Two Strategies
What makes an internet streamer successful?
It was a genuinely difficult question. The streaming scene was the kind of place where things beyond anyone’s imagination happened all the time, so trotting out the usual generalities everyone already knew never quite cut it.
Sure, you could talk about hard work and sincerity—that much was obvious. But every now and then someone with none of those things got lucky, latched onto a big-agency streamer, and exploded overnight. From the perspective of a streamer grinding their guts out, that was enough to make you cough blood.
It was unfair. Absolutely. But in the end you had to accept it and move on.
Everyone already knows the world isn’t fair. You’re not a little kid. Throwing a tantrum forever isn’t going to get you a piece of candy.
You had to look reality square in the face. Instead of stewing in jealousy over someone else’s windfall, better to ask yourself how to get better.
It was a little ridiculous for a four-year veteran viewer to start sounding like an expert, but the truth was that after a certain point in any field, patterns started to show themselves.
In the end the only real answer was “effort.”
Just not the kind where you mindlessly slammed your head into the wall.
I thought back to the virtual streamers of Rena World from before my regression. The ones who, simply because they were streaming alongside big-agency talent, cranked their hours into the stratosphere and repeated whatever they were told like slaves. You could still call that “effort,” I supposed. They were chewing through their own health just to catch a few more scraps of the overflow. Compared to the virtual streamers who didn’t even do that much, their viewer counts and Candy donations did climb.
But I was certain there was a smarter way.
You needed planned, intelligent effort.
I broke it down into two concrete approaches.
The first was promotion and generating buzz.
No matter how hard you worked or how good you were, if the audience never heard about you, it was all for nothing. That was why, from the very start of my debut, I had kept pulling aggro and making sure the conversation around my stream never died. Entering Rena World was no different. I even prepared an event just to squeeze out a little more attention.
Thanks to that, the chat was lively from the jump and the viewer count punched past 1,400. There was some Minecraft float traffic, sure, but nearly double my usual numbers was clear proof the event had worked.
And my preparation didn’t stop there.
Even when you put in effort, do it with a plan and some brains.
A full month earlier I had commissioned Bebe-ttang the artist for a brand-new avatar outfit complete with special functions.
You wouldn’t see a scene like this in any other stream. This was my own brand of effort—making sure I stood out from everyone else for real.
It would have been nice if the crew members could join in, but they said they were short on cash, so that was that. Still, it wasn’t a bad deal. Once I hogged the spotlight I could just rain the overflow down on them. That was the whole point of a crew, wasn’t it? The advantage of moving together.
And I didn’t stop there either.
I locked in the concept completely.
“Hyung-nims, glad you made it today. Who am I? The undisputed number one of Rena World—Seo-a. No stream end until I put together a full diamond set.”
Minecraft was fundamentally a healing vibe, but viewer needs always came in every flavor. Pangea TV in particular had a huge contingent of the type commonly called “strong-team addicts.” So from the very beginning I set the concept in stone.
Healing? Toss that garbage to the no-name streamers next door. I was going full cutthroat.
Life was war to begin with.
Faster than anyone else I built a crafting table, then used it to craft a wooden pickaxe and a wooden axe.
I was the Twin Axes of Mangwon-dong, baby!
You might not have heard of me.
From this moment on, every tree in the area belonged to me.
Crack!
The sound effect alone was completely different from just punching with bare fists. The efficiency gap was massive too. While other streamers were still going “haha hoho,” I vacuumed up every tree in the vicinity. There weren’t many nearby to begin with, so it was a total wipe.
“Huh? Huhhh?”
“There are no trees. Where’d they all go?”
If they wanted wood now they would have to trek east or west. Which meant wasted time and wasted pathing.
Leaving the flustered streamers behind, I started digging into the ground with the wooden pickaxe. A few dirt blocks later and the stone layer appeared.
Alright. From here on it was stone. Time to upgrade the gear.
I pulled out the crafting table I had recovered and swapped the wooden pickaxe for a stone one.
“Behold. This is what we call the ‘Stone Age.’”
All that advance studying had paid off. Plenty of beginner streamers were still standing around blankly with no idea what to do. Some had completely abandoned the work and were just bonding with each other.
Not me.
I had gone beyond simple studying and walked into the server with a fully systematized early-game start plan. I was following the shortest growth route I had mapped out in advance.
Dig down while farming a bit of stone and coal along the way. That way the moment I get iron I can immediately build a furnace and have fuel ready to smelt the ore.
Even if I got unlucky and never hit coal while digging, it was fine. I had already stockpiled plenty of wood as backup fuel—less efficient, sure, but usable. That was exactly why I had monopolized the nearby trees from the start. All of it had been calculated!
Hope the kids are doing okay.
I had drilled them and made them practice so much they should at least be better than the average crowd.
No time for side thoughts. After roughly ten minutes of focused digging I finally found iron.
“Iron spotted! Finally iron!! I dedicate this glory to all of you watching!”
Three iron ore. Happy, but still not enough. Three ore was only enough for a single iron pickaxe and then it was gone.
My first stone pickaxe finally hit zero durability. I tossed it and pulled out a fresh one. Another ten-odd minutes of work.
“Iron! Iron spotted!”
This time I found a much larger vein. Mine all of it, toss it in a furnace with coal, and I would have iron ingots—the base material for every iron tool and armor piece.
You can only mine diamonds with an iron pickaxe or better, so stockpiling a ton of iron early is mandatory.
While I worked, three loaves of bread vanished just to keep the hunger bar filled. Only seven left.
Rena-ttang had explained at the start that you could buy food from the village NPCs.
Don’t go any deeper. Farm iron around this depth. If I push further and drop into a cave or run into monsters it gets dangerous. Rena Coins are expensive—I can’t burn them carelessly.
A Rena Coin sold for a full five thousand won. A precious item you couldn’t casually buy in the early game.
Plan was simple: work hard until the bread ran out, then head back to the village for more food.
And where was the money for food coming from?
Mine copper and coal, sell them to the NPCs.
A clean plan spinning through my head without a single hitch.
The sprint toward overwhelming first place had begun.