Why Andy Bachman Built BuzzStar: From Managing Creators to Owning the Platform

More than 200 million people around the world now call themselves creators. Only 4 percent of them earn over $100,000 a year, and many make far less. In an industry Goldman Sachs has projected could approach $480 billion by 2027, that math doesn’t add up — and it’s exactly the gap Andy Bachman set out to close. 

The founder and CEO of Creators Inc. has spent years watching the problem from the inside. His agency, one of the most powerful in the space, has turned creator audiences into more than a billion dollars in sales across platforms like OnlyFans and Fanfix. But even at that scale, he kept hitting the same wall. His team could grow a creator and help them cash in, yet the creator was still renting space on someone else’s land. 

“The creators owned the audience. The platforms owned the technology. Agencies sat in the middle,” Bachman said.

So he built the thing in the middle. BuzzStar is a marketplace for paid one-on-one video calls, letting fans book live sessions with creators, get a ping when their favorite goes online and keep a recording afterward. The platform takes a cut of each transaction and hands creators a revenue stream that owes nothing to sponsorships, algorithms or ad rates that can collapse overnight.

The premise underneath it is almost stubbornly simple. Fans have always valued access, and creators have rarely had a clean way to sell it directly. Until recently, “access” usually meant a reply, a repost or a lucky DM that may or may not have been real. 

“Everyone in this space has been monetizing attention,” Bachman said. “Almost nobody’s been monetizing access.”

That distinction is the one he keeps coming back to. Most of the creator economy runs on reach, and Bachman has spent years arguing that reach without infrastructure is just noise. Brand deals still account for about 70 percent of creator income, a dependence that leaves even huge accounts one algorithm change or one dropped sponsor away from trouble. BuzzStar is his answer to that fragility, a steady stream a creator controls instead of one they hope the feed keeps feeding.

It also fits the reality of modern schedules. A call can happen from a hotel room on tour, a green room before a show or the bleachers at a kid’s baseball game. Instead of waiting on a sponsorship or planning life around a campaign, people can monetize the pockets of downtime they already have. 

There’s real engineering under the hood, too. As demand for a given creator climbs, BuzzStar’s pricing adjusts in real time, a surge mechanic that lets the most sought-after names charge what their minutes are worth in the moment.

And the names taking calls bring genuine star power. The platform has drawn the likes of ACE Family founder Austin McBroom, rapper Blueface, celebrity jeweler Johnny Dang and live streamer N3on, alongside hitmaking producer Scott Storch, whose credits run from Beyoncé to Dr. Dre. For their audiences, a booked call is the kind of access that used to be reserved for a backstage pass or a serious connection.

Those relationships didn’t appear overnight. By the time BuzzStar launched, Bachman had already spent years building them.

A Babson College graduate and former White House honoree recognized among the country’s top entrepreneurs under 30, he started Creators Inc. in 2020 with a laptop and no partners, then grew it past a billion dollars in sales and $300 million in EBITDA. Before any of it, he was co-founding ad-tech and consumer-protection startups, which is to say he was building real companies long before the internet minted its first influencer. 

For Bachman, BuzzStar is the natural next step in a belief he’s held the whole way up. A follower count can vanish and a viral clip gets old, but the pull of wanting to talk to someone you admire never really fades.

“Content can be copied. Algorithms change. Platforms come and go,” he said. “But direct human access has always had value. BuzzStar is built around that idea.”