Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the 22 Mysteries Podcast. This is gaming, streaming, marketing, everything that those topics can cover. The intersection of those topics is where I find my passion at the moment. Now, I'm gonna just rip the band-aid off and get right to the point. Gamers and streamers are leaving MILLIONS of dollars on the table.

Now I know that's a bold statement. I'm gonna back it up though. Throughout this podcast, we are gonna talk about all the reasons why the top streamers are leaving millions of dollars on the table, and how if you are a streamer, plan to be a streamer, wanna be a streamer, are getting into gaming and streaming, we're gonna talk about how to set up your business foundation so that you don't make the same mistakes that all these first and second generation streamers are making right now. 

Then we're gonna hopefully talk to those first and second generation streamers so that we can help them plug the holes in their ships, so that they stop leaking out so much money. 

All right, so let's get into it. I'm gonna be doing case studies on all these different streamers from the top streamers in the world to people just getting started at the bottom of the list. And we're gonna go through and we're gonna analyze what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong, everything in between, and just discuss some of the new technologies, methodologies, strategies, and practical things that you and I can do to execute on building a great personal brand. 

Because if you think about it, gaming and streaming is just that, it's a personal brand. It's content creation, sure. But at the end of the day, you are creating a personal brand around either an avatar, around your own personality, whatever it might be. You are creating a personal brand, and it's really the only thing that differentiates any of us In a sea of commodities. 

Meaning they're something like upwards of 11 or 12 million different people out there all providing the same type of content. And there's more and more every day. You're getting your computer set up, getting your camera turned on. You're going live for the first time and you're streaming to either nobody or you're streaming to 50,000 people, a hundred thousand people, 300,000 people all at the same time watching you play video games, or the different events that you have going on in your life. 

And what are we doing with that attention? Most people just create content. They record the vibes, they splice 'em up, upload 'em to social media and call it a day.

And then if they build their following big enough, they get brand partnerships, they get sponsorship deals. They run a few passive social media posts that are combined, and then that's it. 

Ninja's Mistakes

It blew my fucking mind when I went and checked out Ninja’s Facebook page. Okay. And let me just tell you about this.

Alright, so I login, and I go check out Ninja's Facebook page and what do I find? Yo, this dude has 883,000 followers to his Facebook page. That's pretty incredible, man. Now, Ninja's a top dog. So we go after him a lot with this content. The course I've created for you, all the different things we talk about, we talk about him a bunch because he's at the top. He's like one of the biggest names, at least one of the biggest visible personalities in this space.

And Ninja right now is streaming on every different platform. He's streaming on Instagram Live and Twitch and Twitter and YouTube and TikTok and Facebook. He's just he's doing it big and so he's obviously driving traffic to his Facebook page.

What I thought was wild was that when you can go onto somebody's Facebook page and you go to their about section, you go down to the page transparency. It shows you if this page has ever run ads. If they're currently running ads, it'll allow you to see their ad library of all the ads that they have run in the past and all this type of stuff.

So I go to his ad library and I was fucking shocked because Ninja's not running a single ad. He's never run an ad. So when I say that streamers are leaving millions on the table, this is one of the big reasons why, because here's the thing, you can run ads through Meta, I'm sure you know this by now, that you can run ads to Facebook and you can run ads to Instagram and you might be like, “what the fuck are you talking about, man?”

This is gamers and streamers. Why would they run ads? And I say Ninja is not just a gamer and a streamer. Ninja is a personal brand. Ninja has a merch store. Ninja also has a partnership with Adidas, in which he has his own line of shoes and slides and all sorts of different products. He wrote a book, he has a masterclass.

He has all of these different affiliate sponsorships, brand deals, partnerships, and he's not running a single ad from his platform. That's crazy to me. So when I thought about it, I was like wait a second. If Ninja's not running ads, who else isn't running ads? So I checked out Dr. Disrespect.

Dr. Disrespect

Another huge name in the gaming space. 403,000 followers to this page. Obviously one of the better known personalities in this gaming and streaming space. And guess what? Dr. Disrespect is not currently running ads, and I go, how the fuck can this be true? How can somebody that has a book, his own merch store, all of the different partnerships that he's got with Roccat, all these different brand deals that he's got going on, Black Steel, he's got his own gaming studio, Midnight Society, and they're not running ads at all.

You want to talk about how much money these streamers are leaving on the table? There's no automation set up to talk to the people who visit their page. I'm talking about the technology that is in existence right now. It's been around for a while. It might have been pretty shitty as most things are when their first iterations come around.

But by now we've worked out a lot of the bugs and a lot of the kinks. And in the marketing world, social media automation is a new kind of frontier in terms of developing your relationship with your audience and talking to them and having touchpoints. And it doesn't just have to be these stupid basic chat bots.

