At 26 I’d had 16 jobs, my dream of becoming a Michelin starred chef was fading faster than my body was falling apart, I’d been homeless twice, fought a couple of addictions, hadn’t talked to my family in 7 years because of religious differences, and was struggling to keep my marriage together.

I had to do something or I was going to end up alone and on the street again.

Year 1

I was working in a deli making sandwiches and pizzas after burning out working as a sous chef helping open a high-end restaurant and spending every waking hour outside of work gaming to distract from the urge to drink. I watched a lottttt of gaming YouTube during that time and after a while, with my kitchen dreams no longer realistic, I figured YouTuber was the next step and threw every bit of my hyperfocus superpower into that.

My end goal at the time wasn’t really that I wanted to be a YouTuber necessarily but that I needed a career to provide

• Creative freedom

• Flexible scheduling

• Scalable/stable income

I didn’t have a lot of equipment though so I started streaming my Sekiro playthrough to Mixer from my Xbox with a $15 headset, then downloading the vods onto my laptop, editing, and uploading to YouTube.

It was an absolute mess and I pretty quickly gave up on the YouTube uploads, deciding to stick with just streaming on Mixer.

So now I was a streamer!

I played Sekiro then moved on to Destiny 2 and Dark Souls 3 where I found a small community that liked to hang around my channel. We had a lot of fun but ultimately I felt like my growth was stagnant, I was unhappy with myself at the time, struggling heavily with depression and trying not to relapse into alcoholism.

It felt like I just wasn’t really providing enough value to ever succeed only playing video games.

Around that time some of the people in my community found out I’d worked as a social media manager for several years before getting into the culinary industry. They started asking questions about how to grow on Twitter and promote their own streams outside of Mixer and that became a pretty regular topic of conversation while I was playing games. My view count started going up and it felt like I was finally getting somewhere!

I found Ashnichrist on YouTube and her advice to treat streaming like a business, market it, brand it, and use your personal strengths in your content got me thinking about my channel differently.

The wheels started turning in my head. “I literally did this, people paid me to build an online presence for their brand… Why can’t I just do that for myself?”

It took some time to dust off my self-confidence enough to start the process.

In my mind, my career as a social media manager was a failure, a years-long experiment that I gave up on to learn how to cook.

But once I came to terms with the fact that moving on doesn’t mean failing and that I had indeed paid my bills for many years with that skill, the imposter syndrome let up enough to allow me to post about it.

I started getting active on my Twitter account and reached 1k followers in 2 months through a combination of short videos about social media marketing geared towards streamers and engaging on active threads related to the Mixer community.

My stream still wasn’t taking off like I’d hoped, though, and it felt like my quality was holding me back.

At that point, I was still streaming from my Xbox but I’d bought a better headset and hooked up a face cam and overlay through LightStream using my old, cracked laptop. It wasn’t great and things frequently broke, froze, rugged completely, or just looked/sounded awful.

Sjoukje and I were moving from Maine to Virginia around that time so I stopped streaming for a few weeks and just focused on Twitter while I built my new PC and settled into our apartment/new town.

$1500 later I came back to streaming with better lighting, smoother gameplay, and better audio.

I felt like Mixer was failing to provide what creators needed and was headed down a bad path so I jumped ship to Twitch a month before they pulled the plug.

Twitch felt great and I started seeing better views on some of my streams, but mostly just the ones I talked about marketing/community management, my gaming streams were pretty frequently barren wastelands punctuated by the occasional troll or well-intentioned fellow streamer popping in to say they’re lurking.

I hit 2k followers on Twitter.

It started to get discouraging when I realized I wasn’t as valuable as an entertainer as I’d thought I’d be.

I was blind to the value of being informative and helpful.

During a consultation from Ashnichrist that I won in a contest she encouraged me to focus on being an educator, use my past experience and realize that I had something unique in the space.

But when some streamers started to question the validity of people like myself, “stream coaches”, and came after my personal credibility, calling the whole thing a grift I didn’t care enough to fight anymore and gave up.

Year 0

I happened to give up right as Covid-19 hit.

There went a whole year.

I worked as a manager in a mall store for teens.

Mall job during Covid was a nightmare.

Priorities shifted. I learned a lot about myself and what type of person I wanted to be.

My old goal became important again

• Creative freedom

• Flexible scheduling

• Scalable/stable income

But now I had another goal; I wanted to help other people do the same thing and break free from these shitty systems that hold us back from living the lives we deserve.

Year 2

It was hard to figure out my focus when I came back to content creation and I bounced from a cooking Insta to IRL streams on Twitch, to gaming content, and eventually back to SMM and CM related content.

A few YouTube videos about Twitter I’d made right before I quit had managed to pull in about 50k views and the channel was almost at 1k followers.

It seemed like if anything was working it was that.

While I’d been away my Twitter had died from 2700 followers to about 1900 and my reach was basically zero.

So in between struggling to give up my dream of hundreds of people watching me play video games I made more social media-related content on YouTube and Twitter.

My focus was still on streamers for the most part but I’d given up on Twitch and I knew I didn’t want to be a YouTuber guru. Focusing on streamers felt really odd when I wasn’t actively streaming nor had I found a whole lot of success in live content.

Around that time I remembered crypto existed.

I’d bought BTC back when it was about $300 a coin to, um, purchase items online…

…and some of that was still left chilling in a wallet that I miraculously managed to get access to again.

So I started researching more about what to do with this stuff now that it was worth a bunch of money and found other blockchains like Ethereum and Tezos, Defi, NFTs, all this shit going on, crypto had boomed!

