Sawatdi!
As we spend more time discussing iterations of our products and on-boarding new users, the more we’re starting to see StreamAlive used in ways that we never imagined it could be. With that, we’ve also started to explore how our use cases have a lot more nuance that we can tap into.
Agency or In-house?
When you start a company, you are taking on almost every role at once. One of the first things we did at StreamAlive was to hire a development agency to rapidly take us from the drawing board to a minimum viable product to secure pre-seed funding.
They’ve been brilliant (I’d be happy to introduce you). We’re currently in the process of ramping up our in-house engineering team too - out of the Scotland of the East: Shillong, Meghalaya.
Both teams work as one seamless unit.
StreamAlive’s dev team’s first in-person meet-up!
In a similar vein, when we started, we barely knew how to put a few pixels together. So, we hired a design agency to create all our graphics. This month we ended that contract, not because we were unhappy with the work that they produced, but because of the amount of back and forth it took.
When you hire a creative agency to take care of your design, they receive a brief and will work on that brief to the letter. I don’t blame them for this—the agency is billing by the hour, and every rejected concept costs money, so there is little room for creativity and experimentation.
When you start out, it’s strongly recommended that you lean on agencies to help you get up and running. But as you grow, it will become more important to get a hybrid model working or bring things in-house.
The Joy of Chess (and StreamAlive)
Every week we get to see some incredible livestreamers take StreamAlive and use it in ways we hadn’t imagined.
This time it was the turn of Sahil Tickoo, a livestreamer who loves watching, playing, and talking about chess. For big chess matches, Sahil runs a parallel livestream. However, since these can run for hours, it’s challenging to fill up all that time with engaging content.
It’s four hours of pure entertainment, and Sahil makes constant use of our interactions: from Power Polls to ask people what moves they would make next, Wonder Words to see which topic is most popular and even Magic Maps to see where his audience would like to be tuning in from.
He even left StreamAlive up and running as he took a quick bathroom break—and to his surprise, the engagement didn’t drop so YouTube continued to promote the stream.
There really are no words that can describe the levels of immense joy that Sahil has while using StreamAlive to engage his viewers, and how his audience reacts.
Penny for your thoughts?
In the last newsletter I mentioned that we’re planning to launch Transient Thoughts, a feature that calls out a user comment from the livestream and splashes it up on the screen - like transient conversations overheard in a hotel lobby.
Just as we were rolling out this feature, we were on a feedback call with one of our regular users. He asked if there was a way he could highlight some longer comments on-screen to encourage more people to engage.
It was quite beautiful to show him in real-time the exact feature that he had just requested! There’s no better product feeling than building something users ask for and then having someone ask for it - after you’ve built it.
We have several new features in the pipeline, and we’ll be making more tweaks and optimizations of existing features based on all the feedback we’re getting.
On our watchlist
Since we moved to Slack, the team has begun sharing the livestreams that they are looking forward to so we thought we’d share them here for everyone else as well!
Note: These livestreams are not (yet!) powered by StreamAlive, but we hope that one day they will be!
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 on October 15th - our younger StreamAlivians can’t wait to catch this K-Pop sensation in concert, even if it’s at 5 am EST.
That’s all for this week, folks.
Wái jəə gan,
Lux & the StreamAlivians
