Creator conferences are full of advice from people who have already reached scale. The advice for someone still trying to figure out how to leave their day job is considerably harder to find. Kai Plunk and Jason Russak, both executives at creator management and studio company Fixated, are at VidCon Anaheim this month to tackle that issue. 

Kai is co-Head of Community and has spent a decade building in the space, starting in social media at 14 and including a stint as a Creative Producer at MrBeast. Jason is Fixated’s Chief Content Officer, having previously led content at Amp Studios and served as COO at Bucketsquad, where his tenure included back-to-back Streamy Awards for “Best Sports Creator” in 2022 and 2023.

Their joint Creator Track mentorship session, “From Side Hustle to Full-Time: Building a Sustainable Creator Career,” is capped at 19 attendees. The format is the argument.

“A lot of creators had the question where the strategy and advice you’re offering is amazing, but the problem is we’re still on step one of making this a job,” Kai says, describing the feedback from previous VidCon sessions that shaped his approach this year.

VidCon Panel Images

The Room of 19 Was a Design Decision

Kai has spoken at VidCon in larger formats before. What he kept noticing was the gap between what a panel can deliver and what someone at the start of a creator career actually needs.

“When you look at the actual depth of what you walk away with, I feel like a lot of times you can only get so much out of a session, out of like a workshop or a panel,” he says. An audience of a few hundred requires advice broad enough to resonate with the median attendee. A room of nineteen allows something more targeted. 

The goal, Kai says, is for attendees to walk out “actually having learned something that I can take with me outside of the convention.”

Jason frames the challenge as a sequencing problem. “It’s really easy to get lost in the weeds during the 0 to 100 phase, but focusing on each individual step that is directly in front of you is more important,” he says. The session’s Q&A is as central as anything they’ll present. At any given stage of development, creators tend to share the same bottlenecks, and one person’s question benefits the rest of the room.

The Peers in That Room Are Part of the Program

The small-room format also serves a secondary purpose that Kai makes explicit: the connections between the 19 attendees may matter as much as anything he and Jason have prepared.

“Those people that they’re sitting in that mentorship session with will oftentimes be the people that they can rely on to help them with advice when someone else isn’t available,” he says.

Jason’s own development came through a similar peer-dense environment. Early in his career, he was part of a group channel with seven creators, all sharing what was working in real time. “We were learning seven times faster than a single creator because we were all sharing our mistakes and understanding and learning from each other,” he says.

That peer logic extends to how both see VidCon at large. It is one of the few places where a creator with niche interests can find a room full of people who share them. Jason describes a creator friend who attended specifically to meet a knitting creator she had been following for years. “There’s no other place to do it,” he says. “No one gathers like this from around the world.”

The MrBeast Misread

The most pervasive piece of creator advice Kai pushes back on is also one of the most commonly shared: study MrBeast and replicate what he does.

“MrBeast is what I call pop music,” Kai says. “He is generating for mass appeal.” For the creator whose goal is genuinely mass appeal, that model may apply. “But the vast majority of creators are not trying to make pop music. They’re trying to make something else. And if you now step outside of what you’re doing and stare at what he’s doing, you’re going to find yourself creating content that doesn’t feel like yourself.”

This critique carries specific weight given that Kai spent time as a Creative Producer at MrBeast before moving into talent management. He is not dismissing the approach. He is narrowing the range of creators for whom it is actually the right one.

The same principle shapes his separate Creator Track session on reaching a first million views, scheduled for Thursday. “A lot of people have never seen a million views in general on something,” he says. “And it can feel so daunting to even think about doing that once, let alone every single time that you post a video.” 

Consistency Beats Creativity

For Kai, the gap between a creator who builds something sustainable and one who stalls comes down to a single variable. “Consistency beats creativity eight times out of ten,” he says.

Creator platforms reward novelty. Algorithms favor format innovation. The most cited success stories involve someone who found the right hook and broke through fast. Kai’s argument is that the far more common failure mode is the talented creator who didn’t show up enough times to find their version of that moment. “I’ve seen a lot of creative people, and I’ve seen a lot of them just not execute,” he says.

Jason puts the same point more directly: “Just keep creating. Keep putting things out there. Don’t be too much of a perfectionist.” 

Together, the argument is not that creativity is irrelevant. It is that consistency creates the conditions under which creativity can compound. The creator who has published 200 videos holds a thousand data points the creator who published 30 never accumulated.

The Case for Physical Presence in 2026

For two people whose industry operates almost entirely online, the argument for a physical event is one both take seriously rather than treating it as an industry reflex.

Kai connects VidCon’s current relevance to a shift in what audiences want from the content they consume. “More than ever, we’re seeing a shift towards authenticity,” he says. “People want to see what they’re watching in real life.” 

He also names something less comfortable: the isolation that comes with a media environment where most connections happen through a screen. “How oftentimes downright lonely it can feel to just watch everything going on, but then still be isolated within your own realms.” Events give people “an opportunity to connect around things that they actually care about, rather than what they’re told to care about.”

Jason’s argument starts with what separates creator culture from traditional celebrity. “The traditional celebrity feels larger than life,” he says. “Whereas with an online influencer, you can actually view that person as a person and still look up to them.” VidCon, in his view, extends that accessibility in a way no feed can fully replicate.

For Jason, the event also carries personal weight. He has been a fan of YouTube since 2006, back when he was posting videos on Google Video. His career in the creator industry started during the pandemic, when events like VidCon were shut down. He has been attending as a guest since they reopened. This year marks his first time speaking. “Now to be someone who is getting to give back to that community is something I’m definitely going to have to take a moment to just take it all in,” he says.

Success, Measured in What Creators Do Next

After the event, both Kai and Jason will measure success by the same metric: not attendance or coverage, but whether the creators they worked with in that room actually change something.

“There’s only ever one generation that we’re a part of, but there is an unlimited amount that come after us,” Kai says. At VidCon, he notes, attendees have access to conversations that might otherwise cost $2,000 an hour. “You get the opportunity to talk to them for free and see their passion, and that this isn’t just a job, that this is something that they actually care about on a deep level.”

The advice he offers creators going into these sessions returns to the same starting point. “Remember why you got into this,” he says. “Remember what that passion point was.” 

Kai describes a creator who was told to abandon a genre they genuinely loved, and his response: “Do you like doing it? Then who cares what anyone else says? Remember that spark.”

VidCon Anaheim 2026 is officially taking place from June 25 to June 27 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California, marking the event’s 15th anniversary. Follow this link for more information.

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