Hey World 👋
A few months ago, the idea came up almost as a joke. “Should we go to Press Publish in LA?”
On paper it made no sense. 14h on a plane for Becky, 10.5h for Bhav. Flights weren’t exactly cheap. Neither of us lives anywhere near California.
We said yes anyway.
Press Publish is a creator event put on by Colin and Samir (we look up to them a lot, in case you hadn’t noticed us taking inspiration from their thumbnail aesthetic 👀). This year it landed in LA as the Hollywood Creator Summit. 500 people, all there on an application that asked two questions: what can you give, and what are you looking for?
Most people answered the second one the same way: Community.
🌍 Making things online is a lonely job
We bang on about this a lot. So much of our work is just us, alone, talking to a camera or a screen. Getting 500 of us into one room (with four food trucks, a pizza party, customisable caps, and a literal creator support hotline, because the team thought of legit everything) feels like a little amazing warm fuzzy creator corner of the internet.
There’s something about being physically in the room with people who get it. People who also spend their days editing thumbnails and talking to themselves on camera. You stop feeling like the only weirdo doing this. And it feels normal to geek out about thumbnail A/B tests 😅
💻 Being a LinkedIn loser pays off
Becky spent the last year putting herself all over the internet. Posting carousels. Talking to a screen. Being, by her own happy admission, a bit of a LinkedIn loser.
At the event, people kept walking up to us. “You’re Becky, I recognise you from LinkedIn.” “Wait, you two run a podcast together, I’ve seen your carousels.” People we’d never met already knew our faces, our voices, our little passion project.
Putting yourself out there online is just digital networking. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But it means that when you finally meet someone in person, you’re not starting from cold.
🎤 The best advice we heard all weekend
Becky’s favourite creator advice from Iz Harris, who runs Newpress and did a panel with Hannah Doyle (our new friend, she just doesn’t know it yet). Her advice, delivered with a real amount of expletives:
If you’re doing the fucking thing, your whole job is to just keep doing fucking the thing.
Ignore the shiny stuff. The brand deals, the new verticals, the podcast you could spin up, the merch you could make. Get really fucking good at your craft. And when you’ve “made it”, keep going anyway, because you love it that fucking much.
We’re at a strange inflection point in the creator space. We all grew up watching people just be real online. Then the brand money arrived, and suddenly everyone wants to be everywhere at once. It was a good reminder of why we started in the first place.
✨ “You can sit with us”
In the first five minutes, the MC said something that we really liked. Some places give off “you can’t sit with us” energy? This whole event was the opposite.
Pure you-can-sit-with-us energy.
And it was true. We learned you can genuinely just walk up to a circle of strangers and get welcomed in. It doesn’t matter if you talk or just listen. You belong there because you showed up.
So if there’s a creator event around you, go attend. Make the effort, even if it’s a stupidly long flight, even if you don’t know anybody. People are far kinder than your brain tells you they’ll be.
Signing off now because we’re still jet-lagged.
Becky & Bhav x
🚨 P.S. Speaking of sitting with people: our Creator Office Hours are basically Press Publish energy in miniature. Every couple of weeks we hop on a free Zoom where anyone can drop in and ask us their messiest creator questions. There’s no agenda and no pressure, just a bunch of us figuring it out together. RSVP for free here.
📺 For those of you who prefer to watch on YouTube 👇
💼 Want to work with us? Book a call with Becky or Bhav
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