You can build out conversations that are personalized to your brand because you are a personal brand and gamers and streamers have something that no other business corporation out there really has, which is freedom and flexibility. Let's face it, gamers and streamers are online all day, cussing up a storm, fucking talking mad shit, getting all pissed off, showing their emotions, being three-dimensional people, talking about all sorts of crazy shit while they're on stream. And they build an audience around that personality. So that gives you the freedom and flexibility to talk to people through social media in a much different way than say a corporate brand must do.

I don't think that they must do it, but they do it because it's just tradition. They're trying to be everything for everybody and end up being nothing for nobody. So this is where I think this type of thing is mind blowing.

The fact that these huge brands are not running Facebook ads is nuts. They're not running ads on Instagram, it's nuts.

I haven't been targeted with any YouTube ads. And you know what's crazy is if you go back and you look at Ninja's numbers, when he went from Mixer back over to Twitch when Mixer fell and he made this announcement, “Hey, I'm coming back over to Twitch,” and he made these big announcements. Guess what? When you look at his numbers, you can actually see the massive improvement that happened around the time that he was actually putting in a little bit of marketing effort.

And that's where the big fail is for a lot of gamers and streamers. I'm naming two in this particular episode, but there are so many others and we're gonna look at 'em and we'll do deep dives on each one of these brands. We'll talk about a lot of this stuff, but this is just to wet your whistle about what this podcast is and the direction that it's going, because we're gonna be talking about games, different games, and where the industry's headed, streaming and where that industry's headed.

All the different kinds of topical things that we can talk about in there that might be interesting. But what I find interesting is the intersection between these industries. And why nobody is actually applying the fundamentals of marketing. They're doing some social media stuff, and that's just because everybody's doing the same thing where they just create content, they upload it to their social media and whatever happens, they let the chips fall where they may.

And I feel like that's lazy, and we're gonna be talking about a lot of really cool stuff. But one of the biggest foundational pieces that's gonna be a through line through my entire narrative and the dialogue that I'm establishing with you and this audience. Building your own app. 

Build Your Own App.

10 years ago, it might have been out of the question because of the amount of cost that it would've taken to develop something like that, because of the amount of coding requirements that there was.

So it was a very specialized skill. If you didn't have that skill in which to code an app native for iOS or Android, you were shit outta luck. Unless you had a ton of money and a lot of resources behind you, most of us getting into the gaming and streaming space probably don't have so much money.

And we've already just sunk a huge amount into our computers and into the gear, the camera, all of the setups and all of that. So we don't have a whole lot left over. But with this no code revolution, let me tell you guys, okay, let me tell you this. No code revolution is changing the fucking game here because it's just drag and.

You pay for a yearly subscription to a service like Adalo, A d a l o.com. Go check it out, man. It's fucking awesome. But what you do is it's just drag and drop. You build an app. It's where I built my app. It's where you're listening to this podcast right now, or it's where you can listen to it through my app where I have the course Zero to 20,000 Subs where you're gonna follow my journey as I build my own empire.

I want to help you build your empire along with me, but we're gonna be doing it with the marketing fundamentals from the ground up. We're gonna be focusing on all of the business techniques, strategies, and implementation because to me that only makes sense if we are in a sea of competition, meaning 11, 12 million other people all doing the same thing, then the only thing that's going to separate us, the only thing that's gonna differentiate us from our competition is going to be our execution of personal brand.

And when we have the business fundamentals sound, we can crush the competition because nobody else is. Nobody else is doing it. We are. We are in the pioneering space here at the forefront in the gaming and streaming space where if you create your own app, then you have a foundation of where to funnel all of that attention that you're gonna be getting back to.

Because let's face it, so many people who run their businesses through social media are leaving themselves vulnerable because they're running their entire business through a third party app that does not allow you to communicate effectively with your audience. 

When a follower comes and follows you on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, Facebook, you don't get the information like that person's name, email address, and phone number.

And that information is incredibly valuable to any business, especially in today's day and age. For digital brands, digital businesses, that information is absolutely vital for you to start building. If you did anything else at all, building an email list is absolutely critical and huge to your ability to make money.

So why is nobody doing it? Why is everybody leaving it in the hands of outdated tactics, right? Like people that have merch stores, and good on them for building a merch store. That's great. And they're like, oh, they put a little link on their link tree page on Instagram and then think that just passively people are gonna go to that and that that's the best way to do it.

But I'm like, that's so passive and you have no real control over that. You're relying on traffic that you don't own. You don't own that traffic. We're building a list of people who are engaged and interested in what we have to say, what we have to offer them. If they're gonna be spending money with us, all of that money that we're making on the back end through all the follow up stuff, man, that's all net profit.

