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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Creator Financials
Calculating Beta
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