How to Diligence Creators
What are you looking at? What are they looking for? Diligencing creators isn't the same as diligencing startups, but it’s just as important. This post covers how to diligence creators: evaluating their business models, revenue streams, audience dynamics, and long-term scalability.
This post outlines a framework for how to diligence Creators, drawn from investing in Creator-led holding companies and working with top-tier talent across entertainment, tech, and consumer brands.
In 2022, I introduced traditional software sourcing by the means of starting with topics with big, meaty Content TAM.
I didn’t know the math and I hadn’t done (or learned) how to do proper diligence on a content creator. You might be thinking Don’t talent managers kinda do this? and the answer to that is as clear as if early-stage VCs really do. The difference, of course is that the process us universally understood in traditional venture. The process for Creator Rounds is not as clear.
This section breaks down the key metrics and financial indicators that reveal whether a Creator (and their content as a product) is scalable, sustainable, and investment-ready.
Here’s what we’re going to do:
- The Difference between Creator and traditional Software diligence
- Go over two of the most common mistakes of Creator investing & diligence
- Go through the literal process of a Creator Investment in terms of Conviction Building (Pre-Diligence), Validation (Core Diligence), and Deal Readiness
What’s Different?
Ironically, you’re actually doing more work (yippie) than traditional software diligence.
I’ll break it down like this:
Category | VC Startup Diligence | Creator Investing Diligence |
What’s the asset? | The Product (Code, platform, tech) | Product + The distribution |
Where is the leverage? | Scalability of code (zero marginal cost) | In scalability of trust (retention) and distribution (sales) on products (code, IP, services, or DTC) |
What are you underwriting? | Market opportunity + team’s ability to ship/scale | Attention durability, ability to convert, team’s ability to ship & scale |
How do you model value creation? | LTV:CAC, ARR growth, margin expansion | Modern LTV:CAC — Returning viewers, completion rates, comment depth |
What is retention? | Weekly/monthly active users | W/MAU + Engagement rates, completion rates, comment depth, returning viewers |
Moat | Tech, data network effects, switching costs | Narrative of markets, audience affinity, tech |
Team Scale | Engineers, GTM, customer success | Executive-level, subsidiary typical hires (engineers, gtm, customer success) |
Exit Value | M&A, IPO, Revenue multiple | M&A, IPO, revenue multiple, lisencing, equity in subsidiaries |
How to determine what you care about:
1. Pre-Diligence (Conviction Building)
Market & Thesis Fit
- Category tailwinds? (E.g. wellness creators, AI explainers, female financial education)
- Platform timing? (New distribution unlocks: YouTube Shorts, newsletter boom, TikTok Shop)
- Thesis match? (Is this a fit for your fund’s consumer thesis, or audience-holding thesis?)
Early Signals
- Format defensibility (Is this a repeatable content engine?)
- Founder-market fit (Are they the best person for this niche?)
- Audience loyalty (High retention, strong comment sections, deep engagement)
- Cultural resonance (Shared, referenced, stitched, memed)
II. Core Diligence (Validation Phase)
Mistake 1: There is Math.
Understanding Creator Math means knowing how to evaluate the business engine behind a Creator’s audience, content, and monetization holistically as an early-stage holding company.
This section breaks down the key metrics and financial indicators that reveal whether a Creator is scalable, sustainable, and investment-ready.
A Common Mistake
One mistake I see aspiring Creator Investors make is to either index on “Traditional Financials” or Current Subscriber/View count.
Let’s assume Content is a Product, meaning, each individual piece has a craft-cycle not so far off from software product. If that is the case (it is), then we have to assess each individual product: its view/engagement growth and subsequent attribution power to other parts of the business. That’s to start.
We’re starting here because it’s the 1/2 of the hardest things about Creator diligence.
Creator Metrics
Creator metrics are the quantitative signals that show how well a Creator captures and retains attention.
In 2025, there are not many Creators that even know their own metrics in detail. We can blame this on a few reasons, one of the main ones is a lack of “benchmarks” (not understood in traditional software) for Creators and their individual pieces of Content. I started building that here.
The general categories for Creator metrics to look for are:
- Audience Growth, obviously
- Per Platform
- Engagement & Retention
- Avg Views/Post, Engagement Rate (%), Watch Time (mins), Completion Rate (%), CTR (%)
- CES-A & Efficiency
- Net New Revenue ($), Monthly Burn ($), Monthly Reach, CES-A Score, Interpretation
- Brand ROI — Showcase campaigns that translated to direct sales
- Format, Views, Clicks, Sales, Conversion Rate (%), Notes
- Platform Health — Which account are active?
- Platform, Monetization Status, Strike History, Age of Account (years), Activated Platform Creator Fund?, Part of Their Partner Program?
Creator Financials
A Creator’s financials reveal whether their content is a business—or just creating product. These are the core financial KPIs to diligence:
Calculating Beta
Mistake 2:
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