From brand deals to equity deals: creators want a stake, not just a fee

“My really smart consumer founders were trying to get creators on cap tables a long time ago,” said Kate McAndrew, co-founder and general partner at Baukunst, a venture capital fund. “2017, 2018, all of a sudden, my B2B founders were coming to me and being like, ‘Is there any way that we could get creators to invest? How do you meet a creator?’” 

Now bigger players in the creator economy are looking to fast-track those connections. 

Earlier this month, Cherub, a fundraising and deal-matching platform that connects startup founders with angel investors, held a private, application-only summit for 100 creators looking to learn more about angel investing and startup equity. Elsewhere, newly minted creator marketing agency JERi is building out its own roster of creator councils with pre-vetted creators it can offer up to startups looking to get creators to sit on their boards. 

“Creators are looking for ways to diversify how they’re getting paid, and creating revenue streams for strategic consult instead of just the execution is a really interesting way to [look for] longevity in their careers,” said Emily Ward, co-founder of JERi and Love X Money Ventures, an early-stage venture capital and angel investment fund. The fund recently vetted creators to join social fashion app Driptail as strategic equity investors, which grew its user base by 60x from March to July of this year.

Ross Yellowlees, JERI’s co-founder, said their “verticalized” creator councils are pre-vetted groups of creators that JERi can bring to brands across a variety of categories, from tech and sports to beauty and B2B. These creators can be involved from the very start of a company’s journey, helping with strategy, cultural insights and creative, or later on for things like product reviews and recommendations. 

“Creators are no longer just creators; they’re businesses. And if you look at any business, you know, whether it’s a marketing agency or a media agency or whatever it may be, all of them are looking at how to get predictable revenue,” Yellowlees said.

There are two main avenues creators can take when pursuing the early investor route: angel investing, where they put money directly into a company, and sweat equity, where they provide services and labor in exchange for partial ownership. Angel investing is really more of an option for a smaller group of top-earning creators.

“Creators are making real money, so they have money to invest now, right? A few years ago, we weren’t minting 20-something-year-old millionaires at the rate that we are now with these creator businesses,” said McAndrew. “These businesses are sophisticated media companies; they’ve got real revenue, real dollars, and these people are smart,” he added. And the kinds of sophisticated creator entrepreneurs McAndrew references will have the financial teams to guide them through angel investing. 

This shift raises a key question: which creators can bring valuable sweat equity to a cap table? For Yellowlees, brands should tap creators with strong growth and engagement. For Sarina Virk Torrendell, CEO and founder of AI operating system for creators, YouPop (with several creators on its cap table), it was about engagement.

“Anyone who is coming on are not mega creators, and that was intentional,” Torrendell said. “Paid marketing is not always super efficient…I think that for a pre-seed startup, it’s super inefficient…bringing creators on the cap table helped instill that trust, because if a creator is investing their time or their money, they obviously believe in what we’re doing.”

McAndrew said brands should only consider creators who can provide real strategic leverage, not just ones who can post about the company

“It’s about insights and strategy,” she said. “People think that the creators are getting paid to post, and are getting equity to post. They’re not. If they’re getting equity, it’s because they’re teaching the startup how to market itself, right? Because a lot of these people, a lot of founders, are not experts in creator go-to-market.” This type of distribution, and you need someone who’s on the inside who understands the nuances of it, who can help you drive that.”

Educating and building infrastructure

Jaclyn Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Cherub, said the platform initially launched as a way to connect more angel investors with brands after discovering that there was a healthy appetite for investment but not enough access. But Johnson and her team quickly realized many of the interested investors were also big players in the creator space, so they went to UTA’s head of creators Aly Grant, to ask whether the agency was sourcing investment deals for their clients. 

UTA said the deals came in randomly, and clients were interested, but they had otherwise no idea how to hunt them down. “We decided to build the creator portion of the business, where you can connect with creators, celebrities, and soon-to-be management and talent agencies to get creators on the cap table from an investment perspective and a sweat equity perspective,” Johnson said. 

Cherub will soon launch a feature that helps its creators keep track of their responsibilities as either sweat equity partners or angel investors. The company’s equity guide also laid out benchmarks for potential investment opportunities, suggesting that:

• An advisory only role (strategic input, organic posts) should be worth 0.1% to 0.3%  at seed standardized to a two year quarterly vesting schedule with a three month cliff. (a waiting period an employee or founder must complete before any of their stock options or shares begin to vest)
• An advisory and services role (guaranteed content, paid social whitelisting, event appearances) should be around 0.25%  to 0.75%  at seed with a two year quarterly vesting schedule and a six month cliff. 
• A long-term collaborator or creative director role (hands-on operational services, co-branded products, sustained campaigns) should be around 0.75% to 3% at seed with a four year quarterly vesting schedule and a one year cliff. 

Benchmarks like these matter because, as opportunities for creator investors grow, so does the risk of predatory deals, which offer low equity options for a ton of legwork. Yellowlees said the deals so far have varied wildly, which may be why these kinds of creator investments haven’t scaled yet.

“Some influencers might get taken advantage of,” Yellowlees said. “I hope that doesn’t happen…But there’s definitely no one-way model, and there never will be because of how different every creator is.”

That’s why education for both creators and brands regarding expectations, equity options, and more is critical on both sides. The five creator agency execs and investors interviewed for this article all believe these kinds of deals will become an increasingly popular option in a crowded, competitive creator economy. 

“This is a really smart way to drive growth,” said YouPop’s Torrendell. “It’s such a noisy time right now. Every category is saturated. It’s super competitive.”

McAndrew took it a step further. She sees creators as the wedge that will help onboard the next generation of angel investors. 

“There’s an opportunity where this goes much beyond creators, but I love creators to start because it’s a group of people who are high-earning,” she said. “They’re entrepreneurial. They have an ability to affect the outcome of what they’re investing in, which is always fantastic. They’re value-add investors…they’re also the distribution machines of the modern age. So if they’re talking about making their first angel investments, guess what? Other high-net-worth people follow them.”