Hi! I'm livestreaming my full indiehacker journey
Hello IH!
I'm streaming my adventure from idea to development to market with BrowserTunes. I lurk this site a lot and love its transparency so I wanted to give back to the community. I'm new to streaming and indie making so I'm going to be making a lot of mistakes live, but I hope it can be a learning process for everybody involved.
I'm still optimizing my schedule but right now I'm streaming as many days as possible at 7:30 EST here
Feedback is welcome and I hope to see you all there!
Awesome stuff. I debated between Twitch and Youtube for my own stream for ages and ended up on Youtube since most of the Twitch programming streams with viewers seemed to be focused on coding games. How are you finding discoverability on Twitch?
Oh boy, that's the golden question. I'm really interesting in reading the OPs opinion.
I decided to go with twitch because I don't have an audience in either platform but its seems there's way more people out there looking for Coder on Twitch vs YouTube.
Hey I also debated between the two platforms and I haven't tried Youtube yet to compare. I've noticed my average viewer count is about 7.4 on Twitch because I was streaming a bit too early and there weren't many people on.
It's only my third day so it's hard to tell if the Twitch community is too small for Programming/Startups to build a bigger audience, but I'll probably take a look at Youtube in the near future as well!
That's more than I'm seeing on Youtube though I haven't been pushing the streams too hard since I am still in the process of getting comfortable on camera so fewer viewers for the live part makes it a bit easier.
Ya it's always a surprise when I last saw 0 viewers then check back again later and its 12 people watching me and suddenly I lose focus on coding. That seems to be the biggest challenge right now: balancing audience interaction with thinking/problem solving live in front of people. Definitely takes some practice.
Maybe set a timer for every 25 minutes, and make it clear that's when you'll answer questions, for a five minute period. That's pretty much how I work anyway, though the five minutes is normally browsing IH.
My chat isn't too active so what I meant by audience interaction is just addressing the viewers and making them noticed. I've gotten some feedback that I do that too much actually so maybe I'll try the timer method. Thanks for the tip!
I can imagine how looking at/checking those stats can be a distraction 🙂
Is it a hassle to setup a streaming environment on Twitch?
Depends how far you want to take it. OBS is easy to setup and if you want to do any fancy widget stuff I suggest looking at Streamlabs.
The other side is getting decent gear like webcam, mic but I'm just using my MacBook right now before investing in that.
Practical.
Good luck with this , i had this idea also i even own the domain
TunesAmp.com
i tried to do some music aggregator long time ago based on facebook and youtube ..
https://speakerdeck.com/meir/tunesamp-social-music-player
Music is always fun but unfortunately very hard to make business out of it
keep us updated !
Hey that's awesome! You're right it is difficult as are most B2C ventures (that's why there aren't many on indiehackers) but I'm looking at solving the problem for myself.
The monetization model is certainly going to be difficult, outright charging annually may not fly with the providers. One thing I've entertained is treating Twitch subscriptions as sort of crowdfunding the applications I build and letting only the subscribers use the apps in exchange for supporting me.
Awesome, Christo! I'll drop by tomorrow if you're streaming. I was thinking of doing something similar during the summer. 😁
Hi Raz! You should absolutely do it. I think it helps keep you accountable and working on the product. See ya tomorrow!
I'm out of the loop on this one. I vaguely understand how live-streaming relates to development. Do you literally stream your screen while you are coding and everything and people can watch and comment?
Don't you ever have sensitive data on your screen?
The most sensitive thing that could ever get exposed when I'm streaming are development private keys/client secrets, but those are kept in a .env file that I never open while streaming.
If they were exposed accidentally it would be trivial to regenerate them as they aren't my production keys anyway.
I have a few different "scenes" for mine.
Coding: A terminal window where I do coding with picture in picture style windows for a browser window and my face.
Browser: The browser window from above full screen + my face
Drawing: A top down view of a whiteboard on my second desk to show how I plan + my face
Then I have screens for secrets, brb, coming soon that are just an image.
I almost never have sensitive data on my screen since it is usually all done through environmental variables but I can switch to the secrets screen when getting api tokens from services.