DeSynkro – Full-Time, Dedicated Streamer Looking to Help Others Grow in the Community

Tell us your history with video games 

Nowadays I don’t play games as often as I used to as a child, but I grew up with a Super Nintendo in my hand and then was given a PlayStation 2 nearly during its release. I was always a huge fan of Sonic, Mario and DragonBall and during my time growing up with those consoles, it was always one of the 3 that I’ve been given. I still love most Sonic and DragonBall games, but there are few games from those series that interest me a lot nowadays. Mario games are still an interest to me but I sadly don’t own a Nintendo console anymore, so I can't necessarily enjoy them.

I never had a nickname right until I started my very first YouTube with my father when I was 7. Back then times were simpler and I didn’t have the creativity to make a proper name and neither did my father. My first nickname was iagorockboy, which is my first name, what once was my favorite genre of music and the fact I’m a guy. Nowadays my name is just something creative I thought of.

For me what sparked my passion for gaming was the sensation of freedom, creativity and the bond you made with the people you played with. Even though I don’t play a lot of games nowadays, the time and experiences I’ve had with the people I met through gaming has been one that has never been forgotten to this day.

What’s your backstory and how did you get into streaming?

When I first EVER started streaming, it was back in February 2019, I did a few casual streams but never often dedicated a lot of time to it. I didn’t particularly like streaming that much back then, It was more of a hobby more so than anything just to meet new people, make friends and play a few cool games with a group of people.

My first stream was very boring and barebones, only really having a few gimmicks and silly memes and a boring layout and over time I tried to expand on that and improve on it but never really got far.
I gave up on the idea a few months after and thought I'd never look back.

It wasn’t until April 2020, after I lost my job due to covid that I thought of streaming again. My parents took me back in and helped me look for work and on rare occasions after job searching I decided to hit the live button and see if I could do anything with it. I simply thought to myself “There’s so many good people out there struggling so much worse than me, I might as well try to go live and make at least 1 person smile, that’s all I could ever hope for.”

From one person, became two, two became four and so on. Now a year and a month later we somehow have become Partner. Streaming has changed my life in a way I never thought it would. I met some of my best friends through it, I met my fiancé and we’ve been together for a good while now, my family supports what I do and I’m able to pay the bills, do giveaways for other folks and even doing frequent charities to help folks out there struggling.

I’m often actively going out of my way trying to help other smaller streamers develop their own streams and hopefully help them make a career out of something they love. I often make YouTube videos in the form of tutorials to try and help them improve their content or do different tricks in OBS to make their content more engaging.

Tell us about your channel and community

My community are some of the best people I've ever had the opportunity of meeting and being a part of. I never thought in my life I would’ve had so many amazing, wholesome, caring and friendly people in my life before. We always welcome everyone with open arms with either trying to make them smile, laugh or help them if they’re struggling.

I provide people with a place to hang out , talk, vent and let things out if they need to. I love doing mental health stuff and giving people the opportunity to talk about what they’re feeling and going through. My goal is to give a place for folks to hang out, feel comfortable and enjoy themselves. I read every single chat that gets posted to the best of my ability and encourage folks to post their chat again if I happen to miss something that they’ve said.

I don’t often play games nowadays. When I’m not streaming I’m often working on content for other platforms, hopefully to grow, expand and make some form of positive difference. I guess gaming, as much as I used to love it, isn’t as attached to me as it used to be. I’ve always been a workaholic but I also suffer from a lot of depression, so being creative and productive helps with that.

Most of the time when I do play any games it’s often community games such as Jackbox, Gartic Phone and whatever I can think of at the time as long as I can get my guys involved with me.
I don’t particularly play them myself, I just enjoy talking, hanging out and watching the guys have fun. So long as they are enjoying themselves, I’m happy.

Tell us about your brand and how you’ve been able to obtain success

I like to think that my brand is my true self. I love characters and the hard work other streamers put on to make a character while they are live, but I prefer being myself more than anything. I’m very honest and transparent with my community and I don’t mind showing them seeing me struggle, having them by my side makes me wanna work harder so I can be a better content creator for them.

My brand is just myself, I have a logo but I don’t use it as often as I do my own face. I wanted my brand to be something people can connect with, showing them I’m not a character, I’m not an invincible force. I’m just a guy like any other trying to do some good with what he has available to him.

I’m not 100% certain how I grew my channel in all honesty. From my personal experience, I just did what I thought was best, to the best of my ability. I read every chat on my Twitch and try to reach out to viewers who are struggling, I make content on several other platforms, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and try to be as entertaining, dumb and funny as I can while still keeping it real and honest when I need to be.

