The Kim Kardashian Test & the First Tool to Show Up Twice on the Podcast

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This week is about audience, and why what sits behind it has to be real.

The watch is my conversation with Scott Van den Berg of HotStart VC, who invests in companies started by celebrities and creators. His test for a celebrity partner is simple. Kim Kardashian passed it by drinking the product for a year before she ever became a co-founder.

The Practical Edge closes a loop for the first time on the podcast. In Episode 2, Vitalii Dodonov told me what Stan was building. This week, Scott told me he uses it. Let's get into it.

If They Will Not Buy It, They Will Not Sell It

The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Scott Van den Berg · ~37 min

This week's Worth Watching is my conversation with Scott Van den Berg, founder of HotStart VC. Scott invests in companies started by celebrities and creators, including brands from Selena Gomez, DJ Khaled, and Jake Paul.

He is Dutch and had no network in the US, let alone Hollywood. So he started writing about celebrity brands on LinkedIn, and now the managers call him.

Scott's test for a celebrity partner is simple. Were they a customer first? Kim Kardashian drank Update for a year and emailed the founders notes on marketing and product before she ever came on as a co-founder. That is the deal you want.

The danger is not a celebrity who is too small. The danger is a big one talking to the wrong audience. Scott sees startups get starstruck, give away 20% of the company, and watch two or three posts convert almost nobody.

At Cutting Horse, an influencer can be a plus or a minus. A big platform makes your first several thousand customers a lot easier. It does not get you the second, third, and fourth purchase. The product does that. Even if you are The Rock, at some point you exhaust your platform.

One Guest Built It. The Next One Uses It.

Stanley is an AI content tool for LinkedIn, built by Stan. This is the first time a loop has closed on the podcast.

In Episode 2, Vitalii Dodonov, co-founder and CTO of Stan, told me Stanley was the product the whole company was heads down on. He called it "your personal head of content." This week, when I asked Scott Van den Berg for one tool he would recommend, he named Stanley.

Scott is Dutch, and English is his second language. He built a LinkedIn following of about 39,000 people by writing about one narrow topic, and that audience is what brought celebrities and their managers to him.

Stanley is trained on his tone of voice. He gives it the idea and the points he wants to make, and it helps him write the post so it still sounds like him.

The part I liked most is what he does not use. Stanley will also suggest post ideas for you. Scott skips that feature, because he wants his ideas to be his own. The tool does the writing. He does the thinking.

Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang at MIT gave 453 college-educated professionals real writing tasks from their jobs, and gave half of them ChatGPT. Their 2023 study in Science found time spent fell 40% and quality rose 18%. The weaker writers gained the most, and the gap between them and the strongest writers shrank.

Scott's split between writing and ideas has research behind it too. Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser had 300 people write short stories, some with AI-generated ideas and some without, then had 600 more people rate them. Their 2024 study in Science Advances found AI ideas made each story more novel and better written. They also made the stories more alike. Writers who each used one AI idea wrote stories 10.7% more similar to each other than the writers who used none.

Let AI help you write. Keep the ideas yours.

Vitalii said something in Episode 2 that stuck with me: "You can go to TikTok, make an account, create viral content, accumulate a lot of attention. The question is, what do you do with that attention?"

Scott is the answer walking around. He took an audience on LinkedIn and turned it into deal flow, an angel syndicate, and now a debut fund. Stanley is one of the tools he uses to keep it going.

Stanley for LinkedIn is $149 a month. Nobody paid for this mention. Scott picked it.

Thanks for reading.

Founder · Operator · Investor

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