Week 1176
I never imagined I would become a Twitch streamer one day. I certainly did not think this was in the cards for me when I left Retool. But here I am — putting myself on camera and talking to strangers on Twitch chat.
The goal of streaming on Twitch is to figure out if there would be any real interest in something like Toby. It would require a fairly significant investment to fully production-ize Toby and so we want to get more feedback before committing the resources to do that. The first piece of content we want to produce a live stream of Toby playing poker autonomously while explaining his reasoning. We’ve ran a few streams and tried promoting it on Tiktok and Reels but it hasn’t gotten a ton of attention thus far.
There could be many reasons for why our views are low: maybe our marketing isn’t that good, maybe gambling content is devalued on these social platforms, maybe we just got unlucky algorithm rolls. We’ve tried reposting across multiple accounts and changing up the storytelling but it’s still hard to rigorously identify the failure mode. Following Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is that this concept of a cat playing poker is just not interesting to people. If so, then we’ll try variations of Toby playing other games and see how they do.
On a personal level, it’s been quite uncomfortable to put myself live on camera. I don’t think I’m a great entertainer (although I’m working on it!), which could be another failure mode for the stream’s viewership. It’s also been quite awkward to force myself to converse with an AI cat. But getting over this mental hurdle is a prerequisite to become a Toby user. It’s a paradigm shift that many consumers will need to get accustomed to in order for AI companions to truly go mainstream. If I can’t accept Toby for what he is, then how can I expect others to do so?
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Content I enjoyed: