The creator economy’s next opportunity is not a bigger brand fee. It is a stake in the company. As top creators grow into sophisticated media businesses, platforms and agencies are building formal routes for them to join startups as angel investors or sweat equity partners.
Alix Earle’s 2024 move as a strategic equity investor in soda brand Poppi was an early public marker. But Kate McAndrew, co-founder and general partner at VC fund Baukunst, says consumer founders were asking how to get creators onto cap tables as far back as 2017 and 2018.
New infrastructure for creator deals
Earlier this month, fundraising and deal-matching platform Cherub held a private, application-only summit for 100 creators who wanted to learn about angel investing and startup equity. Meanwhile, newly launched creator marketing agency JERi is building pre-vetted creator councils that it can offer to startups across tech, sports, beauty and B2B.
Ross Yellowlees, JERi’s co-founder, frames the shift simply: creators are “no longer just creators; they’re businesses.” Like any business, they are looking for predictable revenue.
Two paths to ownership
There are two main routes. Angel investing involves putting money directly into a company, which suits a smaller group of top-earning creators who now have cash to deploy and financial teams to guide them. Sweat equity lets creators contribute services and labour in exchange for partial ownership, which opens the door to a wider set of creators whose value is strategic rather than purely financial.
Emily Ward, co-founder of JERi and early-stage fund Love X Money Ventures, says creators are looking to diversify how they get paid and build revenue streams around strategic advice, not just execution. Her fund recently vetted creators for social fashion app Driptail as strategic equity investors; the company’s user base grew 60x from March to July this year.
What a fair deal looks like
One reason these deals have not scaled yet is inconsistent terms. Cherub’s equity guide offers seed-stage benchmarks to make creator compensation more predictable:
- Advisory only: strategic input and organic posts, roughly 0.1% to 0.3% at seed, with two-year quarterly vesting and a three-month cliff.
- Advisory plus services: guaranteed content, paid social whitelisting and event appearances, roughly 0.25% to 0.75% at seed, with two-year quarterly vesting and a six-month cliff.
- Long-term collaborator or creative director: hands-on operational services, co-branded products and sustained campaigns, roughly 0.75% to 3% at seed, with four-year quarterly vesting and a one-year cliff.
These ranges matter because, as Yellowlees warns, some influencers could get taken advantage of by deals that demand a lot of work for very little equity.
Why this matters for marketers
For startups and brands, the key is not to hand equity to anyone with reach. McAndrew says equity should be about insights and strategy, not paying creators to post. Startups often lack expertise in creator go-to-market, and an inside creator can help them build that distribution.
YouPop founder Sarina Virk Torrendell intentionally put non-mega creators on her AI operating system’s cap table. In a noisy, saturated market, having creators invest time or money signals trust and can be far more efficient than inefficient paid marketing at the pre-seed stage.
As competition intensifies, equity deals offer startups a growth lever and creators a longer career runway. Marketers should treat creator equity as a strategic tool, not a gimmick.
Source: Digiday
