Welcome to Streamers on the Rise, where we find streamers who are growing their channels, content, and audiences in extraordinary ways. Each week we’ll talk with a creator about what goes into livestreaming–both on and off camera.
Cinna has been a McDonald’s staffer, a murder scene cleaner, and an aerospace engineer-in-training.
Now, she’s a full-time Twitch streamer.
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She never thought streaming would be a career for her. She actually didn’t know about streaming at all until college. At the time, she was working two jobs to pay her way through her aerospace engineering program, and was playing video games as a hobby. She’d been raised by her dad, and he was “a big video game guy,” she says, which fostered a love of gaming in her. When she stumbled on Twitch, something about it caught her interest.
“I just was like, ‘Hmm, streaming seems fun and I never really shut up, so I might as well just try it,'” she laughs. “I say I slipped and fell into it because I really did. I just had zero intention of ever being a big streamer. I was going to school for engineering, and we all see how that worked out. I’m a degenerate now, but I love being a degenerate, so it’s fine.”
She may have had zero intention of becoming a streamer, but eventually, she reached a juncture where she had to pick between her college program and streaming. By that time, she’d established a presence on YouTube as well as Twitch, and was sitting at about 500 concurrent viewers during streams. She’d also hit a point she thinks is vital for every streamer considering full-time: her content had been paying her bills consistently for six months.
She looked at her options, and decided to make the leap.
Now, two years later, she’s got more than 150,000 followers on Twitch, and has a goal to hit an average of 4,000 concurrent viewers by the end of this year. She’s set up shop in Austin, which is a growing hub for content creation of every kind, and recently moved into a new house with a bigger, better recording room and space to host other streamers for events like barbecues and IRL streams. She also just signed with Loaded.
“We’ve been closely observing Cinna and are thrilled to join forces with her to nurture her creator business,” Brandon Freytag, Loaded’s co-founder and chief of creator monetization, tells Tubefilter. “With her vibrant and dynamic personality and her passion for gaming, Cinna consistently brings joy, whether she’s diving into a game or socializing with fellow creators. We’re excited to support her in further developing her content, expanding her community, and pursuing projects that ignite her passion.”
Check out our chat with Cinna below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tubefilter: Very nice to meet you! I know you’ve seen some interesting growth on your channel, and you just signed with Loaded, so I wanted to catch up with you for Streamers on the Rise.
Cinna: Oh, thank you. I feel like I’m just getting lucky across the board. That’s how it feels half the time.
Tubefilter: I don’t know about luck. There’s a lot of hard work going into it.
Cinna: I’ve always said that I think that streaming is 70% hard work and I think it’s 30% luck.
Tubefilter: We’re going slightly out of order here, but one of the big things that a lot of SOTR interviewees have discussed with me is the difficulty of Twitch’s discoverability. Maybe there is an element of luck to growth there, when it comes to your channel being shown to people.
Cinna: Yes. Basically, I’ve always told people, you should always try to outsource to other platforms to grow. Or if you want to grow on Twitch, I know a lot of streamers that treat networking, they call it “leeching” in Twitch terms, but networking is a real thing. I don’t think that you can grow on Twitch if you do not network. If you do, you probably are the luckiest person in the world, because otherwise, you have to meet people. I did it from the very beginning, and I think I just learned it from my old jobs to talk to people and know that connections matter. Slowly as I grew, I would interact with people in my bracket, I guess, of viewership. Then you eventually meet bigger and bigger people that introduce you to bigger and bigger audiences. That’s just how you grow. It’s just the name of the game.
Tubefilter: Let’s back up a little bit. For anybody who’s reading this, they’re not familiar with you, give me a little bit of background about you. I know you’re from Virginia, but tell me a little bit about you before you got on Twitch.
Cinna: I grew up in Virginia. I didn’t come from a wealthy background by any means, so I never really even watched Twitch because I was always working. I worked two jobs in high school, always doing stuff. I just watched YouTube videos occasionally and that’s it. I love to play video games because I grew up with my dad raising us. He was a big video game guy, so it was great. Then when I went into college, I was working to pay through college and I just was like, “Hmm, streaming seems fun and I never really shut up, so I might as well just try it.”
