This is something I have been watching play out for years, and almost nobody in this space talks about it honestly. The very thing that makes celebrity brands so powerful at launch, reaching millions of people on day one, is the same thing that makes the traditional startup approach impossible. There is a name for what happens when you try to iterate in public with millions of eyes watching. I call it the invisible tax on fame.

This week, I am breaking down what that tax actually is, what it costs celebrity-founded brands to compensate for it, and how some founders are now quietly building around it instead.

Launch fast. Ship something imperfect. Get it in front of real customers before it is ready, because the feedback you get from actual users is worth more than anything you could figure out in a boardroom. It is what Reid Hoffman meant when he said if you are not embarrassed by your first product, you launched too late.

The concept even has a name: the MVP, the minimum viable product. The idea is that the fastest path to a great product runs directly through a bad one. And the evidence is everywhere.

Instagram started as Burbn, a cluttered check-in app nobody knew what to do with. The founders noticed users kept doing one thing: sharing photos. They stripped everything else away and relaunched around that single feature. Brian Chesky started Airbnb by renting out three air mattresses in his San Francisco living room to conference attendees who could not find a hotel. They used that tiny experiment to learn what guests actually wanted and built a company now worth over $70 billion.

Neither of those companies launched with a perfect product. They launched with something just good enough to learn from. The iteration happened in relative obscurity, when only a small number of people were watching and the cost of being wrong was still manageable.

That is the prerequisite to the entire MVP playbook that nobody talks about. It only works when failure is invisible enough to learn from.

When an unknown startup ships a bad first version, a few hundred people notice. They churn out, leave some reviews, and the founder reads the feedback and quietly fixes the product. The failure is contained. The learning is cheap. Nobody writes about it.

When a celebrity ships a bad first version, millions of people notice at exactly the same moment. The reviews do not sit on a product page. They become content. They become headlines. They get screenshotted, shared, stitched into TikToks, and referenced in every article written about that person for the next five years. A traditional founder's bad launch is a learning moment. A celebrity's bad launch is a reputational event with a long memory and no undo button.

This is the invisible tax on fame. The bigger the name, the more expensive the mistakes. And the more expensive the mistakes, the less room there is to make them. That single constraint changes almost every decision a celebrity-founded brand makes before it ships a single unit.

Take tech creator MKBHD, Marques Brownlee, one of the most trusted voices in consumer electronics with 20 million YouTube subscribers. In September 2024, he launched Panels, a wallpaper app that let users discover and download curated phone wallpapers. It hit number one in the Photos category on both the App Store and Google Play almost immediately. By any traditional startup metric, that is a successful launch.

But the product had real problems. The free tier required watching two unskippable ads before downloading a single wallpaper in low resolution. Premium access cost $49.99 a year. The app requested location data, browsing history, and device identifiers, permissions that had no obvious connection to downloading a jpeg. The reaction was immediate and brutal. Comment sections flooded within hours. "No one's paying $50 a year for a regular wallpaper app," one comment read, racking up 25,000 likes. "It's crazy that the #1 tech reviewer known for advocating for quality would release a cash-grab subscription app with terrible UI design," wrote another. Someone even reverse-engineered the app and published a script to download all the wallpapers for free, noting it took them 26 minutes. 

For a typical app founder, those are normal early-stage problems. You take the feedback, make the iterations, ship a new version, and most people who had a bad first experience simply move on. The learning happens quietly.

MKBHD did not get that window. He had 2 million downloads in days, which meant 2 million people formed a permanent opinion before he had a chance to iterate his way to a better product. He acknowledged the misjudgement publicly, admitted it should have been free from the start, and made changes. But the narrative had already set. The audience that experienced version one was not coming back for version two. Fifteen months after launch, Panels shut down.

The hard truth is that those same product problems, for a different founder, would have been a perfectly normal early stage of building. What MKBHD could not replicate was the obscurity that makes that kind of iteration safe.

Because celebrities cannot iterate in public, they have to do privately what startups do in the market. And that costs significantly more.

Multiple rounds of product development before anything ships. Rigorous quality testing across every production batch. Premium packaging that holds up to the unboxing videos that will inevitably be posted by millions of followers. Every version of the product that reaches a customer has to be as close to perfect as possible, because there is no quiet first version that only a handful of people see.

The team reflects this too. Celebrity brands consistently hire operators who would be overqualified for a startup at an equivalent stage. Former Unilever executives running marketing from day one. Ex-major retailer buyers leading retail strategy before there is even a retail presence. Operations leads from brands that have already scaled past nine figures. These are not hires you make when you are figuring things out. They are hires you make when you cannot afford to figure things out in front of the wrong audience.

A traditional startup hires junior people and learns by doing. A celebrity brand pays a premium to skip the learning curve entirely, because running that curve publicly is not an option. The total cost of getting a celebrity brand to launch almost always exceeds what founders expect, specifically because of this constraint. And even after spending all of that, there is still no guarantee the product will be right. The money buys you a better shot. It does not buy you certainty.

While most celebrity brands respond to this constraint by spending more on product development and hiring better people upfront, some founders are now approaching it in a different way entirely. Instead of compensating for the problem, they are restructuring the sequence to remove it.

They build the brand first without the celebrity attached. They find product-market fit quietly, fix what needs fixing, and prove the core business works before a famous name is anywhere near it. Only once the product is genuinely ready does the celebrity step in and activate the distribution advantage.

The celebrity becomes the accelerant for scaling from one to ten, not the foundation for getting from zero to one. The messy, iterative phase happens when the stakes of getting it wrong are still manageable. The moment the famous name turns on, the product has already been tested, refined, and prepared for the scrutiny that comes with it.

This is not yet standard practice. Most celebrity-founded brand launches still attach the famous name as early as possible. But the founders doing it the other way are solving the core problem at the root rather than spending their way around it. They are not trying to move faster than the backlash. They are building quietly enough that there is nothing to backlash against when the celebrity arrives.

Every startup founder gets a window of obscurity. A period where they can be wrong, learn from it, and fix it before too many people are watching. Instagram used it. Airbnb used it. That window is one of the most underrated advantages in building any company.

Celebrity-founded brands do not get that window. The same audience that gives them the most powerful launch advantage in consumer products is the audience that closes the feedback loop at scale before there is any time to respond. A flawed first version is not a learning moment. It is a permanent data point in how millions of people think about that celebrity's brand forever.

The brands that understand this build differently. They spend more before launch. They hire more senior people earlier. They take longer to ship. And increasingly, some of them are asking their celebrity to stay in the background while the product is proven, stepping forward only once it is ready for the scrutiny that comes with their name.

Fame is distribution. Distribution amplifies what is already there. No amount of famous reach rescues a product that was not ready to be famous.

This week, I'm joined by Matthew Postlethwaite, actor best known for his role in Peaky Blinders and co-founder of Proda, a protein soda with 10 grams of protein, zero sugar, and the taste of an actual soda. The idea came from his grandmother, who was losing her hair from protein deficiency but refused to touch the chalky protein shakes he sent her. That frustration became the catalyst for Proda.

Matthew breaks down how he used ChatGPT to find his co-founder Jeff Church, the veteran beverage entrepreneur behind Suja Juice, how they spent over 1,000 hours on formulation before launch, and how Proda landed in 500 Sprouts locations nationwide within 19 months. We also talk about balancing acting with 16-hour days building a company, and how he generated 170 million impressions without paying a single influencer.

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.