In March 2024, Johnny Hilbrant was teaching spin classes at SoulCycle and Barry’s Bootcamp in Boston’s Back Bay. His clients were finance workers. Private equity guys who, between sets, catalogued their Nantucket compounds, their kiddos’ fencing lessons, their wife still at sample size after three children. Hilbrant was their instructor. He smiled, kept the class moving, and absorbed the condescension daily. He later said the character he eventually built came partly from how these same people looked down on him for working in fitness. They called his videos his “cute little thing.” He took notes for years.
Then on March 21st he hit record on his phone camera, channelled every suppressed reaction into a composite character, posted it to Instagram, and went back to teach the next class.
A year later, PE Guy had crossed $1 million in revenue. That money came from three distinct places. The largest share was brand deals: companies, mostly B2B software firms and fintech brands, who pay a creator directly to feature their product inside content the creator distributes to their own audience. The brand buys access to a specific, trusted following. The creator keeps creative control. Hilbrant collaborated this way with several companies, including a campaign with financial technology firm Ramp that involved actor Brian Baumgartner, best known as Kevin from The Office. The second stream was Cameo, a platform launched in 2017 where anyone can pay a creator to record a short personalised video: a birthday roast, a motivational message, a shoutout for a friend. Creators set their own price. Hilbrant charged $200 per video and, by mid-2025, had completed nearly 1,200 requests. The third stream was live appearance fees from corporate events and private equity firms, several of whom signed NDAs before booking him to perform the character that satirises their own industry. Over 300,000 followers on Instagram. When management offers came in at 30 to 40% cuts, Hilbrant declined all of them. Instagram was not the business. It was the infrastructure that made the business possible. His voice was the product and he was not handing creative control to anyone.
The temptation is to read this as a creator economy story. A lucky character, a platform algorithm breaking the right way, a cultural moment around finance excess. That reading misses what is actually interesting here, which is not how Hilbrant got famous but why the mechanism that stopped people like him for most of recorded history no longer functions.
The frustration was always there
Sharp creative work has almost always started from irritation rather than inspiration. Inspiration is episodic. Irritation, when it comes from something structural in the world, is permanent. If the thing that bothers you does not go away, you will never lack for material. And the person closest to the irritation, inside it without being numb to it, will always observe it more precisely than someone studying it from a distance.
In 1986, Scott Adams was a Pacific Bell employee in San Ramon, California, cycling through a string of roles that sounded more meaningful than they were. Financial analyst. Product manager. Budget manager. Applications engineer. He sat in meetings that struck him as absurd, and he started drawing. A potato-shaped engineer with an upward-curling tie emerged from the margins of corporate presentation decks. Adams called him Dilbert. The cubicle was the research lab. The frustration was not the inspiration for the material. It was the material itself.
In 1992, two students at the University of Colorado took construction paper, scissors, and an old 8mm camera and made a five-minute short about foul-mouthed children, a murderous snowman, and Jesus. Trey Parker and Matt Stone were not working from a brief. The crudeness of the animation was not a budget constraint. It was a reaction to what they found sanitised and consequence-free about mainstream entertainment. The limitation was the argument.
Three cases, three decades, same engine: an outsider close enough to observe something clearly, irritated enough to say it precisely, and willing to say it without softening it first. What Hilbrant, Adams, and Parker and Stone share is not a particular kind of talent. It is a particular kind of position: access without status. Close enough to see the thing clearly. Not embedded enough to have stopped finding it absurd.
None of this is new. Frustrated outsiders with sharp observations have always existed. What changed was what happened between the work and the audience.
The door was never optional
Adams drew Dilbert and spent two years refining the strip before any distributor would look at it. In 1989, United Feature Syndicate, one of the largest comic strip distribution companies in the United States at the time, which licensed content to newspapers on behalf of creators and took a share of the revenue, picked up the strip and placed it in 35 newspapers. Without that agreement, Adams had no way to reach readers at scale. A comic strip in the 1980s did not exist as a cultural product until a syndicate decided to carry it. The syndicate was not optional infrastructure. It was the only path. Adams kept his Pacific Bell day job for six more years after signing, because 35 papers was not enough to live on. The strip only reached critical mass when internet users began scanning and circulating strips in the mid-1990s, itself an early, accidental form of distribution outside the official channel. By then it was in around 500 papers and growing. He finally left Pacific Bell in 1995.
The South Park case is more precise. Parker and Stone made their construction paper short in 1992, premiered it at a student film screening, and it went nowhere. Three years passed. In 1995, Brian Graden, a Fox executive, came across the 1992 student short. He paid Parker and Stone $2,000 from his own pocket to make a sequel he could use as a personal video Christmas card for his Hollywood contacts. Not a studio development project. A personal commission, personal money, personal distribution list of around 80 people.
Those 80 people started copying the tape. They copied the copies. Parker had heard a rumour that George Clooney made 300 duplicates and distributed them widely through his own network — one of those copies reached Comedy Central’s Doug Herzog, who commissioned the series. South Park launched August 1997. Parker and Stone had no prior relationship with Graden before he contacted them. He found the work by chance and happened to have the right network. One chain of events. If Graden does not come across the 1992 student film, Comedy Central never sees it.