I say I slipped and fell into it because I really did. I just had zero intention of ever being a big streamer. I was going to school for engineering, and we all see how that worked out. I’m a degenerate now, but I love being a degenerate, so it’s fine.
Tubefilter: What did you want to go into for engineering?
Cinna: Aerospace engineering.
Tubefilter: Oh, cool. That’s very cool.
Cinna: That was not the reaction I thought you were going to give. I thought you were going to say, “Wow, you do not strike me as an aerospace engineer.” That’s what I normally hear.
Tubefilter: People suck, I don’t know what to tell you.
Cinna: No, no, listen, I was meeting aerospace engineers in college and I was like, “Oh, you guys are different than me. I am not that professional.” I ended up not doing engineering because I ended up coming to a crossroads where I had failed a class and I basically had to pick streaming or this. At the time, a lot of people don’t know, I was originally an anime YouTuber, a Dragon Ball YouTuber, and I had interacted with three of my friends. They’re called The Three Idiots on YouTube, but they’re the biggest Dragon Ball YouTubers. They actually were like, “Oh, we should do content together.” I left to do YouTube. That was great. I was loving it. That’s how I started full-time streaming
Tubefilter: Very cool. Was that– Oh, sorry, I interrupted.
Cinna: Oh, no, I was just going to say I remember it was the biggest regret ever, though, when I switched. I definitely thought, I was like, “This is the dumbest thing ever and I should not be leaving my job, my career,” but worked out.
Tubefilter: What were you working at the time? I know you were working to put yourself through college.
Cinna: I’ve worked so many jobs in my life. Serving McDonald’s was my first ever job. At that time, though, I had been at a restoration company for three years, which, I don’t know if you’re familiar with restoration, but it’s, if your home gets destroyed in a fire, if there’s mold. We even did murder scene cleanup.
Tubefilter: Oh, wild.
Cinna: Yes, we dealt with a lot of domestic violence cases too, like murder-suicide, and those things are crazy. That’s the work that I was doing before streaming, I’ve always loved because it made a difference in people’s lives, which is really nice. Then I left it to play video games, like, come on.
Tubefilter: The murder scene clean-up to the aerospace engineer to the streamer job progression is very interesting.
Cinna: Yes, it’s really not a normal pipeline. Definitely not.
Tubefilter: No, but it is interesting.
Cinna: Yes, I like it because I feel like when I meet a lot of streamers, they don’t have a lot of job experience. I feel like my job experience has made me at least feel like I understand my finances and everything a little bit better when I’m coming into a job like this where I feel like a lot of people don’t have that background, so it helped me get a handle on things when I got thrown in the deep end a little bit more.
Tubefilter: You started streaming when you were in college. By the time you had to make this decision to go full-time, what was your audience like in terms of size?
Cinna: See, when I left, I was at 500 viewers. What I made sure I did, and it’s what I think every streamer should do, is make sure that the money that you’re making is enough to pay the bills, and it’s consistent over the course of at least six months. At the time, that was what I did, between YouTube and Twitch. My size is okay, but the money was decent enough where I can support myself without breaking the bank and having to sit there and beg for subs or anything.
Tubefilter: So you go full-time, you think it’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made.
Cinna: Yes.
Tubefilter: That’s difficult creatively. A lot of pressure. How did that go?
Cinna: Well, my old PC in Virginia, actually, I have to find it, there is a video on that PC. I still have it. It’s of me talking to myself. A journal entry, basically, because my friend at the time, Rhymestyle, a close friend of mine, he had told me that he remembers when he left his job and how important it was in his career. He wanted me to take a video of how I felt. I think it’s a video of me crying, saying that this was the worst mistake I’m making. I felt like I was going to regret it, but I was hoping that in a year, it would make a difference, and I would look back on this and feel better.
It’s probably a great video now, because it’s right. I definitely look back on it and I’m very happy I did. As far as streaming, I think I just really threw myself into streaming. I was like, “Okay, if I’m going to go full-time, then it’s all or nothing. I need to go balls to the wall and work my hardest,” so I did. Eventually, I ended up moving to Austin because Austin is really good for streaming and stuff.
