Behind the Scenes: Inside the World's Biggest Creator Event

Where do we even start?

Well, we had quite the night.

We went and hung out with Will Smith. Uh, that was unexpected. Okay, how dumb would it be to miss your 14.5-hour international flight because you were enjoying hanging out in the Amex lounge just a little too much. That wouldn't happen to us. That would never happen to us. Okay, so we were probably the last people on the plane. How, uh, how stressful was that?

Very stressful. Nathan assured me that we had all the time in the world.

The guy actually seemed annoyed, like, look at how irresponsible I am.

Nathan and I are currently on a flight to our very first event for 2026. We are going to one Billion Follower Summit, which is in Dubai. It's called 1 Billion Follower Summit because the collective, like, total audience of just the speakers alone is nearing a billion. So when you think about that, it's kind of wild.

The lineup is pretty wild. You've got everyone from MrBeast, Will Smith, and Nathan Barry. Yeah, yeah, totally belong.

But in all seriousness, in 2026, we all know that connection is king, and that is more true for 2026 than it ever has been before, especially in the age of AI. And so we are going to go out and we're going to be in public with people making connections at a new event that we've never been to before. And there's going to be things that we do really well, and there's probably going to be a few things that we have to learn as well.

I just think it's crazy that they're flying all of us out there in business class, and there's like hundreds of speakers. We've got a lot of stuff planned. We'll take you behind the scenes. We've got podcast recordings, dinners, meetings, all of those things, and we're going to show you what's actually happening and share a few tips along the way.

We're 15 minutes to landing, and Nathan here has never done a proper eye mask. You can't get off the plane looking tired.

Oh yeah, 15 minutes before landing, apply the eye mask. We're wearing these off the plane? No, no, no, we're not wearing these off the plane. All right, made it to the hotel room. Got all checked in. Now I have a dilemma. It's like 9 PM, but I slept— it's like 9 AM at home. I didn't sleep quite enough. I don't really know what to do with this jet lag situation. I should have planned it better. So I've been hanging out in this lobby for about an hour and just running into so many great creators. So Brett Dashevsky, who runs Creator NYC, they run some great events and meetups. Kaya, who runs— well, she was at the Information, and now she has her own publication and doing a great newsletter on the creator economy. Anish from the Wishly group, they brought like 15 customers over to KITT, and so it's great to meet him in person. Yeah, turns out the lobby is the place to be.

Nathan, who have you fanboyed over?

Oh, well, uh, Jimmy walked by, MrBeast as he's commonly known.

Marie Forleo.

Yes, so Marie Forleo came through and Haley's like, hey, that's Marie Forleo, who I've known of on the internet and all that. She's actually sent a bunch of customers to Kit, and, uh, this is a safe space, I can admit something. I went over, introduced myself. I don't think she had any idea who I was, and she was super nice, but I, I don't think that like recognition ever came in.

I watched the entire thing happen. She absolutely had no idea who he was. It was glorious from my perspective.

It's really interesting being out here and seeing the X booth, right? Because all the big social platforms are here. Instagram's here, X is here. What I didn't expect, which I guess makes sense, is that it's all integrated with everything Elon does, right? So they have Tesla and X combined. So they have their own stage, they have the Optimus robots, they have the Cybertruck and all of that. So it's just weird and kind of cool how Elon has merged all the companies so they're cross-promoting each other. Okay, we're all mic'd up, ready to go backstage, hanging out in the green rooms. This stage is in the round, so never done that before. It'll be interesting to learn how to do that. Should be good though.

Make some noise for Nathan Barry!

So Nelson Mandela says, "I never lose. I either win or I learn." Ray Dalio says that pain plus reflection equals progress. And I say that when you truly embrace the idea that making money is a skill, then it entirely switches your mindset from what can I earn to what can I learn.

