In December 2022, we wrote that creator financing was finally going mainstream — moving from a fringe experiment to an industry-wide movement. Prior to this emergent capital market, creators lacked access to the traditional financial infrastructure available for corporations, but the landscape has shifted quickly and continues to evolve.
Fast forward nearly three years later, there are more creator entrepreneurs (and investors interested in backing them) than ever so it’s worth revisiting the types of capital available to finance growth. Today’s newsletter will serve as a primer, covering different growth options from bootstrapping to flavors of debt and equity… describing what each is and certain considerations to keep in mind.
The first and most common path to finance growth is to bootstrap which means creators rely on their own cash flow to grow — reinvesting income from ad revenue, brand deals, merch or otherwise into content, audience growth or new projects. It’s a perfectly reasonable option. Creators retain full ownership and control with no outside stakeholders. The trade-off, however, is speed, partnership, and leverage. Bootstrapping can constrain how fast the business scales, can be a lonely game, and can leave the creator as a price taker vis-a-vis bigger or better capitalized players in negotiations (with brands, vendors, distribution partners, etc).
Now to debt and equity. The simplest way to frame this is with a classic 2×2. One axis is financing structure which spans debt-like products (e.g., revenue-based financing) with defined payback mechanics to equity-like financing where there’s no fixed recoupment amount and investors share in the upside. The other axis is underwriting scope ranging from an investor financing a slice of the work (a catalog, channel, or single company, for example) to one backing the creator more holistically (multiple pieces of work or the creator’s holding company).
This took me way too long to make
For products in the debt-like / partial category, the most common product is revenue-based financing where a creator receives cash today in exchange for a percentage of future revenue from a specific asset (often a YouTube catalog or campaign). Spotter, the best-known player, became the category’s poster child (deploying roughly $940M as of late 2024) then ran into headwinds in 2025. Others like Viewture and Gigstar operate in similar-ish lanes. These models work best when platform revenue is stable — when marketing budgets and algorithms hold steady — and they’re naturally cyclical when those inputs don’t. Underwriting is largely formulaic where past performance informs potential future earnings, which, in turn, sets terms. Because these deals are typically shorter (roughly 6 months to a few years) and cover only part of future revenue, there’s a ceiling on what an investor will pay. Compared with a traditional bank loan, terms are often friendlier for creators with no interest charge, flexible repayment, and many deals as effectively non-recourse beyond the agreed revenue stream.
Equity-like financing, by contrast, is longer term and offers uncapped upside for investors, which can make the capital less expensive for the creator than debt-like models. Given the shared upside in long term success, equity partners feel more like a strategic partner than a financial transactor and often come with valuable support and guidance. Equity can either fund a specific company or the creator overall. For a specific company, these investments look like typical startup or growth equity investment. Sugar Capital’s investment in MrBeast’s Feastables (*not his holding company) or Imaginary Ventures backing Skims are structured like any other consumer bet.
Some firms go further to capture more of a creator’s commercial power. The Chernin Group takes substantial (often majority) stakes in creator-led content-to-commerce businesses, such as Doug DeMuro’s Cars & Bids. The upside is technically limited to the value from a specific entity, but deals are often structured to include multiple revenue and enterprise value generating assets.
Somewhat similarly, we at Slow finance the creator’s holding company with equity. Financing the holdco or the broader ecosystem, rather than a single project, better aligns investor and creator incentives. It also gives the creator real freedom to allocate time and money to the highest-ROI activity at any moment: content, production, product development, hiring, distribution, experimentation… so on and so forth. Without the risk that a creator will change their mind about what to work on, this model can often deliver cheaper, more flexible capital to the creator than project- or company-specific financing. While we’ve been investing via this model for a few years now, we are grateful that bigger creators like Mr Beast are financing growth this way and educating the market in doing so — especially since he has just a few more followers than we do :)
Creator financing options have come a long way in a few short years, and we expect this trend to continue. Bootstrapping preserves ownership but can limit speed and reduce negotiating leverage. Revenue-based cash advances are helpful when earnings are predictable and 6-12 months of runway is needed. Company or brand-level equity makes sense when a product or media asset really is the only thing or has traction well beyond the creator, bringing partnership in exchange for governance and dilution. Holding company equity maximizes flexibility for multi-project builders and can lower the cost of capital by aligning investor incentives with the creator’s long-term roadmap.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. And on that note, I’ve written a lot… read more from the archive!
— Megan