Nathan Andersen – Building Cadantic’s Brand – 3 Principles of Streaming

Emphasis: Strategic Organizational

A Stream of Experiences

The Process

Cadantic is the name of the live-streaming brand I made back in April of 2022. When Winter semester of 2023 was underway, and my stream had begun to show signs of opportunity and growth, I decided to see what I could do to build the brand into something more professional and likely to find success.

I made a few prospective goals before I got to work on the brand. I really wanted to see Cadantic become something I could use after I graduated, and I wanted it to reflect my personality and interests. The goals I started with:

1. Create a content strategy: Develop a content creation plan that aligns with my personal brand.
2. Establish a digital presence: Set up media profiles and other digital assets.
3. Build a community: Engage with my audience and collaborate with other creators in my niche.
4. Promote the brand: Develop a promotional strategy to increase the visibility of my personal brand.
5. Measure success: Track the growth and engagement of my personal brand.

My prospective hope for the results of the project was to have established a personal brand that reflects my skills, interests, and personality. I also expected to have built more of a community around my personal brand and increased its visibility through various promotional tactics. I also expected to have developed skills in content creation, social media management, and marketing.

The timeline for this project is a bit extended into the previous semester, as was approved by my project mentor. In fact, I had planned on doing this project Winter semester 2023 instead of Spring, but I was advised to begin working on it in Winter and to finish it in Spring.

Project Timeline:

Date	Time	Notes
Feb. 3	1 hour	First Brand-Planning Session With Partner (Dylan Jacobson) – Discussed Content Tilt, emphasis and strategy.
Feb. 10	1 hour	Brand-Planning Session With Partner – Discussed Content, specifically streaming, timing, and style.
Feb. 24	1 hour	Content Planning Session With Partner – Debated on the previous decisions and discussed the need for research and time needed to be put in for quality content. Agreed to do more research and investigation into content distribution options.
Mar. 2 – Mar. 6	3 hours	Content and Marketing Research – Streaming advice and professional input from larger streamers like Destiny, Devin Nash, and TrainwrecksTV. – Prescript streaming principles. – Destiny’s take on Streaming tech.
Mar. 1	4.8 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream Average Viewers: 3 Max Viewers: 7 Unique Viewers: 20 Unique Chatters: 7 Live Views: 32 New Follows: 0 New Subscriptions: 0
Mar. 6	4.2 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream Average Viewers: 3 Max Viewers: 7 Unique Viewers: 17 Unique Chatters: 7 Live Views: 21 New Follows: 0 New Subscriptions: 1
Mar. 10 – Mar. 11	8 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream Average Viewers: 4 Max Viewers: 10 Unique Viewers: 25 Unique Chatters: 10 Live Views: 35 New Follows: 2 New Subscriptions: 1
Mar. 13	2 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 4 – Max Viewers: 17 – Unique Viewers: 23 – Unique Chatters: 6 – Live Views: 23 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 0
Mar. 17	5.2 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 4 – Max Viewers: 9 – Unique Viewers: 27 – Unique Chatters: 12 – Live Views: 34 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 0
Mar. 17	1 hour	Content Strategy: Coordination of Content Distribution + Repurposing and storage. – Community outreach to other streamers
Mar. 24	6.8 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 4 – Max Viewers: 10 – Unique Viewers: 31 – Unique Chatters: 11 – Live Views: 42 – New Follows: 1 – New Subscriptions: 0
Mar. 31	7.2 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 6 – Max Viewers: 11 – Unique Viewers: 35 – Unique Chatters: 15 – Live Views: 53 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 1
Apr. 1	3 hours	Community Building/Outreach – Collaborated with streamer “OrdinaryAlpaca” – Planned for future collaborations – Strengthened relationship with other community.
Apr. 10	7 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 5 – Max Viewers: 9 – Unique Viewers: 29 – Unique Chatters: 8 – Live Views: 46 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 1
Apr. 12	6.5 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 6 – Max Viewers: 40 – Unique Viewers: 56 – Unique Chatters: 8 – Live Views: 75 – New Follows: 1 – New Subscriptions: 0
Apr. 14	5.5 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 3 – Max Viewers: 6 – Unique Viewers: 16 – Unique Chatters: 5 – Live Views: 24 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 0
Apr. 16	2 hours	Brand collaboration and planning with “OrdinaryAlpaca” – Discussed obstacles and opportunities of future streaming endeavors.
Apr. 16 – 22	5 hours	Content and Marketing Research – Streaming advice and professional input from larger streamers like Destiny, Ludwig, and DougDoug.
Apr. 28	1 hour	Brand and Content Planning With Partner – Established timelines and constraints for future meetings, content posting, and stream timing. – Determined Brand theme and color design. Planned on other content ideas, like logo and profile banners.
May 6	5.5 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 4 – Max Viewers: 8 – Unique Viewers: 14 – Unique Chatters: 6 – Live Views: 18 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 0
May 8	2 hours	Created basic logo canvas and color design. Reached out to digital designer to create a final version of the logo.
May 17	5.75 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 4 – Max Viewers: 9 – Unique Viewers: 16 – Unique Chatters: 4 – Live Views: 35 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 0
May 17	2 hours	Planning Session with Partner – Checked in and developed brand plan further after discussing recent research findings and metrics tracking. – Developed more Brand themes including font style.
May 18	4 hours	Content Distribution – Repurpose long form content into short form content.
May 27	4.9 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 2 – Max Viewers: 6 – Unique Viewers: 10 – Unique Chatters: 6 – Live Views: 15 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 0
Jun. 1	7 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 3 – Max Viewers: 7 – Unique Viewers: 16 – Unique Chatters: 9 – Live Views: 29 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 0
Jun. 7	6 hours	Content Creation: Live Stream – Average Viewers: 4 – Max Viewers: 8 – Unique Viewers: 16 – Unique Chatters: 8 – Live Views: 29 – New Follows: 0 – New Subscriptions: 1
Jun. 16	4 hours	Content Distribution – Repurpose long form content into short form content.
Jun. 16	4 hours	Development Session with Partner – Begin Final Presentation prep and finalizing brand strategy planning and development, including design layouts and Canva projects.
Jun. 21	6 hours	Content Distribution – Publish and distribute short form content on Tiktok and YouTube.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of much of the news and discoverability of information and industry trends, I wasn’t able to accurately track my research hours. I included minimum amounts of research done for my timeline hours, but I estimate that I’m missing around 20 hours of undocumented research work.

