maxthecatfish

I’d been working as a FinTech Consultant in Chicago, IL for several years when my partner landed a job in Amsterdam, NL. All expenses paid - the kind of opportunity you don’t turn down.

And so we quit our jobs and moved to a country where

                                              we knew no-one,

we didn’t speak the language,

we didn’t even have a place to live...

With about $10,000 in savings, I decided to give Twitch a try: a place I could be apologetically myself.

I designed and composited all of the brand and on-screen elements including our logo, backgrounds, stinger transitions, OBS scenes, and motion graphics myself. I mastered OBS for livestreaming and pursued courses in the Adobe Suite, social media management, sound and video engineering, and video editing in Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. I researched and invested in high-quality recording equipment and a space treated for sound and video recording.  And I went live to 1 viewer. And then 10. And then 200. The channel was affiliated within a few weeks, and partnered within a year of its first livestream - earning around $15,000 in its first year, and reaching over 6,000 followers and over $30,000 in yearly revenue by 2021

Over the years I received fan art of popular moments and inside jokes from the community, and most-incredibly - one of our viewers created 30 hand-felted outfits for Mike - the microphone - that he would wear during streams. I’d cultivated an engaged, mature audience of passionate viewers who appreciate art, culture, real conversations, and great games.

Running a Twitch stream became running a business. I budgeted for large projects, hired artists and video editors, recruited volunteers and staff, created and negotiated contracts and invoices, and navigated the legal environment of business ownership in two countries. I applied my background in programming, APIs, and IoT devices to design a custom Twitch Chatbot that allowed viewers to control the lights in my house (a project that alone drove thousands of dollars of revenue every year). It was the culmination of all of my creative and professional experience wrapped up in what became a full-time job.

MaxTheCatfish ran on Twitch from 2019 until 2022, and ending the stream
was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make.