A creator sits in her apartment at 2 a.m., watching a number climb. Fourteen million views in three days. Her phone will not stop buzzing.
By morning, the platform has quietly shifted its algorithm. The views stop. The brand deals that were supposed to follow never materialise. She built something that felt like a business, and it evaporated in a single update she never saw coming.
She owns none of it. Not the audience, not the distribution, not even the format that made her famous. She built a house on land she was only ever borrowing.
What if the entire model was wrong from the start? What if the goal was never supposed to be attention at all?
Meet Tobias Hoss
Tobias Hoss is the Co-Founder of 30 Dishes and a senior advisor across the creator economy, working with Copyright Capital, TopFan and Talentir from his base in Frankfurt. He is Forbes 30 Under 30 for Media and Marketing, the former Chief Business Officer of Lunar X, and by his own admission someone who cannot hold a camera steady or edit a single frame of video.
What defines him is not a talent for making content. It is a conviction, hardened by watching creator after creator lose everything to a platform they never controlled, that the real business was never the audience. It was always the asset underneath.
From McKinsey Slides to a Media Empire
Hoss did not start out chasing creators. He started out at WHU, one of Germany’s most rigorous business schools, graduating with a 1.1, the kind of grade that gets you noticed before you have proven anything. His master’s thesis was on intellectual property management. Even then, ownership was the question he could not put down.
McKinsey came next, and it gave him something specific. Not glamour, but discipline. He learned to walk into rooms full of senior executives with nothing but a framework and the confidence to defend it under pressure. It was, in his words, “structured problem-solving and the confidence to operate with senior leaders under pressure.”
Then came the pivot that changed everything. He joined Lunar X as Chief Business Officer, stepping into a business built entirely on the volatile, exhilarating world of creator media. The scale was staggering: a portfolio scaling past 125 million YouTube subscribers, 150 million monthly Spotify streams, creator products landing in more than 2,000 Walmart stores, one of the industry’s largest creator-led fashion events, and seven-figure deals stacked across syndication, publishing and brand partnerships.
But the real education was not the size of the numbers. It was the fragility underneath them. Reach could spike in a week and vanish in a day, and no framework from business school had prepared him for platforms that could rewrite the rules overnight. That gap, between what he was trained to build and what the industry actually rewarded, became the question he has spent every year since trying to answer.
Building the Infrastructure Nobody Else Was Building
Today, Hoss operates less like a marketer and more like an architect of financial plumbing for an industry that has never had any. His current work spans three distinct problems that all trace back to the same root cause: creators build valuable businesses that traditional finance and traditional media cannot see.
The capital problem. At Copyright Capital, Hoss works as a capital partner to creators and to the reps and operators standing behind them. The premise is simple and, in this industry, still radical: a creator business should be financeable without its owner giving up equity, IP or control in order to grow.
Traditional lenders cannot see these businesses at all. They look for a factory, inventory, receivables from counterparties they recognise, and finding none, they decline. So the money that has historically been available came with a price measured in ownership. Sell a stake. Sign over the catalogue. Hand across the rights in perpetuity. Growth cost you the very thing you were growing.
Copyright Capital underwrites the full revenue picture instead, brand deals included, and advances against it. No equity. No IP. No creative control. The firm recently closed a $150 million fund for North America.
“The only reason creators historically had to sell their IP to grow was that nobody would lend against it,” he says. “That excuse is gone.”
He is not arguing from theory. 30 Dishes was itself financed this way, underwritten against signed brand partnerships before a single episode existed to point at.
“Creators need to be treated as businesses,” Hoss says. “That means professional, supportive infrastructure behind them, not a handshake and a hope. That is the part I care about.”
The dependency problem. If Copyright Capital solves the capital problem, TopFan solves the dependency one.
Most creators mistake followers for a business. Hoss’s math is blunt: only three to seven percent of an audience ever converts from watching to paying, but that sliver can drive more than eighty percent of revenue. “A follower is a vanity metric. A fan is a business asset.”
The harder truth underneath it is that on a platform, the creator does not hold the relationship. The platform does. The creator rents access to their own audience, at a price set by someone else, and can be repriced or cut off without warning.