The work was not the constraint in either case. Access to distribution was. And this was not a problem unique to cartoonists. It was the structural condition of every industry where content moved through controlled channels: record labels, book publishers, film studios, newspaper syndicates. All of them controlled access to audience through scarcity. Physical objects, limited shelf space, finite broadcast hours, a fixed number of newspaper pages. You could not reach people at scale without going through them. That was not a side effect of how those industries operated. It was the operating model. The gatekeeper’s power came entirely from the fact that the channel was scarce and they controlled it.
Copying broke the model before the platforms replaced it
What destroyed that leverage was not a better product. It was the moment copying became free.
Napster launched in June 1999. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, it was a peer-to-peer file sharing service that let users exchange music files in MP3 format directly, bypassing every node in the distribution chain: the label, the distributor, the retailer, the physical object itself. Within a year it had tens of millions of users. The Recording Industry Association of America sued in December 1999. A federal court ordered Napster to remove all copyrighted material in March 2001. Napster shut down.
The idea did not. Pirate Bay launched in September 2003, founded by Swedish activists who understood exactly why Napster had been killable and built something structurally harder to shut down. Where Napster used centralised servers that could be seized, Pirate Bay used BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer protocol where files were split into pieces distributed directly between users. No single server held the content. Shutting down the website did not make the files disappear. The content had moved outside the distribution system entirely, and there was no technical mechanism to reverse that.
Between 1999 and 2015, music industry revenues collapsed by over half. The labels did not lose that revenue because they made bad creative decisions or signed the wrong artists. They lost it because the infrastructure that made their gatekeeping possible — physical distribution of scarce objects — became irrelevant the moment a file could be copied infinitely at zero cost. The scarcity was gone. The leverage went with it.
Spotify launched in 2008. The major labels — Universal, Sony, and Warner — signed licensing deals that gave Spotify access to their full catalogues in exchange for royalty payments and equity stakes in the company. The combined 18% stake the majors received cost them almost nothing in cash at the time. Sony alone later sold part of its stake for $750 million. The terms they accepted in 2008 were terms they would never have considered in 1995, when their catalogue was the only way to reach music at scale and they could dictate conditions accordingly. They did not embrace streaming because they saw the future clearly. They accepted it because a decade of Napster and Pirate Bay had already destroyed the leverage they needed to refuse.
This is the mechanism in full. The gatekeeper did not step aside. The gatekeeper got weakened by a decade of free copying until a new model arrived on terms the gatekeeper had to accept or be left with nothing. The VHS tape copies that spread the South Park short in 1995 were a primitive version of the same force: content moving outside the official channel, person to person, without permission. The difference is that in 1995 it still required an executive with a contact list to start the chain. By 2008 it required nothing except a file and a connection. By 2024 it required nothing except a phone.
What the platforms built from the wreckage
The platforms that followed did not create the collapse of gatekeeping. They built infrastructure on top of its ruins. YouTube launched in 2005, Instagram in 2010, TikTok reached Western markets around 2018. Each solved the same problem: how do you get from the work to the audience without asking anyone’s permission first. The answer each of them gave was the same. You do not ask. You post. The platform carries it.
But the platforms changed something beyond distribution. They collapsed the feedback loop.
Adams’ iteration cycle was years long. He refined the strip for two years before a syndicate would look at it. He then waited to see whether 35 papers would grow to 100, whether the audience was there, whether the observation had landed. Each adjustment took months to register. Parker and Stone’s construction paper short took months of physical labour per minute of finished animation. Their entire path to scale was one feedback cycle: the Graden commission. One person’s reaction, one network, one chain of copies.
Hilbrant posted two videos a week from the start. He opened his Cameo account and the first 600 requests told him whether the instinct was right. When a tuxedo rental company emailed him in June asking if PE Guy would promote their brand, he ran with it. Each decision produced a signal within days rather than years. The iteration loop that took Adams the better part of a decade compressed into weeks.
In April 2023, Goldman Sachs Research estimated the creator economy at $250 billion and projected it would nearly double to $480 billion by 2027, driven primarily by brand deal spending and the monetisation of short-form video. That projection covers roughly 50 million creators globally. Most analysis of that number focuses on what it means for brands and advertising budgets. The more structural implication is simpler: the infrastructure for reaching an audience no longer runs through gatekeepers, and the time between having the idea and finding out whether it is right has collapsed from years to weeks.
What did not change
The sharpness of the observation still has to come from proximity to the problem. Hilbrant’s PE Guy works because he spent years in rooms with the people he was satirising, being talked down to by them, absorbing every detail of how the performance operated. Adams’ strip worked because it named something millions of cubicle workers felt and had not seen named, written by someone who had lived every meeting he was drawing. Parker and Stone’s short worked because they said on screen what polite people at parties kept to themselves.
In all three cases, the outsider’s eye was sharpest because of a specific combination: access without status. Close enough to see the thing clearly. Not embedded enough to have normalised it.
What also did not change is the requirement to state the observation without softening it into something more palatable. Adams did not hedge Dilbert for corporate HR departments. Parker and Stone did not make the short less crude because a network might eventually want to carry it. Hilbrant did not smooth PE Guy into a character that private equity firms would find comfortable. When management offers came with 40% cuts and creative approval attached, he declined, because the voice without the edge is not the product. The edge was the whole point. It always is.
The gatekeeper is gone. The frustration was always enough. The only thing that changed is how long you have to wait between having the idea and finding out whether it is right. For most of history that wait was measured in years and required someone else’s permission. Now it is measured in weeks and requires none.
