When Maxx Chewning's Sour Strips sold to Hershey for $75.5 million, every VC texted me the same question: "How did a fitness creator with 385k subscribers sell candy for 8-figures?"

The answer changes everything we know about creator-founded brands. Chewning built his following preaching protein shakes and six-pack abs. Then he launched a sugar empire. Zero creator-product-market fit. His fitness audience wasn't even his target customer. By every framework I use at HotStart VC, this should have failed spectacularly. Instead, Chewning just banked more money than most creators see in 10 lifetimes. And he owned 100% of it.

The lesson isn't about candy. It's about three skills he learned as a creator that matter more than follower count and audience alignment, skills that resulted in every investor missing the real opportunity.

Maxx Chewning started creating fitness content back in 2011, documenting his own transformation journey. Think workout routines, meal prep tutorials, supplement reviews, macro counting guides. By 2019, he'd built a following of 385,000 people across social platforms who trusted him for fitness advice.

Then he did something that made zero sense: He launched a candy company.

Not protein bars. Not healthy snacks. Not even "guilt-free" alternatives. Pure sugar. Sour candy strips designed for maximum indulgence.

In 2024, Hershey acquired Sour Strips for $75.5 million. Chewning owned 100% at exit. The success story seems impossible when you consider everything this brand was missing.

At HotStart VC, we focus on investing in companies that have creator-product-market fit. It's the alignment of three critical elements:

1. Creator Persona - Who the creator authentically is

2. Product Solution - What problem the products/services solve  

3. Audience Alignment - Whether the creators followers are the right buyers

When these align, you get the perfect formula for building a billion-dollar brand.

Chewning violated every principle:

His Persona: A fitness influencer preaching nutrition and workout optimization. Yes, he occasionally ate candy as a cheat meal, but his brand was built on counting macros and maintaining single-digit body fat.

His Product: Sour Strips had better texture and flavors than existing options, but there wasn't a real problem in the candy market that needed solving. Nobody was desperate for slightly better sour candy.

His Audience: 385,000 fitness enthusiasts who counted calories and avoided sugar. The exact opposite of candy buyers.

This is the misalignment that typically kills creator-founded brands. Yet Sour Strips sold 20,000 units in the first hour and scaled to $24 million in revenue by year four.

Let me show you why.

The success of Sour Strips had nothing to do with creator-product-market fit. Chewning's fitness audience bought some early units out of loyalty, but they weren't repeat customers for candy. His YouTube fame didn't secure distribution. His personal brand didn't fuel growth.

Instead, Chewning leveraged three skills he'd mastered as a content creator, skills that traditional CPG founders spend decades trying to learn.

Every successful content creator shares one trait: obsessive attention to quality. MrBeast famously spent months perfecting single thumbnails. Top creators analyze every frame, every hook, every second of retention data.

Chewning applied this same obsession to candy:

"I approach product development like content creation," Chewning explained. "Every detail matters. Every choice impacts the experience."

This wasn't a creator slapping their name on a white-label product. This was a creator applying content-creation discipline to physical goods.

The result? A candy so addictive that customers posted unboxing videos without being asked, ordered multiple bags per purchase, and created their own content about flavor combinations. The product quality was so high that it turned candy skeptics into evangelists.

Here's what separated Sour Strips from every other creator brand: Chewning never made it about him.

Instead of featuring Sour Strips on his fitness channel where it didn't belong, he built a completely independent content machine for the brand. No face reveals. No "hey guys, it's Maxx." Just pure candy content.

After years of creating content, Chewning knew exactly what would hit:

The strategy was genius. Logan Paul has to show his face on every PRIME post because that's the only value prop. Chewning built something bigger than himself.

Within two years, Sour Strips had 400,000 followers across platforms. These weren't Maxx Chewning fitness fans following out of loyalty. These were candy obsessives who didn't know or care who owned the brand.

The result? Sour Strips built its own distribution without depending on Chewning's personal platform.

Traditional CPG brands spend $100,000 on focus groups and wait six months for results. Creators get instant feedback from millions of people for free.

Chewning turned the Sour Strips community into his R&D department:

When fans said the watermelon was too sweet, he reformulated within weeks. When they wanted resealable packaging, he redesigned immediately. When they asked for mystery flavors, he launched them the next quarter.

This rapid iteration cycle is impossible for traditional brands. But for creators who've built careers on audience feedback, it's second nature.

