🔴 How and why creators should host events

The creator economy is not a purely online phenomenon.

Particularly over the last year, we’ve found more and more of the people we interview for Creator Spotlight are throwing meetups, happy hours, and conferences. They’re hosting retreats and organizing panels.

One of the clearest signals we’ve seen that a creator’s community has real depth is if people show up for one of their events.

I’ve identified four main categories of creator event.

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

By Natalia Pérez-González

It's 7:45 pm. Your panel ended fifteen minutes ago, and nobody wants to leave.

The crowd has splintered into small clusters near the bar, by the windows, and in the center of a room now loud with talk and laughter.

In 2025, creators, podcasters, and authors sold 500% more event tickets than in 2024, with tickets priced roughly 40% lower than those for traditional live entertainment.

Over the past year, we’ve interviewed several creators who’ve integrated events into their revenue streams. The most successful event programs we’ve seen are extensions of that creator’s core mission, values, and product — whether that’s education, access, identity, or belonging.

Done right, these can be packaged into a repeatable format, generate revenue, attract brand sponsorships, and accelerate community growth.

When I spoke to Jay Clouse, founder of Creator Science, he described community as a living thing, with a pulse to be monitored.

I’ve identified four main creator-event models, each with different economics, audiences, and demands on the host:

You’ve been to an excellent media or creator event, and you want to throw one of your own.

What makes these events feel alive is a great host, a tastemaker. We love parties that cater to our sensibilities — our affinity for a curated atmosphere: music, visuals, food, energy, the elements that make an event memorable.

Before you book a venue, you need to have a solid understanding of your value proposition:

Knowing what type of host you are is key to knowing which event formatting works best with your style. I’ve identified four types of host — Tastemaker, Connector, Architect, and Educator.

Brett Dashevsky, founder of Creator Economy NYC, makes his living throwing events for New York’s creator community. An expert host, he looks to the every-touchpoint approach of a Disney theme park for inspiration.

These are the most accessible starting points. Intimate by design — usually 30 to 100 people — they prioritize recurring connection over one-time spectacle.

Colin Rocker, creator of For the Firsts, a club for first-generation professionals in New York City, runs this model; monthly events of 50 to 60 people, built around guided prompts and open networking at a community space in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. The end goal is always belonging.

Colin’s community meetups run on a tight structure:

He consciously avoids calling these networking events — he wants people to feel like they're joining something ongoing rather than attending a one-off. The distinction is subtle, but it shapes who shows up and how they show up.

After a year of monthly meetups, he's now building toward a three-pronged model: a recurring meetup for connection, panel and fireside chat events for learning, and workshops for people ready to go deeper.

"I think about events like a form of media," he tells me. "I want to create something where, the same way as with certain shows — like Hot Ones — a brand can get inside there and make it their own. I want to do the same with For the Firsts."

A work-and-play formatted event, this is the most sponsor-friendly of the four. Typically, this maps out as a 45-to-60-minute moderated panel on a relevant industry topic, followed by open networking.

The panel is the draw — it gives your audience a reason to come, learn from notable industry leaders (who often have their own engaged communities), and a shared reference point for starting conversations. But the mixer is the real value.

Brett hosted his first Creator Economy NYC gatherings at a Lower East Side bar in January 2023; more of a casual community meetup at first. He’s now logged over 8,000 RSVPs for his events, developed a panel-and-mixer model, and landed year-long brand deals with companies like Teachable, beehiiv, and Notion.

For each event, Brett picks a theme, usually in partnership with a presenting sponsor, and curates the room himself — reviewing every RSVP against the event's theme and the sponsor's goals. He has a small team that runs check-in, an entrance activation, and a panel before stepping back and letting the networking take over.

He doesn't charge for tickets — he wants to keep the events free for his audience — so he never does an event without presenting partners, who pay anywhere from $20–30k per event, enough to cover the cost and keep operations running.

He offers two sponsorship tiers:

Olivia Owens, Head of Product Marketing and Partnerships at Teachable, shared what that trust looks like from the other side of the table. Teachable has been investing in creator events for three years, including Brett’s, and for them the core insight is simple: audiences don't want to hear from brands, but they do love to see a brand supporting a creator they follow.

That specificity is what separates a pitch that lands from one that doesn't. She tells me the creators who stand out come to the table with:

The most successful Teachable activation at a Creator Economy NYC event, in terms of brand-creator-audience integration, was a series of mini expert sessions: community members with Teachable courses led 15-minute presentations on their area of expertise.

The best brand presence at an event doesn't feel like a brand presence at all.

These annual events become destination experiences for a community, and it’s the format that requires the most infrastructure, the most lead time, and the most willingness to involve other people.

Video Consortium is a global community connecting nonfiction storytellers. One of their flagship events, the Future of Nonfiction Video (FoNV), is a yearly conference hosted at Columbia University. It brings together documentary filmmakers, video journalists, and content creators who wouldn't ordinarily be in the same room — a deliberately cross-disciplinary mix that shapes every programming decision.

The conference began as a community first, a bar gathering of a few nonfiction storytellers ten years ago, and the conference grew from the relationships inside it.

Maggie Piazza Carroll, Manager of Community Gatherings and Engagement at Video Consortium (VC), is the conference’s lead event coordinator.

Through their Slack community, surveys, and Instagram, she gathers what the Video Consortium community actually wants, then builds a dense spreadsheet of ideas, finds the cross-cutting themes, and maps people and organizations to each one.

"We'd even reach out to people who were consistently posting interesting ideas and say: would you want to turn this into a session?" The result is programming that feels specific, curated, and earned.

Maggie runs FoNV with a scrappy team:

She deploys a network of volunteers in lanyards during the event so attendees know who to ask for help, prioritizes good food, and does a full debrief — internal team review, then attendee survey — immediately after every event.

Energy pacing matters more at conferences than at any other format, especially those that run for multiple days. "You don't want a bunch of slower things back to back, or things that are too high energy," Maggie said.

On Sunday, the final day of the conference, the programming moved from a meditation, to a higher-energy activity, to a medium-energy close — a deliberate arc designed around how people feel at different points in a long event day.

This is often the highest-trust, highest-ticket model.

Retreats give people concentrated, unstructured time with each other, in a place they traveled to get to, with nothing else competing for their attention.

Jay Clouse has been building communities for creators for almost 15 years. He built his company, Creator Science, with the premise of helping professional creators run better businesses. The Lab is the community arm of his business — a private, curated network of professional creators sharing results in real time.

Last year, he hosted his first major in-person event for Lab members.

On the itinerary: two days in Boise, Idaho, for 40 of his Standard and VIP members.

He priced tickets to cover costs — food, venue, and programming — not to draw a profit. "I think about our events as a member retention and attraction mechanism rather than a profit center for the business," he told me. His Standard membership in The Lab runs $1,999 per year; VIP is $3,999. The retreat is part of what justifies those prices.

Jay's framework for every programming decision was simple: "Is this something that takes advantage of the fact that we're in person? Or could this be done online? Because anything that could be done online, we shouldn't do in person."

This is why, he argues, most conferences are terrible products.

Jay’s Boise event was built almost entirely around conversation; no presentations, everything in groups of eight or fewer. His main goal is to create what he calls collisions between people, serendipitous connections that couldn’t have been engineered online.

This year, he's likely to add a title sponsor, which will let him invest more in the experience without raising ticket prices. That's the mature version of this model: events as a membership benefit, underwritten by a brand partner who wants to reach a curated room of professional creators.

The format you choose should ultimately align with your audience's needs: