- Social media stars are ditching brand deals to become entrepreneurs, building products and investing.
- Warner Bailey’s Assistants vs. Agents and Alex Poscente’s Ivy Insights exemplify creators launching products.
- Brett Perlmutter, founder of BulletPitch, helps creators invest in startups at NYC dinners.
It’s the creators’ world — we’re just living in it.
Social media’s stars came of age on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, building massive audiences while getting paid to promote other people’s products. Now, creators are using the audiences they’ve built to expand beyond traditional brand deals and into entrepreneurship, software and venture investing. It’s a notable shift poised to disrupt a number of major industries.
“It used to be that you’d create a product and go find distribution, but the model has flipped,” Warner Bailey, founder of Assistants vs. Agents, a meme-page-turned-media-juggernaut, said. “We’ve created trust and we have distribution, we can build products around that.”
Bailey, 34, is one of the new generation of founders already cashing in on the growing creator economy, worth an estimated $250 billion in 2023 and expected to double in size to nearly $480 billion by 2027, per Goldman Sachs.
Bailey started his Instagram page, a satirization of the entertainment industry, when he was working in the WME mailroom in 2018. Fast forward eight years and he’s got a team of 15 producing a newsletter that averages 400,000 monthly impressions, an entertainment job board that reached a million early-career applicants in its first three months and a daily live show, clips of which are making 42 million Instagram impressions per month. There are also live events centered around career access and education, plus a book and a tech product in the works.
“It took years for us to grow the trust and relationships,” Bailey said, “but that’s what’s now allowing us to scale the business.”
What AvA is doing for entertainment, Ivy Insights is doing for tech.
Founded by Alex Poscente — 27 and a former advisor for Frank McCourt, Alexis Ohanian, and Kevin O’Leary’s ‘The People’s Bid’ to buy TikTok — the company bills itself as an app factory that turns creators into co-founders through collaborations on apps tailored to their audiences.
“AI has made it possible for anyone to [build any kind of platform], product has become fully commoditized,” Poscente said. “The last defensible moat is audience and community.”
Ivy’s very first app, Creator Hub, hit the app store this week. It’s a toolset to help creators manage all the core pieces of their business and was built with Carrington, a 24-year-old comedy and lifestyle creator with nearly five million followers across platforms.
“I’ve been telling people how to do social media for six years,” Carrington said. “Now [I can do] that at scale.”
Ivy has three other apps coming this summer including a wellness app with makeup artist Emmy Combs and a card game with actor and comedian Zach Justice. In total, the four creators the company is partnering with have about 50 million combined followers.
Historically, they’ve captured just a sliver of the value they created for brands and platforms. There are over 120 million global creators generating about $60 billion worth of revenue, according to a 2023 report from Citi Bank, but only 4% are earning more than $100,000 a year.
“We’re empowering a disenfranchised group that has been beholden to platforms for years and years,” Poscente said. “You built your audience, now you should own it.”
At BulletPitch, ownership takes a different form. Instead of helping creators launch products, the venture studio gives creators opportunities to invest directly in startups and share in their upside.
“Creators can de-risk a company and add more value than almost any other kind of investor,” Brett Perlmutter, Bullet Pitch’s 25-year-old founder, said. “In the world we live in, media flow drives deal flow.”
Perlmutter started Bullet Pitch from his Middlebury dorm room in 2022; at first, it was a newsletter focused on interesting startups in the process of raising capital. By 2024, entrepreneur and creator Felix Levine, also 25, joined the team and the duo launched their now-flagship Influence Meets Venture dinner series.
The curated events seat founders and creators around an oversized dinner table; founders pitch their companies, and if creators see alignment in audience, product or personal conviction, they can join Bullet Pitch Plus — the investment arm — as accredited investors and buy directly in.
Past BulletPitch dinners have featured startups such as Beli, beehiiv, David and Sauz alongside creators such as Ashtin Earle, Remi Bader and Brian Kelly, better known as The Points Guy. To date, Bullet Pitch has invested in 19 startups and its total assets under management is nearly $10 million.
For creators, the model offers ownership in private, venture-backed companies and the potential payout that comes with an exit; for founders, creator-investors can bring users, trust and visibility in ways traditional venture firms cannot. Moreover, the content they produce promoting the brand doesn’t have to be slapped with #ad.
“The ability to get attention is how companies differentiate,” Perlmutter said. “The world’s starting to [catch up] to that.”