While building Sour Strips, Chewning did something unusual for CPG founders: He shared everything. Revenue numbers, manufacturing challenges, retail negotiations, all documented through behind-the-scenes content and interviews.

This transparency revealed remarkable growth. In the first year alone, Sour Strips generated $3M in revenue, selling 1 million bags of candy. By 2023, annual revenue had reached $20M.

The brand's retail expansion was equally impressive. What started as an online-only direct-to-consumer brand quickly caught the attention of major retailers. First came 7-Eleven, then Target. Eventually, Chewning secured the holy grail of CPG distribution: Walmart. Within five years, Sour Strips had achieved nationwide presence in every major retailer.

By 2024, Sour Strips was generating serious revenue with its nationwide distribution. That's when Hershey came calling.

The acquisition price: $75.5 million in cash.

The kicker: Chewning still owned 100% of the company. No investors. No dilution. Every dollar went straight to the creator who bet on himself.

When Hershey announced the acquisition, they didn't mention Chewning's YouTube channel. They focused on three strategic assets:

Access to Gen Z consumers - The demographic Hershey desperately needs but can't reach through traditional marketing. While Hershey's core brands like Reese's and Kit Kat still dominate with older millennials, they've struggled to connect with the TikTok generation. Sour Strips had cracked the code, building 400,000 engaged followers who actually create content about candy.

Proven innovation velocity - New flavors and formats launched in weeks, not years. Hershey's product development cycles typically span 18-24 months with multiple rounds of focus groups and market testing. Chewning would drop a new flavor based on Instagram polls and have it in production within weeks. This speed is something legacy CPG companies talk about but rarely achieve.

Authentic brand voice - Content that resonates without feeling corporate. Every Hershey social post goes through layers of brand guidelines and legal review. Sour Strips' content felt like it came from your friend who's obsessed with candy, because it essentially did. This authenticity can't be manufactured in a boardroom.

Hershey wasn't buying a creator-founded brand. They were acquiring a founder who understood young consumers better than any McKinsey deck ever could.

That's why they kept Chewning on post-acquisition. Not as a spokesperson, but as head of innovation. They need his creator instincts more than his face.

And Hershey is not alone. Almost every legacy CPG giant from Unilever to General Mills is desperately hunting for the same thing: founders who understand how to build authentic brands for Gen Z. They're acquiring creator-founded brands at premium valuations because building these capabilities internally has proven nearly impossible.

This creates a massive opportunity for creators willing to build rather than just influence. The math is compelling:

Traditional creator monetization:

The Chewning model:

This isn't just wealth. It's generational wealth from an audience smaller than most micro-influencers.

Here's what the Sour Strips exit teaches us: Creator-product-market fit is just one path to success. The other path, the one nobody talks about, is leveraging creator skills to build something bigger than your audience.

Chewning succeeded not despite the misalignment, but because he understood something deeper. The skills that make great creators (obsessing over quality, understanding content, building communities) translate directly to building great brands.

The best creators aren't just influencers with followings. They're operators who understand attention, community, and rapid iteration better than any traditional founder. When they apply those skills to building products, magic happens. That's what Hershey bought: not Chewning's fitness audience, but his creator operating system that legacy CPG companies can't replicate.

If Chewning had pitched me Sour Strips in 2019, I would have passed. A fitness influencer selling candy violates every rule in my playbook. That rejection would have cost me the chance to back one of the most successful creator exits to date.

The lesson? Sometimes the best opportunities look like the worst ideas. And sometimes the skills that matter most have nothing to do with follower count.

The latest episode of the HotStart VC Podcast is here. This week, I’m joined by Katie Hunt, co-founder of Oh Norman!, the pet care company she built with Kaley Cuoco after a random LinkedIn message turned into a real operating partnership, not a licensing deal or paid endorsement. Kaley, who made $150M from The Big Bang Theory, runs a rescue farm with 200+ animals, drafted a letter to investors stating she’s “never leaving” the company, and is so hands-on she drops into vet team Zoom calls unannounced.

In this episode, Katie breaks down why most pet products aren’t developed by veterinarians, how they built a 150,000-person community before launching a single product, and why they get 10,000 survey responses in 24 hours on Instagram Stories. We talk about how “bad dog breath” became a best-selling product, why they stayed DTC-only for a full year, how Amazon offered them a $250K Amazon Live asset in exchange for a single Kaley post, and why Oh Norman! could survive without the celebrity, though it never has to.

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.