I saw other people in the streaming space start to catch on to Web3. This made me feel like maybe I wasn’t crazy and there was something here after all.

Since most of my community still wasn’t crypto-friendly I didn’t talk about it very much but dropped little hints about what I was working on every now and then to get some open-minded people interested in the changes coming.

My idea started turning into less of the traditional streamer mindset “how can I build a community large enough to monetize” and became a more achievable “how can I have a community that helps people and monetize the opportunity that brings my way”.

The social media skills that I’d been presenting were in high demand in the gaming and web3 industry. If I could present myself in a way that highlighted my value in this area then maybe I could tap into some of that potential?

My first opportunity presented itself when Syc from Digitized Entertainment reached out to me about helping their organization with its social media strategy. There wasn’t a budget but the group seemed so genuine and the intentions were great so I jumped on board. I helped out where I could at Digitized while working my retail mgmt job and continuing to create content for my brand.

Once my reach started to build again on Twitter and I proved to myself that I could still do this, I decided to start offering consultations, helping creators fine-tune their social media profiles and content distribution strategies.

I launched a giveaway and offered 3 free consultations which brought so much visibility that I made $300 my first two weeks, which at the time was pretty helpful! (If you’re just starting out or getting back in, don’t be afraid to do low investment things for free to boost visibility and credibility)

Through these consultations, I managed to find my first official paying SMM client since getting back in the game and was happy to help them out for, again, very low prices just to get myself working again.

It still felt weird to me that I was focusing on streamers when so little of my personal time was spent involved with streaming anymore and so much spent on learning about web3…

Right about the time I was really struggling with this balance Ashni sent me a DM asking if I’d be interested in applying for a job at an NFT platform she’d been hired onto recently. I jumped at the offer and fought through the imposter syndrome!

This part is going to be where I put a disclaimer.

*Unless you are in a position where taking this risk is appropriate please do not follow my exact steps and end up putting your family in danger

Sometimes, when you have the means to do so, or nothing left to lose a leap of faith is necessary and in my case, it was a little bit of both.

I had a feeling if I quit the retail job and focused that time on getting my career off the ground I could have enough income to pay all of the bills in at least a couple of months. My crypto trading and savings could keep me sustained that long.

So with only a few hundred dollars a month coming in from my business, I quit my job.

When I Tweeted that I was quitting my day job on January 1st I started immediately seeing offers in my DMs from people looking to work together!

Through all of this, I ended up in a Discord meeting with Ashnichrist and BritishBrat chatting about some work that had been coming Ashni’s way that she couldn’t take on herself. She floated the idea of creating a group where we could find people to work with us and train new groups of people to work in this space and find opportunities.

The next day she made the server and added us as admins just like, “well, lfg”!

Through this group, which ended up being called MOD3 (member-owned decentralized 3ducation) we landed a contract with a blockchain game called Inferno. Ashni, BB, and I started working on this as the launch project for our group and in 3 weeks have reached 9k Discord members and 4.5k Twitter followers. So I’d say it’s been pretty successful!

I was also contacted personally by a crypto art DAO called Monograma, a group focusing on using the tech to bring the artist/collector community together behind social justice causes worldwide. I agreed to join on as their community manager, helping craft their narrative on social media and build connections among the members.

On top of all this, because of Ashni’s incredible boss skills and the performance of Inferno, MOD3 is receiving its first major investment at only one month old and through that, we’ll be able to empower more people to find work in the CM/SMM field!

Between all of this, in one month my net income is 2x what it was at my retail job. This next month looks like it’s going to be even better.

After 2 years of work, I’ve found a market for my brand.

This is why having a flexible brand is so important.

If I’d just stuck to “no, I wanna be streamer”, I would still be working retail.

But just like you, your brand needs to be allowed the freedom to evolve over time.

You can remain flexible while still focused on your end goal.

My goal was working from home, achieving financial stability, and helping others do it as well.

I’d be lying if I said I thought just streaming or making YouTube videos was a reliable way to do that.

I don’t think that spending a lot of time focusing on building their Twitch stream or YouTube channel is going to be most people’s ticket out of wage slavery and poverty. Statistically, it’s a fact.

But I CAN help people see that a lot of these skills like community building and social media management are attainable and will allow you to showcase your own unique skills and personality to bring opportunities that are perfect for you right to your DMs.

I’m not excited about building streams anymore, I want to help build brands.

And the next frontier of building brands and communities is Web3.

Don’t let a chance to reach your goals pass you by because you’re sticking to old models that don’t work for you.

• Just start building something, even if your equipment is low end, do what you can, and start learning

• Don’t be afraid to fail at your first few attempts to find a niche where your value is noticed

• Keep an open mind about new ways to showcase your skills

• Don’t be afraid to help others out for free if it means building your reputation and getting your foot in the door, just don’t get taken advantage of!

• Once you find a content platform (Twitter, Insta, TikTok, YouTube) that works for you stick to it, don’t overwhelm yourself creating for too many places. Find ways to cross utilize content in unique ways across a couple of brand-appropriate platforms to manage workload while still achieving some diversity (putting all your eggs in one basket is always a bad idea)

• Create consistently

• Don’t be afraid to talk to people in your niche that are “bigger” than you

• Build genuine connections in your field of interest by getting involved in Twitter spaces, threads, and Discord servers

• Keep your goal in sight and remain flexible in how you get there. Don’t get emotionally attached to the wrong aspects of your dream

I feel like most people have it in them to build a community of a few thousand members around their brand, show off what they're good at and find a job doing something they love. With the ownership of our content that Web3 allows more is becoming possible every day.

We all have value, it’s about finding the right audience, not the biggest audience.