All right, friends, Nathan and I divided and conquered. I went to a dinner that we hosted in partnership with our friends from Creator Leaders, Gabriel and Aiden and Iram. And, uh, we've done a bunch of stuff with them. They're amazing. They always host epic community events. And tonight Tonight was no different. Had so many fun conversations, brainstormed, uh, some things for Max Klimenko's career ladder, uh, with his agent. Talked about, um, like what's going to give us energy or what's giving me energy with Simon Alexander Ong, who wrote the book Energize, uh, in 2026. Nathan, like I said, he is at the speaker dinner, uh, doing God knows what in the desert. That is a travel tip. Sometimes when you're in an event, uh, you're going to divide and conquer, and so capitalize on maximizing your time with the most amount of people. All right, friends.

Simon, what's one piece of advice you'd give to someone who's showing up to an event and they want to get the most out of it?

Good question. The one bit of advice I would say is this: when you're coming to an event, make sure you're focused on increasing your luck surface area. What does that mean practically? If you're going to a talk, arrive early, sit at the front. On average, you tend to be more interesting people at the front, and you might even get to connect with the speakers. Sit in places where you have a lot of people passing through because you just never know who you're going to bump into, and actually make an effort to introduce yourself. Tell someone what you do, why you're here, and you never know where that conversation may lead to.

Now is the point of the day in which we're both hitting a wall.

We're a little tired. We've recorded 4 hours of podcasts.

We, Nathan Barry, just recorded 4 hours of podcasts. I again was a scribe.

It was really good though. First episode was with Grace Miller, who runs so much amazing stuff for Flight Story, which is Steven Bartlett's team. And then next episode was with Simon, who is a UK-based creator who just has all this great stuff on energy and avoiding burnout, and it's a lot of fun. Now we're headed back to the venue. To see if we can meet up with Will Smith's team. Uh, so Tom Brady's team introduced us, and, uh, we're going to try and see if we can make a newsletter happen, which would be pretty cool.

Well, we had quite the night.

Uh, that was unexpected. So where, where do we even start? We went and hung out with a whole bunch of of incredible creators, but included Will Smith. So there was, yeah, just a little evening gathering with like, what, 30, 35 people or something like that? It was in like a fancy penthouse at a hotel residence thing.

It was too fancy for us to even explain how fancy it was. Let's just say that.

It was on the level that we had to send in our IDs in advance so that the security could verify that we were the right people.

But we also had no idea what we were walking into. I am deeply regretting my tennis shoes choice.

There were people with tennis shoes. I saw a few.

There was one, and that person, side note, was Jordan Matter, who can do it because he has, you know, second most viewed YouTuber in the United States. Yeah, he was wearing a pair of sneakers, but he can get away with it because he's Jordan Matter. So, who also, side note, um, recorded a video for my kids and, uh, sent them Salish's sold-out Sephora makeup line. So I am going to be mom of the year, basically. Mom of the year.

Hey Millie, Charlotte, and Lena, it's Jordan. Um, I'm here with your mom. She's really cool. We're having a good time. Basically, we ended up going there because Tom Brady's team, who we've been working with on his newsletter, uh, connected us with Will Smith's head of content. And that this guy named Lucas, who was kind enough to invite us this evening, and we got to meet him, we got to meet, uh, Will's agent. Got to very, very, very briefly meet Will. And it was, it was super cool event.

I was looking around the room and I was like, how am I here? Yeah, how are you here? And that's just like one of those little things. Like sometimes you just have to be in the room and then you get in the room. Nathan's trying to close a deal right now. He's currently talking to Will Smith's team as a follow-up from our conversation. I joke that we flew all the way around the world just to meet with them. And so they're having a quick call before we jump on this 15-hour flight, and he's going to try to close this deal in the 10 minutes that we have before we fly out.

My guess is like— Yeah, that's not how you go.

Okay, well, welcome, friends, to business class in Emirates. Advice with Kalia. No, but in all seriousness, Kalia is actually the most important person that we met in this entire conference. She was the emcee of the main stage, so she— you introduced— okay, there's like a— there was a lot, a lot of creators, but we're talking MrBeast, Will Smith, Nathan Barry, Simon Squibb. And I want you to tell the people how you ended up doing this and what your number one piece of advice is for emceeing 1 billion followers summit. Absolutely.

