I get a lot of emails that are like:

"Oy! I'm new to streaming and I was wondering if you would have any tips on how to hit the ground running"

The truth is I think I would do a better job answering the inverse question...

But personally, the secret to my success was (cont)

When I decided to take the plunge and go "full time" in Jan 2017 I had already been streaming for about 7 months & was doing about 100 concurrent viewers. I didn't know anything so I figured my "competitive advantage" as a streamer was that I would approach streaming

like a truck driver or an associate at a law firm. I would outwork everyone since at the time most of the bigger streamers I saw definitely treated streaming as more of a "lifestyle business" with flexible hours and little obligation to maintain a schedule

(this might be just who I talked to rather than indicative of what most "big streamers did." So I figured I would differentiate myself by "always being online."

I wanted to always be an option when a big stream ended and the viewers filtered out to other creators.

And I feel like this worked for about a year and a half. Mind you, during this time twitch was growing like 70-100% monthly actives per year. So in all likelyhood it was just a "rising tide lifts all boats" situation. But it felt like I had a game plan so easy motivation

In my mind, the most dependable way to grow was to pick up followers at a predicatable clip (2000-3000 per day) and then rely on that to grow. When you're a new twitch streamer, the biggest friction you face even if you're UBER ENTERTAINING or a human aimbot gosu is...

no one knows you exist. You have a "customer acquisition problem."

So there I was chugging along, 10K followers/day Andy on instagram, couple hundred on twitter, 2-3K/day on twitch. Life was not bad.

Some amount of people would convert from insta/twitter/youtube to my twitch stream. And I was growing concurrent viewership by like 100/month in 2017-2019 (in a lumpy way).

But what I missed was that at some point, the "problem to solve" shifted from "awareness" to "quality"

I feel like at around 700k-1million followers I was already "known" but anyone who would care to watch me on twitch. And I missed the pivot I needed to make (better content). Eventually viewership plummeted to like 1250-1400 and that's when on a lark @Dyeoxy suggested I hit up

a @DevinNash

And other than cutting hours (I felt obligated to entertain during covid) I implemented many of the suggestions (probably badly due to my determination to keep hours up). But as they say "A good plan, immediately executed is better than a perfect plan next week"

and here we are.

Breaking into being a fulltime streamer has never been harder. Marginal Supply (anyone with a desire to become a content creator) greatly outstrips marginal supply of viewers (borrowing from devin)

Everyone wants to be the Fat tail, but what we're seeing is the long tail play out (at least it would if people could find the content they want to see e.g. discovery). Without a algorithmic discovery mechanism, most viewers just pile into established streams.

But I think there's also another factor... one of preselection.

The early crop of streamers were "Pioneers" in a sense. They pursued the activity of streaming without any pretense that it was a steady career full of glitz/glamour. They did it largely for other reasons. there

Are no normie OG streamers. No expectations to meet, and anyone who stuck with it could learn the ropes in the serenity of a calm pond.

Many of the people who want to be streamers today/ or try their hand at streaming don't even really know what the job entails. It's probably

far less likely that you could become a career actor/movie star than a fulltime streamer/mega creator. This is largely a selection issue. You have to go to auditions and do things to become an actor.

There is NO FRICTION in taking a shot at content creation today. Phone/PC from the comfort of your home.

Some will make it on a combination of luck, extraordinary talent or skill, or connections to established veterans... odds aren't in your favor though