That's just sound business techniques because if you make yourself financially attractive because you have the sound business fundamentals behind you, then all the opportunities for brand partnerships and sponsorship deals, you're gonna be in such a stronger position to negotiate your percentages, your deals, the perks that may be on the table, right?

You're going to be more attractive than, say, the 11, 12, 13 million other people that are out there trying to do the same thing, vying for the same opportunities. So when you have your fundamental sound and you have been building your business based on a very solid foundation, which is why building your own app is so critical because this is a place for you to funnel all of that attention back to so that when people sign in to your app, you're providing them value. Your content lives in this space. You're providing them value and engaging them in stories that they can't get anywhere else.

You have your merch store right there in your app. You have all of these different touchpoints. All of these different ways to communicate with your audience, however, they have to sign into your app. So they have to give you their information just to sign into the app, like you've probably done with my app at this point, right?

But what we're gonna talk about is not just marketing to people, because that shit sucks, right? People hate being sold, but we love buying stuff. But more importantly we provide value as personal brands.

If we provide people with actual substance, not asking for any money, we're building relationships. We're building rapport. We're building loyalty to people because we are actually providing above and beyond a level of value that they just don't get anywhere else. 

And so that's what we're doing here. I wanna show you the business fundamentals. That's what this whole podcast is gonna be about. It's talking about these fundamentals, analyzing them, looking at all of these different people and where their holes are, how we could plug it up so that you really understand all of the different kind of mistakes and missteps that people are making, all the good things that they're doing that you could implement and execute.

That's all well and good. So we just need to learn from them. We learn from each other. We move forward as a community, and we all grow together. That's what Zero to 20,000 Subs is all about. It's a free course inside my app, so if you haven't already, go download that app from the App store, Google Play, whatever, wherever you get your apps.

Download 22 Mysteries Today.

Download 22 Mysteries today. Get signed up for that free course. I'm not trying to sell you anything through this app. I just have all my content there and a way for us to stay in contact and communicate, and I will show you through videos, through all the stuff on my YouTube channel and everything like that.

I'm gonna show you through videos, how to set it all up. I'm gonna show you through videos, how to integrate and how to connect the dots so that you can, once you learn the rules of the game, you can bend them to your will, get it to do whatever your use case is all about, because I promise, the more brand partnerships you get, the more information like this you're gonna want to know.  That way you can capitalize on all that stuff so that you can actually sell the affiliate products and programs that you get opportunities for down the road without having to invade your primetime content and be like, “oh, I'm Billy Mays here with another fantastic product.”

And everybody's just hawking stuff through their YouTube channel and I'm just like, Okay, fine. That's one way of doing it. Sure. But what if we were able to not molest our content and actually talk to people in different and other ways in order to engage them in these offers. 

But we do it in a way that isn't always in their face being like, I got a product to sell. You look at this brand partnership thing, right? Like you're gonna do those. Sure. But the real money is in the follow up. And if you don't have that automated system to do that, then you're spinning your wheels and you're leaving so much money on the table.

So we're gonna talk about all that, and I promise you, I'm gonna convince you because it's really easy to see how much money these people are leaving on the table. Ninja's a real easy example because of the fact that he has over 800,000 people who follow his Facebook page and he's not running ads…that is nuts.

Just for his Adidas shoes and his slides alone, that's nuts. But for his book, for his masterclass, He's not running ads that’s nuts, man. How much money this dude could really be making for his empire is absolutely bonkers. If he would actually implement and execute a strategy, because right now none of the platforms that he's on, does he get any contact information for the people that are following and subscribing to him?

But if he had his own. People would actually sign up for it because you're engaging them in content and stories that they can't get elsewhere. And I'll show you how to be creative with it so that we can actually engage people where they're at. Tell them fun stories, keep it creative, keep it interesting, and not just, Hey, sign up for my newsletter for updates and merch sales.

No one wants that shit. It's boring as fuck and no one wants that. But if you engage 'em with stories, because we're all three dimensional human beings that live lives and have interesting shit happen, we just have to find the angle in which to talk about it in an interesting way. Be storytellers, right?

You can be a content creator. You can be an influencer, whatever fucking word you want to talk about yourself as. But really, if you start changing that mindset to be more of a storyteller, I promise you,  it's going to change your entire business because that is really what you are, is a storyteller.

You're playing video games, which is a story. The way that you play the video game is also a part of that story. The content that you create outside of whatever ecosystem you're living in is a story. So if you actually start communicating with your audience, even in the marketing ways, it is still a story.

And so if you execute on telling a great story, you're gonna execute your personal brand in a way that will crush all the competition around you. All right, that's this first episode. I'm gonna leave you with that.