So it's crazy how this all came to be because I decided to take a free speaking engagement. I wasn't paid. I was flown out to London last summer and I did an event for free. I moderated a panel and I was there with Google and Meta and we were all talking about AI. They took that panel, they posted it on YouTube, and then an event producer for this Dubai conference saw it and said, we have to have her as a speaker, and then reached out to me. But if I hadn't invested in myself to go do that London event, then Dubai would have never happened. So my number one piece of advice would be you can 10x your business by investing in yourself first before someone else is willing to invest in you.

Well, Haley, do you think the event was worth it?

I think it was worth the 14-hour and 37-minute flight times 10. What do you think?

Okay, times 10 is kind of a lot, but yes, it was absolutely worth it. There were so many things that happened this trip, amazing conversations, people who said they're switching to kit who wanted to, that have not kit for years. But before we dive into all that, one of our conference tips is to find the place where everyone congregates. At every conference, there's usually one central gathering place. And if you could figure out where that is, you can plant yourself there and it makes a big difference. At this event, it was the lobby of the speakers' hotel. It was attached to the venue, so people were coming in and out of it. All the speakers were coming down through it.

At any given time, there was literally like 40, 50 of the 400 speakers across the board. Nathan taught me something that I really like: lingering energy versus leaving energy, leaving energy. And he did this several times. It's like a masterclass in connecting with people that have like celebrity status and people are always wanting something from them. I'll let you tell it.

Yeah. So basically you just walk up to them and instead of, you know, fully fanboying over them, you just walk up, cut through whatever line they have, talk to them, or just jump in and say, hey, I'm Nathan Barry. You know, say what you do and then just say, "Love your work, would love to connect later. Like, you're busy now, I'll catch you later," right? And then you walk away. And the goal is to be the one— this is the leaving energy— the goal is to be the one to end the conversation. And so when you do that, you're basically signaling like, I'm not lingering over you and I'm like, "Oh, I love you so much. This is amazing. Like, I can't believe that I got to meet you," and all of that. Where they're like, okay, they might be a little freaked out, or they're putting you fully in the fan category.

Another tip, as we're kind of on this topic, is letting someone else introduce you. Ultimately, that's actually the number one thing. So if you have like a conference buddy, um, and you, you both say like, all right, who do you want to meet? Who's in my network that you want to meet? Um, and you kind of go off and you do this with your, your own partner in crime. And so that way, when you walk up to a conversation and they're like, Oh, let me tell you about Haley. She's so great. She works at Kit. This is what they do. And you being the person not to share all of the things that you do and having someone else do that on your behalf is a really warm way to connect with somebody that doesn't feel so self-promotional.

All right, my next tip, and this is obvious if you're a content creator, but if you're going to events, create content. Now that could be as involved as having a podcasts and all of this and building your reputation. Obviously, an event is better if people recognize you. But it could be as simple as before you go to the event, put out a LinkedIn post with, here's the 5 people that I'm looking forward to connecting with, or what you're hoping to— your takeaways for the event, or recap from the day. And you could tag the people that you want to meet or that you did meet. But what happens when you create content is it makes these connections much easier.

Okay, I have another one. Nathan and I were sitting with, um, Christo, and I decided that day that I was going to wear a nice white-ish outfit, you know, all cream outfit, very monochromatic. It was such a vibe, uh, and until I spilled coffee all over myself. But it did happen while I was talking to Christo, so for the rest of the trip I just said that Christo spilled coffee over me, and people— I automatically got credibility because They were like, you were talking to Chris Doe? And I was like, exactly.

Okay, we've mentioned a bunch of people. Who were a few of your other favorite people you connected with?

One person that I was so excited walking away from this event meeting is David Meltzer, who's like so kind, so amazing. Um, he's represented by our friend Anish at the Wishley Group. He's migrating to Kit, and it was so fun because now we actually have a real relationship with him as a customer. And so he knows someone that he can email if he has a question or a problem or, you know, whatever the case may be.

Tons of amazing people. I think the big takeaway is get out there, attend events, make a plan in advance so you can get the most out of them and do that a lot in 2026.

Cheers.

Cheers.