I dev.to community,
A few weeks ago, I published a landing page for a project called Strow.io: https://strow.io/
I realized that several developers, designers and makers livestream on Twitch or Youtube Live.
The problem is that these platforms are not suitable for them.
Youtube is for entertainment and Twitch is for gaming.
I've had a lot of people sign up on the landing and I've had a lot of encouragement. It's something that a lot of people are looking for and with a lot of potential.
If I come here to talk to you about it, it's because today I have the vision of the project, I know the impact it can have.
However, I cannot depend on Twitch or Youtube.
To monetize the platform I need to be independent.
The streaming infrastructure requires a lot of investment.
Every time I push back the project, different people come to me to say "Alex, I need that ! It's really good."
Today I'm solo, I always preferred to bootstrap my projects instead of finding investors. However, this kind of project is hardly bootstrapable.
I need to hear the voice of the dev.to community.
Do you think this idea is worth pursuing knowing that streaming is becoming more and more popular ?
Do you have any advice or constructive feedback to offer?
How to start small and with low investment in the livestream industry next to giants VC companies ?
Thanks for your interest and your feedback 🙂
Top comments (3)
This is definitely an interesting project.
I agree though that monetization will be tricky. A similar system like twitch very likely won't be suitable here.
The potential audience for this is pretty different. I'd suspect most viewers wouldn't be looking to have this on in the background, and would be more likely to use this as a learning tool or something along those lines.
This means your monetization model will need to differ.
For example, midroll ads don't make alot of sense here, as that would interrupt the learning.
Viewer subscription-for-access is probably a better long-term solution, and is more consistent for creators.
Sponsorships would be valuable as well. On twitch people pay to use the same keyboard as their favourite streamers.
Here, people would probably pay to use the same IDE or cloud tools. Building these relationships will be very important.
That being said, I don't know if this kind of service would generate enough traffic to sustain a freemium model offering, which means you would be heavily reliant on your creators for bringing their audience. Attracting those creators will be your hardest task, and I'd focus on that part first by starting to build reasons for them to sign up.
I support your idea simply because I like the idea of competition. And specialization, but mostly competition. Innovation is encouraged when you've got dozens of other independent or corporate businesses hot on your heels fighting for market share.
When people say "but that's already been done", my first question is, so if they're making tons of money doing it, why aren't you doing it? Then my second question would be, can it be improved?
Sure, youtube and twitch can both be used as (live) video streaming platforms, but me having to FIND content creators I like becomes quite challenging amidst the millions of other content creators out there.
So if you can build a system that will introduce me to interesting content and make it easy to explore new content, I would use it. And if you make it easy for new creators who might not be super marketing savvy to reach an audienc, even better.
I think these days with cloud platforms, you don't need to worry too much about funding: in the beginning you might be spending nothing besides time and maybe a little money for contractors. And even if it blows up, you can scale it up without incurring too much expenses as well. Well, you'd still have to solve your money problems eventually cause that might quickly add up if you really explode.
I'm as a beginner live code streamer interested in this one 👍