What if nobody comes to watch my livestream?

Instructor: [0:01] I want to address the question of what if no one comes to watch my stream. The answer is that nobody will come to watch your first stream, most likely. You just have to get over that and start talking to a camera like people are there, like I'm doing right now.

[0:18] You who are watching this video or are not watching this video, I don't know that you're there or not right now. I'm talking like I have a friend in front of me. I'm talking to them, not some amorphous person that I'll never meet.

[0:34] The answer to if you don't have viewers on your first streams or if you don't have viewers on your 10th streams, that's OK. You don't necessarily have to be doing this for viewers.

[0:47] First of all, coders don't really make a large amount of money, like gamers do, off of streaming. Coders make money off of building products and selling it to people who have been following them through the entire process and things like that.

[1:04] My friend Jason has a stream that he runs, that is his own stream. He owns everything about it. It helps him get new jobs. It helps him interact with the communities at the jobs that he has and things like that. It's a tool to use for other things, not the thing itself.

[1:25] Now, if you do want to have more people watch because zero is sometimes not fun to stream to, you need to start building your community presence on other sites. This can be sites like Twitter. It can even be sites like Reddit.

[1:40] I've even seen people use Instagram to good effect. The idea is that Twitch doesn't have discoverability down well for their main target audience, which is game streamers. They're definitely not going to have discoverability down for code streamers.

[2:00] When you think about your stream and how many people watch your stream, what you need to think about is how am I going to bring people that are already interacting with me on other platforms to the stream so that I can forge a deeper connection with those people.

[2:14] That's what streaming is at its core. It's not just amassing a large audience or amassing a large chat. It is you have relationships with people on other platforms and other spaces and you want to take those from we're sending 200 and whatever characters back and forth on Twitter deeper to we had a full live in-person conversation in person.

[2:39] It's through a computer, but we had a full conversation in depth about something, and now the relationship there is a deeper relationship. That, to me, is what streaming actually is. When you ask the question of "What if nobody comes to watch my stream," that's my answer.