Tubefilter: Okay. Let me go back to your chronological timeline here. You go full-time, you go completely all in on it. What was your streaming schedule like? What year was this?
Cinna: 2021, maybe. It was late 2021 into 2022 was the first year. Yes, 2022. I just went live. I was just streaming whenever. There was no schedule. It was just like, “Hey, this evening, we’re going to play games with friends,” and back then I was doing just gaming and then cool stuff in my room. Then we switched and now we can do IRLs. There’s so many more things we can do, but back then, it was just whatever.
Even now I would arguably say my schedule is still like, when I want to go live, I’ll go live. Most of the time I’m live early afternoons now, so it’s a little bit more regulated than it was. I love streaming. I went through a phase briefly recently where I was like, “Man, I’m just really stressed out,” but I’ve always maintained the stance that I love streaming, but it’s because when you come from a background of working a regular job, it makes you appreciate the fact that you have control of your own schedule because before I didn’t have that.
Tubefilter: Yes, huge.
Cinna: Now I’m like, “Woohoo!”
Tubefilter: Is there a particular reason why you chose late afternoon, or is it just that’s what works best for you?
Cinna: I just fell into it. I just like being live early afternoons because I don’t like structuring my early part of my day on the fact that I have something to do later that night. If I’m home, I might as well stream.
Tubefilter: Interesting. Yes, that’s a question that I’ve been really curious about, because at least on YouTube, there’s almost a superstition of like, if you upload on Sunday at 3 AM exactly, your video will take off. There’s charts and different things for the optimal time to post, the optimal time to do this, so I was curious if it was a particular reason that it worked better for you.
Cinna: No, I feel Twitch is really so different than YouTube in that I don’t think there’s a lot of those meta superstitions or anything. I think the only thing that maybe I could think about during the day is if there’s– I’m obviously very wrapped up in a lot of the Austin streamer space, and there’s a big Austin streamer event going on, it might not be the best for viewership during that time.
For the most part, I’d say I have a solid, decent amount of viewers when there’s stuff going on, so I don’t really have to think about that too much anymore versus maybe when I first moved, I was worried about it. I just like streaming early.
Tubefilter: You say Austin is a really big streamer city. What does that entail in terms of you being able to network? Do you go to events a lot? Do you meet up with other streamers? Is there just a big concentration of streamers in Austin?
Cinna: Ooh, this is a tricky question because I feel like when streamers move to Austin, they assume, “Okay, move to Austin, go to streamer event, equals meet Mizkif, big views,” right? Versus I just don’t think that that’s how it really works. I met most of these people because I live with ExtraEmily, and at the time, Emily was signing to OTK. We happened to have a party at our house in which Miz and them showed up, and they briefly knew who I was.
I feel like most people in Austin, we don’t go to events. I feel like we don’t go to events. We all just hang out as friends, and then over time…I have people who are streamers smaller than me that I’ve just met through them happen to be invited to a dinner or something and then we just become friends, but there’s no real event that I’ve gone to where I felt like I was networking.
It’s always just been making friends more naturally, which honestly I prefer because I am not a social…What is the term? Butterfly? I’m not a good social butterfly when it comes to events because I don’t want to bother people, so I’m like, “Well, I just won’t talk to them.” This is a way better way to go about it.
Tubefilter: Yes, definitely. Was there a point where you could relax and be like, “Okay, I left college, but it’s fine. This is working out for me.”?
Cinna: No.
Tubefilter: Even now?
Cinna: I don’t feel that way now. That’s bad. That’s bad that I don’t feel that way, because I think that a lot of people would look at me as a relatively well-established streamer. I don’t see it that way. To me, this can go away in the blink of an eye. I’m like, “Okay, nothing is stable, nothing is good.” I’m never relaxed. I think that if you talk to most streamers in the industry, I think that almost every streamer, unless they’re millionaires, will tell you the exact same thing because there is always a situation in which you know that your platform can go away and you know that you could fall off, you can do something wrong. I think every streamer is constantly, even if they hit an achievement, looking for the next step.
