I spent two weeks last January sitting in the back rows of smaller channels — the ones with 40, 60 viewers — and just watching the chat. Not the stream. The chat. What I found rewired every assumption our product team had about what we were building and who it was for.
We had shipped overlays, scene transitions, analytics dashboards, clip editors. Our roadmap was a monument to production value. But the creators who grew fastest? They barely touched any of it. They had a webcam, a decent mic, and they read every single message in chat.