Kon'nichiwa!
The last few weeks have seen a flurry of activity with new faces joining the StreamAlive team, new features ready to be introduced, new livestreamers onboarded, and sometime between a taco-lunch and a happy-user-call, I was interviewed on the CMO Stories podcast.
Slack’ing off at work
StreamAlive is a remote-first company. We believe that to access the right talent, we shouldn’t constrain ourselves to a geographical location. Regardless of whether the person is in Chennai, Chicago, New York, Nongpoh, Bangalore, London, or Shillong, if we think they are the right person for the team then we’ll work with them.
There are disadvantages to this approach. Collaboration can take longer but, if you empower your team enough to make decisions independently, the amount of time they spend waiting for approval or feedback gets reduced and the team can focus on getting the job done.
We’re now a team of 15 people and up until now, we’ve been using various Whatsapp groups to coordinate and collaborate. Along with a couple of all-hands video calls per week, it worked pretty well.
My advice when it comes to tools: Don’t overthink them. You could spend hours researching the right tool, or you can trust the herd and go with the market leader in each segment (assuming the price is right). We’re now at a size where we need a dedicated team chat tool, and there are various options available. But, Slack is the choice for hundreds of thousands of companies, so it’s almost certainly the right choice for StreamAlive.
New features coming up
Nearly every demo that we do brings up new ideas and new ways that live audiences can be engaged and made to feel part of the show.
Transient Thoughts is one such feature that came out of a demo call with Keith, an IELTS teacher on YouTube. He liked to call out certain comments and highlight them as an overlay on his video.
Viewers love to see their comments featured and grab a little bit of personal attention from the livestreamer, so we’ve been working on a way to make this as seamless and inclusive as possible.
Transient Thoughts is still going through the QA process, but keep an eye out as it should be launched by the next newsletter!
P.S. Did you notice our new engagement meter?
StreamAlive in the wild
Unfortunately, we don’t have public videos of StreamAlive being used on Zoom meetings and Webinars. That tribe is growing really fast, and is keeping us on our toes!
Every week sees more and more livestreamers sign up and play around with StreamAlive on YouTube. Here are a couple of “public” livestreams that caught our eye…
Jeb Smith
Jeb is a real estate investing coach with a loyal following. His livestreams attract thousands of viewers. He recently used StreamAlive and was surprised to learn that most of his viewers were homeowners after he asked a question using Power Polls.
Academic English Help
Adrian is an online English tutor with almost 2 million subscribers and does regular livestreams for students around the world. Adrian likes to project his computer screen behind him and annotate directly on the screen. In this broadcast, he used Wonder Words to encourage his audience to type their answers in the chat.
On our watchlist
Since we moved to Slack, the team has begun sharing livestreams that they are looking forward to so we thought we’d share them here for everyone else as well!
Artemis launch on September 27th - several StreamAlivers (StreamAlivians?) watched the livestreamed first launch attempt, then the second… and now they’re hoping the third time is a charm!
Minecraft Live on October 15th - only one person on the team said that they were looking forward to the Minecraft live stream, and for his sake I’ll keep him anonymous for now!
BTS Live in Concert in October 2022 - our younger StreamAlivians can’t wait to catch this K-Pop sensation in concert!
‘Till next time, sayonara~
Lux & the StreamAlivians