TopFan hands that relationship back. It is a white-label direct-to-fan platform, so memberships, digital products, community and commerce run under the creator’s own brand rather than inside someone else’s marketplace. The creator owns one hundred percent of the first-party data, which in practice means they can still reach their audience on the morning every algorithm turns against them at once. The commercial model is deliberately aligned: no fixed fees, roughly ten percent of platform revenue, so TopFan earns only when the creator does. The platform already sits behind more than $100 million in fan monetisation for Warner Bros., Fox, the NFL and Maroon 5.
“Diversification is not a nice-to-have, it is the entire point,” Hoss says. “Recurring revenue from people who actively chose you is the only income in this business that does not depend on a feed.”
The payment problem. The third is the least glamorous and, Hoss argues, quietly the most expensive. Creators do not get paid properly.
The creator economy moves more than $250 billion a year across roughly 200 million creators, and the machinery carrying money from an audience to the person who earned it remains slow, opaque and costly. Payouts arrive weeks or months after the content that generated them. For an individual creator that is a cash-flow problem. For an agency or network paying hundreds of people across dozens of countries, it is an operational tax that silently caps how large the business can ever get.
Talentir, the Vienna company Hoss advises, builds the financial layer underneath all of it: revenue splits, invoicing, reconciliation, treasury and global disbursements, automated, for agencies, MCNs, platforms, labels and distributors. Money moves as it is earned rather than in monthly cycles. The company raised a €4 million seed round led by Redstone, with Inovia Capital joining.
It is unglamorous work, and that is rather the point. Capital without infrastructure is just a faster way to lose money, and a direct fan relationship is worth little if the revenue it produces takes ninety days to arrive.
The FRANCHISE Framework
His clearest thinking shows up in what he calls the FRANCHISE framework, built from his experience at Lunar X, leading the global portfolio across content, products, music, events. Hoss has grown the portfolio to more than 125M YouTube subscribers, 50BN YouTube views and 150M monthly Spotify streams.
Format locks the repeatable show. Reach moves fans onto owned channels. Affinity engineers belonging instead of passive viewing. Networked monetization stacks revenue lines that reinforce each other. Commerce builds products audiences already asked for. House of IP means registering the trademarks nobody bothers to register. Infrastructure means clean books and real operators. Storyworld extends one universe into many formats. Evolution means never standing still.
With 30 Dishes, he is not advising this philosophy anymore. He is financing, producing and living inside it. The show launches in Q4: a premium food and travel competition hosted by Uncle Roger (Nigel Ng) and Mark Wiens alongside a cast of global food and travel creators with roughly 100 million combined following, twelve episodes plus three behind-the-scenes, with a German season running in parallel. Nine creators, thirty iconic dishes, twelve hours to survive one of the world’s greatest food cities.
The Hoss Playbook: 6 Lessons
- Own the asset, not just the audience. A following that cannot be reached off-platform is not a business, it is a loan you have not been asked to repay yet.
- Measure fans, not followers. The three to seven percent who convert are worth more than the ninety percent who merely watch.
- Build a format, not a moment. A viral clip cannot be repeated on command. A repeatable show can.
- Diversify before you are forced to. No single revenue stream, platform or sponsor should be able to end your business in a day.
- Protect what you sign. Rights given away in a contract rarely find their way back, no matter how good the deal looked at the time.
- Get paid like a business. Revenue that arrives ninety days late is a loan you are making to someone else, at zero percent.
The Business That Outlasts the Algorithm
The creator from the opening scene never had to lose everything. She just needed to know, before the algorithm turned, that the audience was never the asset. The format was. The rights were. The direct relationship with the people who actually paid attention was.
That is the case Hoss has been building his entire career toward, from a thesis on intellectual property to a business built on lending against it. He is not trying to make creators famous. He is trying to make them impossible to erase.
Attention will always be borrowed. What you build with it does not have to be.
Tobias Hoss is the Co-Founder of 30 Dishes and a senior advisor across Copyright Capital, TopFan and Talentir, based in Frankfurt, Germany. He helps creators turn audiences into owned, financeable businesses through creator-friendly capital, direct-to-fan monetisation and original IP.
