can't crack $5B. Meanwhile, tech companies regularly scale to $10B, $50B, even $100B+. The ceiling simply doesn't exist in the same way. When you're building software, you're not fighting for shelf space at Target or negotiating with distributors. You're not limited by manufacturing capacity or shipping logistics. Every new customer is just another server spin-up. Pure margin. Pure scale.

The margins are game-changing. Consumer brands celebrate 40% gross margins. SaaS companies operate at 70-90% gross margins. Every dollar of revenue in tech is worth more because less gets eaten by costs. This means faster profitability, more resources for growth, and better returns for everyone involved.

Why Now Is the Perfect Time

The barriers to building tech companies have never been lower. AI tools can now help with everything from coding to customer service. No-code platforms let non-technical founders build MVPs. Cloud infrastructure eliminates massive upfront costs.

A celebrity or creator who couldn't have built a tech company five years ago can now launch a SaaS platform in weeks. The technical moat that protected traditional software companies is eroding. What matters now is understanding the problem deeply, and nobody understands problems better than the people living them daily.

The Advantages That Transfer (And The New Ones That Emerge)

Celebrities and creators bring the same fundamental advantages to tech that they bring to consumer brands. The trust they've built over years transfers seamlessly. Their domain expertise, whether in content, sports, fashion, or wellness, gives them insights traditional founders lack. Their built-in audience provides instant distribution and feedback loops.

But tech amplifies these advantages in new ways. That audience becomes a testing ground for features. That trust translates into enterprise deals. That domain expertise becomes defensible IP when encoded into software.

More importantly, tech companies benefit from network effects that consumer brands can't match. When MrBeast's viewers become ViewStats users, they tell other creators. When those creators see results, they tell their audiences. The growth compounds in ways that selling physical products never could.

Why This Is Just the Beginning

We're witnessing the first wave of celebrity and creator tech founders. But this is just the start.

What's coming next? Every industry touched by celebrities and creators is about to be rebuilt from the ground up. Not with another beauty brand or tequila label, but with the technology they wished existed all along.

In five years, we'll look back at 2024 as the inflection point. When creators stopped limiting themselves to consumer products and started building the infrastructure for entire industries.

The smartest celebrities and creators aren't asking "What product can I slap my name on?"

They're asking "What tool do I desperately need?"

Then they're building it.

And capturing value that makes tequila brands look like lemonade stands.

The Mic Drop

HotStart VC’s Backstage Pass

Looking to Launch or Partner on a Celebrity-Founded Tech Company?

Are you, or do you know, a consumer tech company interested in bringing a celebrity or creator on board through an equity deal? We’re here to help make those partnerships happen. As you can see from this post, we’re excited about the growing wave of celebrity- and creator-founded tech ventures and want to be at the forefront of structuring these deals to build lasting success. Reach out if you want to explore how we can work together.

Hippie Water Launches New 10mg Sips

HotStart portfolio company Hippie Water, co-founded by actress Sasha Pieterse, just dropped a new cannabis-infused beverage. The limited-release 10mg sips are designed for those seeking more presence, peace, and relaxation. This launch expands Hippie Water’s lineup with a stronger dose for consumers who want to take their chill to the next level. Available now via pre-sale. Limited drop only.

Upcycled Paint Brand Seeking Creator Partnerships

We’re working with an upcycled paint company that’s turning leftover paint into premium-quality colors through a unique tinting process. They’re looking to team up with DIY, home, and design creators to launch co-branded paint lines. Deals will start as revenue share, with the option to grow into equity partnerships. Want to suggest your talent? Reply to this thread with their media kit, and we’ll get back to you.

Take #7

The celebrity and creator tech awakening is finally here. After years of launching beauty brands and tequila companies, celebrities and creators are realizing: the real money isn't in physical products, it's in building the software they desperately needed.

MrBeast analyzed YouTube videos manually for a decade. Now ViewStats is his $10B+ play. Grace Beverley dealt with terrible talent managers for years. Now, Retrograde is replacing them with AI. Every inefficient system, every manual process, every broken workflow, they're all software opportunities waiting to happen.

At HotStart VC, we're backing celebrities and creators who get this shift. Because when you've spent years wishing for a tool that doesn't exist, you're not just another founder entering a market. You're the customer who knows exactly what's broken and how to fix it. That's an unfair advantage no MBA can replicate.

Remember: In a world where celebrities and creators can finally build tech, the biggest returns will come from those turning their daily frustrations into tech solutions.

Welcome to the fame game,
Scott

P.S. Know a celebrity or creator building tech that makes consumer brands look like a rounding error? I would love to get in touch

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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.