I’ve been pondering this thing. Here’s the results. Also there’s a start to the branding as you can see in the title!

I’ve been preparing a few things.. I know right, gonna be preparing for 6 years then get bored and do something else at this rate. Very close to actually doing things, promise!

This is a followup to Profit Share if you haven’t got a clue what this is about.

Problems

Being a pessimist grumpy bastard the first thing I want to look at are the problems I’ve identified and how they can be solved.

Tokens. Don’t panic! The profit share thing is still in place. The problem was Twitch use the term tokens for their mobile app currency for subs. I’m going to rename tokens to coins from now on to avoid butting heads with Twitch on that.

Cashout. This will be a good problem to have of course, but I keep picturing myself having to send a thousand tiny tiny payments every month that increase over time. For the sake of sanity the min payout will be a tenner (which rolls over each month until it hits $10 without doing the charity donation thing)

Copyright. It really feels like it’s in bad taste to require everyone to sign over their copyright, however I’ve not come up with a better way of handling this. We’re not building open source (at least not primarily and definitely not to start off) we’re building businesses and products. Businesses and products that might one day be sold, ideally without needing permission from a whole crowd of people. While I want to change this one and use a lovely hippie license we can all enjoy, I have to keep the copyright ownership thing in place for now.

Boredom. How on earth do you make a business building slash code stream entertaining enough for those that aren’t involved to stick around long enough to get involved? Then again actually if the marketing part is done well they’ll already be interested, they’re here because they’re interested.. Maybe this one’s a non-issue.

Marketing

For this to work we need some motivated people to get involved. I need to figure out where they hang out and get the word out to them without spamming.

The easiest way would of course be to lean on the “I pay you to watch my stream” angle but that feels it might be a little bit too dishonest for me. It’s a maybe.

I also need to be aware that I’m a PHP guy so most of the codey websitey projects will be started using the Laravel PHP framework. At least I’ve already alienated a lot of the naysayers out there with that one so at least there’s that.

I still need to find other PHP devs, frontend folks, business savvy people, etc. Not limited to those of course, anyone that’s motivated is absolutely welcome, there’ll always be something to do.

The project

I’m not sure if I should pre-plan the project before doing it or get it all done on stream. I’m quite aware that me scribbling notes and then crossing them out might be a bit of a bore, but then again if I explain my thinking..

You know what, all this self doubting waffling leads me into the final point.

Hit the Start Stream button lol

Almost. Almost. My main PC runs Linux so naturally things are randomly broken sometimes and a pain in the arse. This interferes with OBS and causes massive frame drops. I’m having a look at setting up a second PC that can handle the stream part. Bonus: If I get a fatal error you can see the PC rebooting instead of the stream going offline!

I gotta move the PC and NAS and fans off the desk the mic is clamped to too.. just a constant buzzing whir in the mic if the fans spin up or the NAS is doing whatever it does now and then.

I’m also relying on Virgin Media so there’s a bunch of downtime too.. unfortunately my 4G backup line doesn’t quite get a reliable enough signal to be a viable alternative either. Hopefully that one fixes itself because I don’t even know from there.

Soon. Very soon. Next week? I dunno. This month? Hopefully. Next year? Soon!

https://twitch.tv/cohan

P.s Also I know, I really need to simplify the explain. Working on it.