Creator Spotlight 👾 Da Shady Alpaca: “As a streamer, it’s really difficult to get discovered.”

Tell us a little bit about yourself. How old are you? What do you do for a living?

I’m 24, I live in Miami, and I’m a bulldozer operator. You can see I’m in my bulldozer right now as we speak (laughs).

That’s amazing, wow! And so, how did you get into streaming?

My wife suggested I do it, in her eyes I was very entertaining to watch when I played games with my friends. So I followed her advice. One thing led to another: I got a capture card, shifted from console to PC, and started building up from that basically. It was about three years ago. Then we moved, and I took a really long break. I missed streaming though. With all the equipment just laying there, I thought I’d start again, but this time do it 100%.

What does it mean for you, streaming 100%?

Being consistent. Setting up a stable schedule and sticking to it. That’s what I did and finally got a face cam. For me, it was about setting up a corner for my streaming stuff, instead of doing it while gaming on my couch with my big TV and a mic stacked on top of books (laughs). So I just started getting a new routine: designing my layout, overlays, alerts, all that stuff, and just interacting more with the viewers.

What is it that you enjoy most about streaming?

The fact that I get to meet new people! The friends that I have made due to streaming have been really close And they’ve really helped me grow because they’re all streamers as well. We keep each other motivated. It’s really fun to create a community with its own inside jokes and rituals. At the end of all my streams, we always watch funny videos together, as a group. And imagine, I even have people that watch me from Italy! And at the time that I stream, it’s like 1 am for them! The fact that people stay up just to watch a funny video on my channel, and that helps them end the day on a better note, is really great — because you never know what goes on in people’s lives outside of Twitch.

Alpaca’s channel on Twitch.

Do you want to continue doing it just for fun? Do you aim to start monetizing?

A lot of people start off with wanting to do it for fun, as a hobby. That’s why in the beginning most don’t have a schedule. Once they start seeing the traction, that’s when the decision needs to be made: okay, am I going to do just this, or am I going to mix two things at once? Personally, I’m doing it for fun, I’m doing it to kind of just get people’s minds off for the day of work or school or whatever they’re going through. That’s why I do it, and that’s who I stream for. I’m not looking for any big monetization gains or anything like that right now. However, people do support, and that helps out a lot — by donating. And I try to give back to them by doing giveaways, and stuff like that.

How does it work on Twitch, in terms of roles/status?

The goal of every starting-off person wants to reach is the affiliate level(i.e. Twitch Affiliate Program) as it allows you to get subs and monetize more consistently as a result. As an affiliate, you can start getting bits as well. I think some ad revenue opens up too for affiliates, but nothing crazy. After that you can become a partner (i.e. Twitch Partner Program) — that’s as ‘top’ level as it gets.

To get to affiliate, which is my goal currently, you need to have 50 followers. Plus, an average of 3 viewers within a 30 day period. And you have to stream for at least 8 hours, on 7 different days, within that same period. The hardest goal to hit is always the average viewers.

Why is that?

Because it varies depending on the day. And generally, there’s a big discoverability problem on Twitch. On Twitch, they mainly highlight people who have 1000s of viewers. Say you play a popular game, like Apex Legends, you start streaming and there’s just one viewer. However, the guy at the top of the Twitch feed will have 5000 people watching him play the same game at the same time. Not to mention all the other streamers live simultaneously. So when you’re on the website, you’d have to scroll forever before you can find yourself there.

Sounds like a real barrier to growth as a creator.

For sure. For someone starting out, it’s so hard to get past that one viewer and gain an audience. It took me months before I got even just 2–3 viewers. Months!

Then again, I was kind of limited at the time, streaming from the console — no overlays, no face cam, a bad mic, etc. A lot of things needed to change in order to kind of bring up the production value of the stream.

Still, the most popular streamers will appear at the top. With Twitch, there are no recommendations like “hey, we think you would like this random person”, who then turns out to be a small streamer. They don’t have that kind of system in play. So you have to go outside of Twitch, on YouTube, and other social media, because they have a much better algorithm for discovery.

Do you use social media a lot then?

Yes, quite a lot lately. I’ve been making short vertical videos from my streams for TikTok and Instagram reels. This week I managed to post daily. And believe it or not, but it’s all thanks to Powder! It has this emotion recognition feature (i.e. for highlights detection), which is great for me because the highlight of my streams is when a funny thing happens. It’s not really based on my skill in video games, because I honestly suck (laughs).

Thankfully, Powder can capture that stuff, without me having to manually do it myself — which helps a lot. With a full-time job and everything else that happens during the day, I don’t really have a lot of time to edit videos. I tried, but it was too tedious: going back to my streams, watching the VOD, seeing what I found was funny or what can be used, and then figuring out how to edit on my phone because I’m at work and not on my computer. So, not great. It works pretty well with Verse now for social media, so I’m happy.

Where it gets tricky now is getting followers from Instagram or TikTok over to Twitch. I’m trying to figure out the best way to do it.

Do you think gaming clips are becoming the kind of content that anyone could watch and like on social media?

Yes, it’s definitely going mainstream, and a lot of people are opening their eyes to it. There’s a lot more innovation happening around gaming, too. Companies are now releasing hardware specifically for streaming. You can look up a streamer starting kit on Amazon, and they’ll have everything you need to get into the streaming game. Back when I started to game, no one had a PC, it was all consoles — PCs were way too expensive. It was such a niche thing, streaming off a console, with a lot of technical limitations. But now, every little kid over here has a PC that is good enough to run Fortnite.

In terms of the diversity of content you see on Twitch, how has it evolved in the past few years?

Many people think Twitch is just for gaming streams, but that’s not at all the case. You have all these different categories there. Some people are there to watch others draw. I’ve seen guys who play drums on streams, who have like 10 different camera angles, and they’ll have hundreds of viewers. People DJ-ing on streams, too. They have everything. So it’s not just limited to gaming now. Which is a good thing.

Twitch is becoming more like free TV, with live interactions.

And for you personally, what has been the impact of streaming (and Twitch) on your life?

I used to get really really nervous whenever I had to talk to someone in real life. Now I’m not so scared, and less quiet overall. It helps especially at work, where I have to interact with higher-up people, which in the past got on my nerves a lot. So thanks to streaming, that nervousness barrier has been broken. I’m more open, more talking, and I help more people. It made me more positive overall.

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To follow Da Shady Alpaca on Twitch, go here!

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