Some notable but not tracked events include:

Date	Issue
May 2 – May 7	TV and Movie Streaming Writer Strike – Impacts on entertainment industry – Impacts on content strategy and theme
Jun. 4 – ?	Live-Streaming Platform Twitch market disruption – Bad PR and crisis from announcement to change Twitch Affiliate and Partner standards and rules – Platform competition and market stability at a completely questionable status. – Predictions of massive exodus of streamers and content creators from Twitch.
Jun. 16	Live-Streaming Service “Kick” buys 100 million dollar contract with largest Twitch streamer “xQc”. – one of the largest marketing deals in all of marketing history – growing instability in Twitch market share

To summarize the hours put into the project, within the last semester (from April 16), at least 9 hours went into planning and brand strategizing, at least 5 (at most 25) hours of research and study, at least 30 hours of content creation, and 18 hours of marketing, content distribution and content repurposing. However, if we include streaming/content creation since the beginning of March, content creation actually clocked at around 90 hours instead of 30.

Now, obviously the execution of this project ended up looking a lot different than the prospective plans described. During my early research, I found that my initial aims and desired plans didn’t exactly map onto a productive and effective path which would lead to the most success. This research can be concisely described through the words of one of my 3 model streamers, Destiny:

 “…every single day I wasn’t streaming I was missing out on the opportunity to grow my fan base of 5-15 people to something larger.“

Steven Bonnell II
“My Journey In Streaming“

This introduces my first of 3 developed streaming principles that I believe are mandatory for a successful streaming brand.

Content Is King

Nothing matters more than content. If you have no content, your brand is dead. I knew that I needed more time to develop content than I had. Furthermore, my content was underdeveloped and had no effective distribution strategy. However, no content is worse than no content, and, most of the time, you won’t know how to improve your content until you start producing it.

To compare brick and mortar industries to the streaming industry, having no content is like having no product. There’s no point in advertising a product or service that doesn’t exist. An issue arose in that entire portions of my project were made unmanageable to do within the tight time frame of this project… at least in the way I had projected to do so. I would need to do things in a mixed order, since the most important thing is that everything is behind a solid, or at least developing, product: my stream of content.

You Are Good at 2 Things

This principle was surprising to discover, but it makes a lot more sense the more it is explained. Many new streamers will fall into content traps. For example, some will try to do the exact same thing as other streamers, which may make sense at first. I mean, hey, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Or, new streamers will try to do many things at once. They may pick and choose about 30 aspects of other streams or pieces of entertainment that they liked, and try to emulate them all at once.

Both strategies will lead to burnout, and long-lasting, low viability. You may get some success, but nothing sustainable. While I haven’t figured out all the underlying numbers, I would be confident in saying that live-streaming as a content medium has one of, if not the lowest rates of returns on investment out of all the content mediums. Many streamers are immediately discouraged; despite buying a $500 camera and $1200 PC, streamers will drop out of the market after trying to make it work for two to four months.

Leading streamers I sought advice from said that the best solve is to find your best aspects, your greatest talents, or whatever helps you stand out the most (each streamer said it somewhat differently from others) and focus all of your effort on making those aspects shine.

Why waste your and everyone else’s time doing things you’re mediocre at, when you could be doing something you’re one of the best at? Viewers will always prefer to watch streamers who are the best at what they do, whether it’s content style/genre, or if it’s just pure talent expression. You need to find the two things you do best and focus your content and efforts there.

For me, I found that I shine best in producing content which is highly interactive, and allows for me to engage in discussions. I love to engage in thoughtful, fun debate, and I am pretty good at those conversational elements. During streams where I tried to focus on talent expression, I found that I was less engaged, as was my audience.

Consistency is Critical

While I struggled with maintaining this principle the most, I recognize its potency. Larger streamers recommend avoiding inactivity like the plague. Nothing is more destructive to a community than inactivity. If viewers don’t know when or where you’ll be live, they will find someone else to replace where you once were in their schedule.

It’s also best to lean into content which is consistent, not just focus on consistent timeliness. Most live-stream viewers expect a particular setting and environment when they associate with your channel. If you shift those elements around too often, you’ll find that it’s hard to retain viewers and grow a community.

Project Substance

For the remainder of this report, I’d like to showcase the content I produced and the progress I made throughout this project.

Finally, my social media links.

I used Linktree as my main channel for connecting audiences with my other outlets of content. Currently, it helps you find my Twitch, TikTok, YouTube, Kick, and Twitter channels. I will soon expand it to the other main social media outlets, but didn’t want to spread myself too thin, too early.

I would post links to all of my YouTube stream “videos on demand”, but those are currently being developed for short form content before I edit them for full release. Instead, here are screen shots of my content under development on YouTube. Below that, my public TikTok profile.

Streaming is one of the most difficult mediums in the industry to thrive in. It must be fueled by true passion and connection. It is too unpredictable to be an investment of effort and energy, and yet, it is only able to succeed if everything is on the table. It asks much but promises almost nothing. That being said, I wouldn’t take back this experience for anything. It was worth it, despite the pain I had to endure to get here.