Live Streaming and Entrepreneurship: Adapting Lean Start-Up Approaches to Live Streaming on Twitch

Digital video content creation has developed into a means of monetization as individuals can produce content independently. The perception of digital entrepreneurship is changing as content creation and distribution across several digital media platforms has become an accepted occupation. Twitch streamers produce live video content in various categories to an audience and, in many cases, manage their streams, audience, brand, and execute offline strategies to help grow their channel. Many of the activities that new and small Twitch streamers engage in are similar to the work that goes into building a start-up. Moreover, these activities can be compared to design thinking and the lean startup approach, two entrepreneurial frameworks that focus on iteration, customer development and growth.

Through literature review, content analysis and research-creation, both the lean start-up approach and live streaming best practice were carried out into testable strategies and applied to a new channel on Twitch. The content analysis was broken into guidelines and aspirational content, where themes were pulled from each category and ranked in order of importance and frequency. Furthermore, the aspirational content included analyzing their community through customer mapping to identify three audience segments to test during the research-creation. 

From the literature review and content analysis, hypotheses were derived from the primary themes and then validated through research-creation. Through the validation, an adaptation of the business model canvas was presented as the streaming model canvas, a framework for new and small streamers to better understand how they will deliver value to their intended audience with their content. The research revealed that seven main components contribute to growth as a live streamer; key requirements, key resources/value adds, viewer segments, niche, social channels, community engagement/relationships, and revenue streams.