For years, the creator economy has been measured in followers, likes and subscribers. Success was defined by audience size and the ability to turn content into income. Yet beneath the surface something more significant has happened. Many of today’s leading creators are no longer individuals posting online. They are businesses employing staff, managing customers, running marketing campaigns and generating substantial revenue. The platforms they rely on, however, have failed to evolve alongside them.
It was this disconnect that caught the attention of Amjad Pirotti, co-founder of FindStars.
Pirotti did not begin with a product. He began with a question. Together with co-founder Amir Roknifard, he spent months talking to creators from across the industry, from newcomers earning modest incomes to established names with hundreds of thousands of followers. Rather than asking what features they wanted, he wanted to understand what prevented them from growing.
“What we were interested in wasn’t the type of content creators were producing,” he says. “What interested us were the main pain points of content creators. We believed this industry had become very exploitative.”
Research was vital
With a research background and a PhD, Pirotti approached the exercise methodically. He was less interested in symptoms than in underlying causes. The founders interviewed dozens of creators, listened carefully to their experiences and discovered that many of the biggest problems had little to do with content itself.
“We needed to sit down with people who were active in the industry,” he says. “High earners, low earners, it didn’t matter. We wanted to understand what was really happening.”
The conversations revealed something unexpected. The biggest frustrations were not creative at all. They were operational.
For Pirotti, the real transformation is that creators have quietly become entrepreneurs. A creator with hundreds of thousands of followers is no longer simply producing videos or photographs. They are running a business with customers, recurring revenue, administration, marketing and, increasingly, employees. Yet the platforms serving them still behave as though every creator is working alone. That central observation became the foundation of FindStars’ business model, which describes the platform as “the operating system for creator-led businesses” rather than simply another content platform.
“The industry has treated creators as individual creators since 2016,” Pirotti says. “Now we’re talking about businesses.”
That distinction changes everything.
Successful creators frequently need people to help manage customer messages, organise schedules, moderate communities and oversee day-to-day operations. Existing platforms offer few tools to support collaborative working, leaving creators with little option but to hand over usernames and passwords to agencies or assistants.
Creators become Businesses
Pirotti believes that creates unnecessary risk.
“There have been cases where agencies have changed payment details because they had control of the account,” he says. “The platforms weren’t designed for businesses. They were designed only for individuals.”
The issue received wider attention following investigations into agency practices, reinforcing Pirotti’s view that the industry had outgrown the infrastructure supporting it. Rather than adding another feature to an existing model, he believed the model itself needed rethinking.
As the interviews continued, four themes emerged repeatedly.
1. Discoverability
The first was discoverability. Many creators told him they remained almost entirely dependent on external social media platforms to attract audiences because the platforms where they earned revenue offered little meaningful internal discovery.
“The creators have to bring traffic from somewhere else,” he says. “Either you already have your own fan base or there is no other way to be discovered.”
2. Privacy
The second was privacy.
Many creators wish to restrict who can see their content, whether family members, employers or people within their own communities. Existing geo-blocking systems rely largely on IP addresses, something that can easily be bypassed through virtual private networks (VPNS).
Pirotti saw that as a technical problem with a technical solution.
“If somebody is connecting through a VPN, the platforms don’t really know who they are,” he explains. “We wanted to solve privacy properly.”
3. Platform Economics
The third issue concerned platform economics.
Most established creator platforms charge broadly similar commission rates regardless of whether a creator is just starting out or generating significant revenue.
“The top one per cent of creators contribute most of the platform revenue,” he says. “Yet they’re treated exactly the same as newcomers.”
FindStars instead proposes a tiered fee structure that rewards creators as their businesses grow, reducing platform fees for those who reach higher revenue levels while maintaining sustainable economics for the platform itself. The concept forms one of the central elements of the company’s operating model.
4. Chargebacks
The final issue was perhaps the one that surprised him most.
Chargebacks have long been accepted as part of doing business online, but Pirotti argues that the burden has traditionally fallen almost entirely on creators. Payments are often held for days or weeks in reserve, with disputed transactions deducted from creator earnings.
“It was very unfair,” he says. “That is money the creator has already earned. Maybe they have children to feed.”
Instead of treating chargebacks as an unavoidable cost for creators, FindStars has designed its payment architecture to minimise disputes before they occur while shifting responsibility away from the creator wherever possible.
Taken individually, each of these issues is manageable. Together they reveal a deeper problem.
Pirotti believes most platforms continue to optimise for the transaction rather than the business behind it. His ambition is broader than building another subscription platform. He wants to provide the infrastructure that allows creators to manage audiences, operations and revenue from a single place.
The company’s longer-term roadmap reflects that ambition, moving beyond monetisation tools towards workflow management, analytics, collaboration, financial services and business infrastructure as creators continue to professionalise.
Artificial intelligence also has a role, although perhaps not the one many expect.
While much of the industry is experimenting with AI-generated personalities and automated content, Pirotti believes AI should remain firmly behind the scenes.
AI is behind the Scenes
“The human is the product,” he says. “AI is the leverage.”
Rather than replacing creators, he sees artificial intelligence reducing administrative work, improving workflows, translating conversations, handling transcription and giving creators more time to concentrate on the work that only they can do. That philosophy runs throughout the FindStars business methodology and reflects Pirotti’s belief that audiences ultimately value authenticity over automation.
Although FindStars begins with one segment of the creator economy, Pirotti’s ambitions extend much further. He believes the same operational challenges increasingly affect coaches, educators, writers, fitness professionals and many other independent entrepreneurs building businesses around their personal brands.
His vision is therefore less about content than infrastructure.
“The platform that meets creators in this transition,” he says, “with infrastructure rather than just monetisation, defines the next decade.”
Whether FindStars succeeds will ultimately be decided by the market. Yet Pirotti’s central observation feels difficult to dispute. The creator economy has changed dramatically over the past decade. The question now is whether the technology supporting it can keep pace.
For Pirotti, that evolution is already underway. Creators have become companies. The platforms, he believes, simply need to catch up.
