yeah the traditional search fund model definitely has stuff in common with small cap PE, often a lot of people with some early career finance experience are ones to do search fund to come to startup side without founding from what i’ve seen.
the creator search fund idea is a little less by finance / PE though since you’re not buying a company but that said you do have to factor in valuing the existing creator entity / brand and the ownership structure for the new biz.
I like this model. It's more collaborative in nature than most.
I've been playing around with the idea of building economies around creator instead of businesses.
Basically, open up participation in a shared economy that everyone works to keep maintaining. Reduces the work load a ton vs focusing on competitive edge.
The networks need some small adjustments to fully allow these to occur, but I'll have a working model soon to demonstrate the principles.
It's really cool. I'm working with a small group of creators next week to start launching a set of them and will be documenting the experience. I'll share once I have things going!
I can’t believe the timing on this!!! I’ve literally been brainstorming today how to put something together like creatorfund.co and just checked my inbox and saw your piece 😂🔥
Interesting idea. It reminds me of the white label brands that partner with creators and bring in a retail concept that the creator can sell, like this one which helped with the Mr Beast Burger and some other podcasters' food delivery concepts https://joinvdc.com/
for sure, lot of these types of orgs trying to service creators but i’m biased in think many of these don’t work out from a product integrity and alignment standpoint — Mr Beast shuttered the burger delivery biz if i recall due to quality issues, though the chocolate bar biz seems to be faring better. the less high profile the creator though the better i think it is to partner up with an individual from the startup side than to work with a seasoned agency or shop
Just saw this announcement about Marques Brownlee joining as equity partner and creative officer for an existing product brand. This is pretty much the opposite, and more common already, but I think shows just how much appetite there is for creators to commercialize themselves successfully outside of just content.
Recently sold a tech startup, as more of an operator, now want to become an Creator and totally relate to this theory. When I was leading the M&A process trying to sell my startup, I talked extensively with a bunch of search funds. They were the MBA type and wanted proven-out metrics, LTV, CAC, etc. This would be the challenge for a creator fund. The creator doesn't have all this yet. You'd need an operating partner that is good at the zero-to-one stage, which in my experience most search fund operators are terrible at this. They want a Google Sheet with all the metrics already in there, and want to scale it from one to 100.
Not saying it can't be done, just that the operators within a creator search fund would need to be much different than the typical search fund operators.
Happy to chat more with anyone, you can find my info on hedgian.com
loved this, so intriguing ❤️
I’m still thinking about this article and the concept see seems quite similar to PE
yeah the traditional search fund model definitely has stuff in common with small cap PE, often a lot of people with some early career finance experience are ones to do search fund to come to startup side without founding from what i’ve seen.
the creator search fund idea is a little less by finance / PE though since you’re not buying a company but that said you do have to factor in valuing the existing creator entity / brand and the ownership structure for the new biz.
I like this model. It's more collaborative in nature than most.
I've been playing around with the idea of building economies around creator instead of businesses.
Basically, open up participation in a shared economy that everyone works to keep maintaining. Reduces the work load a ton vs focusing on competitive edge.
The networks need some small adjustments to fully allow these to occur, but I'll have a working model soon to demonstrate the principles.
would love to learn more about it when it’s ready!
this seems recently relevant re: group of creatives https://www.metalabel.com/
It's really cool. I'm working with a small group of creators next week to start launching a set of them and will be documenting the experience. I'll share once I have things going!
I can’t believe the timing on this!!! I’ve literally been brainstorming today how to put something together like creatorfund.co and just checked my inbox and saw your piece 😂🔥
Interesting idea. It reminds me of the white label brands that partner with creators and bring in a retail concept that the creator can sell, like this one which helped with the Mr Beast Burger and some other podcasters' food delivery concepts https://joinvdc.com/
for sure, lot of these types of orgs trying to service creators but i’m biased in think many of these don’t work out from a product integrity and alignment standpoint — Mr Beast shuttered the burger delivery biz if i recall due to quality issues, though the chocolate bar biz seems to be faring better. the less high profile the creator though the better i think it is to partner up with an individual from the startup side than to work with a seasoned agency or shop
Just saw this announcement about Marques Brownlee joining as equity partner and creative officer for an existing product brand. This is pretty much the opposite, and more common already, but I think shows just how much appetite there is for creators to commercialize themselves successfully outside of just content.
link: https://x.com/seanecom/status/1760690516310868266?s=46&t=9-Z4llx_tguue3LRiH7GBg
Recently sold a tech startup, as more of an operator, now want to become an Creator and totally relate to this theory. When I was leading the M&A process trying to sell my startup, I talked extensively with a bunch of search funds. They were the MBA type and wanted proven-out metrics, LTV, CAC, etc. This would be the challenge for a creator fund. The creator doesn't have all this yet. You'd need an operating partner that is good at the zero-to-one stage, which in my experience most search fund operators are terrible at this. They want a Google Sheet with all the metrics already in there, and want to scale it from one to 100.
Not saying it can't be done, just that the operators within a creator search fund would need to be much different than the typical search fund operators.
Happy to chat more with anyone, you can find my info on hedgian.com