What We Look For In Creator Investments

We’re often asked what we look for in a creator opportunity. While there are dozens of factors we consider, our framework boils down to four key areas: the creator, the community, the category, and current scale.

Over the next handful of newsletters I’ll unpack each one, sharing the questions we ask ourselves, signals that give us conviction, and the gaps that make us pause.

Some questions are binary — “Is the creator doing this full‑time?” — but most live on a spectrum. Can we get comfortable with a terrific creator-entrepreneur, with a small but growing community, operating in a category where the businesses are unproven? Knowing where we have high-conviction vs. where we might be taking a leap of faith lets us size risk appropriately.

How we think about each area:

1. Creator: We bias toward creators who act like founders. They’re an authority in— and are obsessed with their niche. They’re magnetic, great at world-building, and can rally audiences, employees, and investors to come along for the ride. In short: they’ve got rizz and tizz (h/t AZ). Compared with creators who consider themselves “talent” and for whom fame and notability are paramount, creator-entrepreneurs strive to generate and capture enterprise value, rather than creating it solely for others.

2. Community: As we’ve previously discussed, our hyper‑connected world has ushered in unprecedented levels of visibility and competition, meaning creators can rise at dramatic rates but only cult‑level communities cut through. We look for a white‑hot core of fanatics bonded by psychographics like shared values, interests, or stories rather than surface demographics. When the center burns bright, growth on the edges gets easier.

3. Category: Unsurprisingly, community is closely tied to category and when considered together, they represent a theme. In this context, we ask how niche, durable, and investable the category is. We prefer specific or narrow verticals over broad entertainment or lifestyle, where attention can be ephemeral. It’s also (relatively) easier to build lasting enterprise value in a niche. From there, we look to understand the competitive and commercial dynamics of the category and pattern of consumer behavior.

4. Scale / traction: Follower counts have lost some signal, but traction and heat still matter. For most opportunities we like to see ~200k–2M+ followers and $500k+ in annual advertising / platform revenue. If the creator is generating revenue off‑platform from product sales, that serves as even stronger proof of conversion. While these numbers guide us, they aren’t hard and fast rules.

Finally, and just because you made it this far, one of the last questions we ask: are we excited simply because we are fans ourselves? If yes, that’s great — we just need to own it. Backing a beloved creator is a perk; confusing fandom with fundamentals is not.