Live streaming my work has changed my life.
For the better and for the worse.
Here's everything you can expect from streaming your startup.
A Thread:
Opportunity.
You never know who will show up in your chat.
I met @levelsio on Twitch.
Investors DM me on Twitch.
Countless people ask to join my company daily.
I've done consulting based just on my streaming knowledge.
When you put yourself out there, people will find you.
Fun.
Working by yourself with just your laptop can get lonely. Or boring.
Streaming fixes that.
You work,
make a joke,
laugh a bit,
work,
talk about code,
strategize,
keep working.
It's like coworking and hanging with all your friends.
It makes work so much more fun.
Happiness.
When work is fun, it changes your life.
In ways you can't even imagine.
I don't worry about what projects will succeed or fail anymore.
I don't stress about being perfect.
Even with insane goals, I enjoy every single day.
I've never been this happy.
Accountability.
When you stream, you make a schedule.
When you start growing your audience, they'll expect you live at the same times/days, giving you an external reason to get started/get working.
As your audience becomes your friends, they'll push you to achieve your goals.
Productivity.
"But won't I be less productive?"
If you struggle to get work done, just wait until there's 30 people staring at your screen.
You'll code faster than ever :D
To keep the stream interesting, you'll need to talk through everything you do.
It forces you to focus.
Friendship.
If you think Twitter friends are great, wait until you get Twitch friends.
Talking to someone with your voice for hours at a time, several times a week, can create amazing friendships.
People will know YOU. Not just your content.
This is unlike ANY OTHER PLATFORM.
"True Fans"
When you stream long enough, you realize the distance between "friend" and "true fan" is not so far.
When people come to know YOU, they follow YOU.
Whatever your project, they will stick with you and support you.
This is the superpower of small streams.
Help.
I had a viewer redesign my entire frontend. I just hit "merge" and my app is beautiful.
When I hit a bug, 5 different people in chat will all start sending me stack overflow links.
When I need to design something, I've got 30 other engineers to design it with me.
Free Marketing.
When I started out in Startups, I struggled a ton to get ANY visitors to my site.
Streaming can fix this.
Any project I work on, with no marketing other than streaming and twitter, will get ~1000 pageviews a month.
Search "Clipbot" on Google. I did 0 SEO.
ALGORITHM WARRIORS!
This may seem like a stupid name, but secretly, this is one of the MOST SIGNIFICANT BENEFITS.
Want to hit the top of a subreddit that day?
Want a successful product hunt launch?
These are way easier when you get to start with 15-20 votes instead of 0-1.
Revenue.
A lot of people ask me about this.
These days, Twitch makes me anywhere from $300-$1000/mo not including donations and sponsorships.
Twitch income is complicated and EXTREMELY inconsistent.
I'll write a detailed thread on this next week. Follow me here for that.
Small Audience Growth.
Although Twitch is known for being garbage for discoverability, programming/tech streams are different.
It still isn't easy to get views as a tech streamer, but it is MUCH easier than a gaming streamer.
Do it long enough, you will see some small growth.
Encouragement
"It's so cool that you're building a startup!"
"Your project is so cool!"
"I think everyone will use this, it's such a good idea"
"Omg I can't believe this doesn't exist already, this is gonna be huge."
You'll get these a couple times a day.
But, more often...
Criticism.
"I could build this in two days"
"This is dumb"
"Why would anyone use this?"
"Why would you do it this way?"
"Isn't __ already doing this?"
"You should build __ instead"
Feedback is a gift.
Criticism 20x a day is not.
This can and will break you. Be careful.
Bad Opinions.
"Why didn't you build this in rust"
"JS is a garbage language ur dumb for using it"
"Why aren't you using typescript?"
"You're a bad engineer this code is terrible"
A lot of noise. But trust me, hear it enough times and it hurts.
xkcd.com/378/
Loss of Privacy.
People know where I live.
People know where my parents live.
I tried to keep my country a secret. People treated it like a puzzle and figured it out within days.
It's extremely easy to accidentally show your address, email, phone, API Keys, etc.
It's...scary
Loss of focus.
Not productivity focus, but life focus.
If you ever start to really care about how big you are on twitch, you WILL lose sight of your startup as a goal.
This is actually really hard to overcome.
Even after a year I still struggle with this.
A Bad Reward System.
Streaming more doesn't result in more viewers.
Stream growth is insanely hard and can make you feel like absolute crap about yourself.
If you measure success in any way based on your twitch viewers, you will be disappointed.
twitter.com/roxkstar74/status/1442505634260283398
Trolling.
Sounds like a funny joke, can actually ruin your day/week really easily.
Twitch is anonymous and full of buttheads.
People will come in and just call you a pussy randomly.
People will come in and say a bunch of racist shit randomly.
It's both stressful and hurtful.
There are amazing opportunities in streaming your startup.
It has changed my life.
But I want you to know everything you will face if you decide to do the same.
All in all?
Go for it.
Do something different, be someone amazing.
This thread is the "Why" of streaming your startup.
Next week, I'll tell you the "How".
There's a lot you need to know.
If this thread helped you, RT the original tweet, and follow me @roxkstar74 for the next thread.