The #1 Ingredient for a Successful Artist-Founded Startup
Authenticity. It’s practically all brand managers and marketing gurus talk about anymore. Billion-dollar brands are spending millions to appear relatable and genuine. They want to talk to you like your best friend — your best friend who really, really wants you to open your wallet for a new phone plan or digital subscription service.
But what if you could start a business with the authenticity already built in? With a visible, relatable founder who’s passionate about solving a problem and an audience predisposed to be receptive? What if you could do authenticity, well, authentically?
“Companies that are truly authentic don’t have big marketing budgets because their customers are doing the marketing for them while the companies make money and grow,” writes Richard Kestenbaum, a retail contributor at Forbes. For startups, that means they have the potential to get off the ground and scale more quickly.
Building a human-first company starts with a relatable founder. Entertainers and celebrities with significant followings are perfectly positioned to build companies for this exact reason. By having a recognizable leader, celebrity-founded startups have a built-in distribution advantage (i.e. loyal fans), allowing them to move fast and win in the market while also creating a high barrier to entry for competitors. In fact, launching a startup or tech company is the most effective way an artist can leverage their audience beyond music. Artists have a captive audience ready to be early adopters of the innovation — as long as it doesn’t come off as just another way to make a buck.
Case in point: Killer Mike’s new digital bank designed to help Black and Latino communities build wealth. Named for the area of Tulsa dubbed “Black Wall Street” in the early 1900s, Greenwood Bank focuses on removing barriers that often prevent working-class Black and Latino people from opening bank accounts, as well as on building equity in communities of color. It’s a tech innovation that addresses a clear problem in the banking industry, and it’s clear Killer Mike is passionate about Greenwood’s mission: “…there’s never been a time in my life I did not have a Black bank account,” he told Fast Company.
Or consider Kid Cudi’s new live music streaming app. Missing the experience of being able to perform live during the Covid-19 pandemic, Cudi helped build Encore, an app that allows artists to host live shows and talk with fans from anywhere in the world. It empowers entertainers to continue working, build communities around their music, and connect with fans in real-time, all without having to wait until it is safe to tour again.
Then there is Pharrell Williams’s new skin-care line, Humanrace. On first glance it may seem like just another celebrity beauty brand, but this is the real deal. Pharrell has been committed to skin health since his mid-20s, according to Allure, and he developed Humanrace’s products with input from his long-time dermatologist. For Pharrell, this wasn’t about putting his name on someone else’s formulation — he was heavily involved in the product development and made sure that the ingredients, in keeping with his personal values, would benefit all skin types and be earth-friendly.
When entertainers and celebrities leverage their platforms and passions to create products to solve everyday problems, people pay attention. Hyype is here to help artists get their startups off the ground, including helping them connect with a co-founder who will run the day-to-day operations. (Killer Mike and Kid Cudi both have non-celebrity co-founders for Greenwood and Encore.) But before we even get that far down the path, we help artists test startup ideas to find one that has a high chance of success in the market.
Artists and their managers have unique market insights — whether about the music industry or issues they and/or their fans encounter in everyday life — that have the potential to be developed into viable companies. With the right co-founder and team, an artist can transform their insights into tech-enabled solutions for their followers and others. The key, of course, is that the startup needs to be grounded in a concept that genuinely excites the artist. If the artist isn’t passionate, it won’t feel authentic to their fans, which means the startup won’t have a meaningful advantage over the competition.
By integrating their assets with tech-enabled business models, artists can continually generate new revenue streams and capture new audiences, just as Killer Mike, Kid Cudi and Pharrell are already doing. In turn, their celebrity can potentially increase as the company grows, with new listeners discovering their music as a result of their innovation — but only, of course, if everything is done from a place of authenticity.