A good example of this is when I moved, my end-of-the-year goal was I wanted to be, at a minimum, max viewers of a thousand every stream. I wanted a max viewers of a thousand. By the end of the year, I had 3K, which was great. It’s wonderful, but definitely, when I was sitting at 3K in December, I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, I hit my goal. Whew, weight off my shoulders. I’m good to go.” Instead, my brain goes, “Okay, what do we need to do to make sure that this year is a better year than last year?” I think every streamer will tell you that’s how the industry makes you think.
Tubefilter: I feel like that is a smart approach to things.
Cinna: Yes, but it’s just imposter syndrome.
Tubefilter: True. That’s not necessarily a great thing. You did mention how you have financial literacy from your previous jobs, which is something that I really worry about a lot of creators with back taxes and stuff like that. That’s a huge stressor, especially around this time of year when I would just watch creators really struggle.
Cinna: Listen, don’t also confuse my financial literacy with taxes. Taxes will still be my bane of existence. I hate it so much. It’s stuff like that where I’m like, “Okay.” I don’t even think in terms of my career, I’m always thinking financially. I think more so I’m almost always thinking like, “Okay, I just don’t want to let anyone down.” I feel like most creators are like, “All right, if last year was great, next year needs to be better.”
You will never feel like you can’t do it because if you start getting comfortable and then you go, “Oh, last year was good. I don’t need to improve,” then you’re letting yourself down because people want to see what’s big and what’s the next thing. That’s just how I feel like most creators think, especially on Twitch.
Tubefilter: If somebody tunes in to one of your streams now, what can they expect to see?
Cinna: Me probably yelling. Me yelling at something. Me being bad at a game or me interacting with the real world, which is probably a spectacle in itself. I just have horrible social anxiety, so it just does not work good. I feel like that’s what I like about my stream is, I feel like a lot of people watch me for me versus, they don’t really come for me playing a certain game or anything.
It feels a little more freeing to be able to say that they can just see me being an idiot. If people want to see me being an idiot, well, then here I am–or me having friends over and my friends are being idiots. It’s a nice, good, relatable, I feel like, stream, versus nobody’s going to click on me and expect me to be good at Valorant. If they do, they are going to be severely let down.
Tubefilter: I do feel like, at least for me, I like watching streamers whose skill levels and games are closer to mine. There’s some fun in watching and learning from elite pros, but I’m never going to be there. The relatability is very cool.
Cinna: I’ve always said, if you’re going to game on Twitch, you’re either really bad or you’re really good, and in between no one cares.
Tubefilter: I think that’s fair. They’re both equally appealing to audiences.
Cinna: I’m so bad at games that people will either hate-watch me if they play them, or they laugh because they know they’re not going to do as good. If I was just like, “Oh, I’m doing okay.” No one would watch the game. They would go, “Okay, we don’t care.”
Tubefilter: To wrap up, what’s your trajectory, especially now that you’re signed with Loaded, over the next year or so? Do you have any plans, any goals? Where do you see yourself growing to?
Cinna: I mean, I set a number goal. I would like to be at an average of 4K. 3.5K to 4K would be really nice, because right now, if I play a game, it’s a little bit less. I would say that’s a good sitting point. If I’m live, talking in my room, that’s a good point. Also, I don’t like to think of it that way too, because I don’t like to look at my viewership numbers. I also do like monetary value-wise. I got thrown in the deep end last year. I would say I barely had a six-figure year. That’d be pretty cool. You know what I mean? I think I had a little bit over a six-figure, but not a crazy one. That’d be pretty cool to do this year.
I talked to Loaded, I want to be able to do fun friend hangouts that are streamed in Austin too because I feel like nobody really does them anymore. Austin watchers love it. They love it, but nobody does it. Just things like that, that are just getting people more together. I feel like some streamers want to do shows. I don’t think I’m a show person. I also still want to be able to bring people together in a fun way on stream. I think you can do that without it being on a show. That would be really nice to do too. I think I want to do a summer barbecue one at my house since I moved.
We’re going to do IRL streams here, which is really cool, and just more stuff like that I could never do because I was streaming it in my bedroom before, and now I’ve got a great team that actually cares that I do well. Then I’ve got a new house and a new stream room. A bunch of new things with new opportunities, which is great. I know so many streamers in Austin, so to not have them all get together is just insane. It’s crazy.
