Challenges at scale
Despite the flurry of activity, the professionalization of the creator space has not come easily.
Beast Industries is fighting a federal lawsuit alleging sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, and wrongful termination. The company has denied the claims and called the suit an attempt to “manufacture a payday.”
Unwell, the podcast network built by Call Her Daddy creator Alex Cooper and her husband and co-CEO, Matt Kaplan, saw more than 30 current and former employees tell Vanity Fair this year that the company fostered a hostile workplace, allegations Cooper has disputed.
And Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat, once valued near $650 million, has cut roughly a quarter of its staff, churned through two CEOs in about a year, and is fighting lawsuits from former podcast executives.
This turbulence is a direct illustration of what Chou coaches her creator clients to guard against: building a business quickly, with a lack of structural governance, around the judgement of a newly famous person. Creators, after all, rarely bring a wealth of commercial acumen to their enterprise, at least not at the outset.
As a result, the most difficult part of scaling a creator business is often not the strategy, according to Josh Kaplan, co-founder of the creator collective Smooth Media.
Instead, it is the unglamorous work of operationalizing a business that often began as a hobby: formalizing employment agreements, establishing clean chains of title, cleaning up their books.
This professionalization shows up most concretely in who creators are hiring. Housenbold came from Shutterfly, Dhar Mann Studios’ Atkins from broadcast television, Babish Media’s Jacobs from trademark law, and former NBCUniversal executive Zach Miller stepped into the role of president at Jesse “Jesser” Riedel’s sports media empire JesserCo in April.
In fact, the influx of executive talent is perhaps the clearest indication that the space is poised for growth.
“We have built infrastructure, and we have hired people with different kinds of expertise,” said Miller, who’s been working within Jesser’s brand empire since 2023 and plans to launch branded outdoor goods and consumables companies within the next year. “We are not slowing down, but we now have people in place who have seen a lot more than young people who are figuring it out as they go.”
The next phase of maturation, though, will be when the creator economy no longer needs to import such outside leadership, according to Kaplan.
As creators have grown their followings over the years, a service economy of editors, thumbnail strategists, and IP lawyers has similarly scaled to support them.
The early career media buyers who years ago advocated for increasing creator budgets have now aged into decision-making roles at agencies and brands. And businesses like Beast Industries, which employs around 750 staff, have served as a kind of coaching tree for the creator space, turning out the next generation of operators who will go on to build ventures of their own.