Thus far I feel like my biggest achievement has been hitting Partner, albeit, maybe because of my depression or my workaholism I feel like I could’ve done better, part of me wants to do better. I’m never satisfied, I just can’t stop. To achieve something, I need to do more and achieve more. I want to do more for the people I love and care about, my family, my community, my friends, my fiancé. I owe the world to these guys and I wanna make sure I’m able to do as much as I can because I love them.

Fighting depression, inadequacy, anxiety has been the biggest hurdle, fight and obstacle I’ve ever faced not only during my time as a streamer but in general. It’s been the biggest fight of my life. While streaming has been the biggest source of positivity in my life, it’s been a double edge sword. It's also been the reason for a lot of depression and anxiety. In my mind, I try to think that these negative feelings I go through are a way of keeping the balance. I’ve never given up despite all these hurdles and part of me doesn’t want to, I want to keep fighting and doing my best.

For me, hitting affiliate took me a week or so. My first ever stream was Apex Legends, while I was streaming I decided to browse through Twitch to see other Apex streamers and see if they’d wanna play some matches together. I ended up bumping into a guy named BobbyJ and he and I got along really well, he raided me with 70+ viewers and within the next few days I had hit affiliate.

Partner was a different story, but I had help thanks to friends and networks I’ve met along the journey. It took me a year and two weeks to get Partner from when I started streaming again in April 22, 2020, till May 10, 2021. It’s been a fun journey and I feel like the most rewarding thing wasn’t the Partnership with Twitch but the people I’ve met along the way.

I’ve been working as a full-time streamer since June of last year because at the time streaming was my only source of income due to losing my previous job from covid. After showing some payslips to my parents they said it was something I should pursue. Now they make regular appearances on stream whilst I’m live.

What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve ever received from a viewer?

One of the biggest things I’ve received was to not give up, even when things seem bad, giving up makes you lose the opportunity for things to improve. So keep pushing even when things are down because eventually it could get better.

What’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to you because of your streaming?

I feel like meeting some of the most amazing people and even the love of my life through streaming counts itself as an unexpected opportunity. Something that I never expected to happen and it did by chance, something that never would’ve happened had I not decided to go live one day.

How do you balance streaming and your day-to-day life?

My day to day life is actually quite unhealthy and unbalanced and I would recommend that you try to pace yourself a lot better than I have. I stream on Monday - Friday at 4pm AWST and often I wake up at 1-2pm which means I usually have 2-3 hours of leisure during my week, which is the time I spent getting out of bed and in a way preparing to go live. When I finish streaming I simply just go back to working and doing more content.

I have no days off, sadly. When I finish streaming I work. I edit videos, work on things for the next stream and try to make new, interesting and fun things for next time. I give myself a few hours off so I can spend time with my friends and family and my love and that’s about it. I work on average around 16+ hours and then I try to sleep only to wake up and repeat again. I’m tremendously dedicated to what I do because I want to make something good out of it, which is why I feel upset, depressed and anxious when I don’t see a large amount of positive outcomes coming from it (this is completely my fault and my biggest flaw.)

I don’t often go out because I physically can’t bring myself to do it. I'm a ball of introverted anxiety and incredibly agoraphobic. I can go outside but I struggle and it scares me. I try to face that fear, and overcome it so I can improve myself but I often avoid leaving my comfort zone.

My family loves what I do, my mum and dad show up on stream, hang out a bit, talk to chat as well, make jokes and much more. When they saw me doing it initially, they saw it as just a hobby and when I told them I wanted to try and make a career out of it, they were on board so long as I kept working hard and was able to keep paying bills and living somewhat independent of them. At this point my family and I are more like roommates than an actual family. (Which is not the most comfortable relationship to have with family…).

I want to keep streaming. I want to be a content creator. It’s why I work so hard despite all the hardships, depression, anxiety, ridiculous and taxing hours. It’s worth it. My community is what makes me strive to work harder. They are the reason for my motivation, the reason I do this. I don’t see myself streaming or making content anymore if one day my community ceases to be.

Tell us what tools you use for your stream

OBS Studio is my main streaming tool, I can’t go a day without using it. It’s always open on my computer and there’s few times during the day I actually close it. I record all sorts of videos using the tool and much much more. I couple it with Touch Portal and that allows me to add some big effects whilst live. My Streams have been compared to a “well edited meme video on YouTube.”

Discord is essential in my opinion. It’s my community hub and the only place I really use to talk to my community and everyone around me. It’s where I provide free tools, tips, emotes, sub badges and many more resources for my community. It's also a place for people to talk about mental health, rant and vent about what’s happening on their end. And it allows the community to seek and ask for help, as well as share what other creative things they get up to.

For my Bots, I use DynoBot and Carlbot on Discord. I use StreamElements as my Twitch bot for fun commands and socials. My overlays and animations are often made by myself. I don’t particularly enjoy relying too much on others, so if I can learn something to do it myself I often take that approach before seeking help. My emotes were made by a dedicated and loyal artist friend of mine, plus my fiancé helps with a lot of other art that I do.

StreamElements has a plugin called OBS.Live for OBS Studio, which is highly recommended. There are amazing plugins you can install in OBS Studio to enhance the capabilities of the software. I don’t recommend anyone, even beginner streamers, to use StreamLabs OBS. I don't like StreamLabs. They once were a great service but now, in my opinion, they've succumbed to greed and are more interested in turning a profit as opposed to helping content creators.

I find looking at Analytics, as smart as it is to have an insight on how well you are progressing, to be more harmful long-term. While looking at numbers can give you an insight on where and what you need to improve on, it could also be damaging when you see the numbers go down even after you’ve addressed the issue.

What are your favorite streaming resources?

Alpha Gaming is an amazing channel. They provide great tips for streamers who already have an established audience and want to learn new things, improve their content and equipment, and much more. Harris also provides free music for streamers, which is amazing considering the DMCA situation going around Twitch.

Besides that it’s very rare for me to actively seek help in different channels. I prefer reaching out to friends and people I know as well as different connections I’ve made in order to learn from them.
It’s harder to learn from a YouTube channel than it is to have someone who has experience directly tell you where to improve and what you could be doing wrong.

Regardless of how much bigger or smaller you are to others in the streamingsphere, you can always learn something from one another. You could have 100 viewers and they could have 10, but you can still learn something from them and improve on your end.

Which 3 streamers inspire you the most?

1. Harris Heller - I love what Harris has done for the community. Despite having a business mindset, his content helps both large and small content creators develop different talents, mindsets and skills for their own hobbies and potential careers.
2. DarkViperAU - His dedication to content creation, hard work and brutal honesty helped me in more ways that can be described. The advice he’s given me, despite being brutally honest and in such a way many others wouldn’t always appreciate, has helped me feel a lot more motivated and dedicated to content creation, making me strive not only to be like him but to do better in the long run!
3. Ludwig - I don’t enjoy Ludwig’s content, it’s not for me, but I enjoy the advice he’s giving to people. His most recent subathon, he not only donated a portion of the money to charity but also he was able to pay his moderators for their time and assistance. That's something I hope I'm able to do one day. My moderators are my backbone and some of my best friends and I want to be able to help them.

What are your top 3 streaming tools? 

1. OBS Studio + Stream Elements
2. Elgato Stream Deck and Keylight
3. Touch Portal and Lioran Board

What advice would you give to small channels trying to reach Partner? 

Don’t let one bad day define whether or not you’ll make content in the future. Bad days will happen whether you’re doing everything right or not. Don’t fall victim to them. Keep going even if it seems bad because if give up, you lose the opportunity for things to get better.

Make content for different platforms, make friends, and work alongside them on this journey. You’re in this together! One person could change the entire outcome of your career and that person could quite literally be sitting under your nose, you just gotta give yourself the opportunity.

If you could change one thing about Twitch, what would it be? 

I could write an entire essay on how many things I would change about Twitch if I had any semblance of power in this company.

There are so many flaws that are not addressed, and half the time it’s a debate whether or not Twitch is actually listening to us or any criticism we put out.

I love the platform, but I will not refrain from speaking out about the flaws and by far the biggest one for me and many others have seen is just the fact that they don’t listen.

The fact that many content creators including Harris Heller himself has left the platform and switched to YouTube should be a dead giveaway that some must be done about it ASAP before more bigger creators do the same.

What are your plans for the future? 

I want to provide more means to help other content creators. A long term goal is starting my own record label in the future to help people deal with things such as the DMCA issue rampaging through the company.

I want to provide more free resources for smaller streamers who are just starting off and want to improve their content.

I want to provide more overlays, badges, emotes and more.

I want to keep doing charity streams and help those in need. If I can keep growing and make even more of an impact then I will keep pushing.

I want to make a community of people so they can have good friends by their side, and are able to help each other grow and support one another through their content creation journey.