Building the Pokercode Stream Team: Applications & our next members

In part 1 of our 'Building the Pokercode Stream Team' mini-series, I elaborated on the absolute first steps. How Q reached out to me, how we initiated the idea of our stream team, how we all together wanted to make the idea happen, that we can provide a supportive environment for young poker and steamer talent. Today, I will write about what happened next on our way towards where we stand today with our Pokercode Stream Team, a four streamers army, proudly repping the team on and off the felts in full fashion. My name is Pokercode-Johannes, CEO & Co-Founder of the Pokercode, and I am happily writing some lines about our Pokercode Stream Team here as the project leader.

Q’s Pokercode partnership spreads fast

As always, the start and jump into the Pokercode Stream Team was fast and naive. I had a call with Q, we chit-chatted back and forth, and the deal was done. Afterward, we started posing questions and experimenting with how the partnership would exactly look like, but the main and key cornerstone is that we’d just go hand in hand with Pokercode’s values: being honest, transparent, proactive, interactive, and innovative. The rest would play out itself, guided by the goal of relieving some financial pressure of Q’s shoulders and helping him sustain himself and his career as a poker player and Twitch streamer in a relaxing and supporting fashion. Soon after Quirin had shared the happy news with his 'Qummunity' early on, some dynamic evolved that we hadn’t anticipated. A new community (the DACH twitch community, frankly said) got confronted with Pokercode, the audience started getting interested in us that hadn’t before, and a new experience evolved not only for me as a project leader but also for the rest of the team and especially Fedor as our frontman and from now on regular visitor in our stream team members’ schedule. Soon after we had signed and announced the partnership with Quirin, Monika 'Moni_Poker' Lambertz and Jan 'HansiWurst' Wagner sent us their wholehearted emails, disclosing interest in us sponsoring one of Hansi’s regular community home games, as well as potentially figuring out more long term partnerships. It was funny for me to see since we had only been approached by one- or the other streamer in the last years, but there was never something truly interesting or relevant under all these applications. Now, Moni and Hansi just seemed to naturally be the perfect fits as our second and third addition to our freshly found stream team. Both very enjoyable and cool persons, ambitious poker players and streamers, with a very good connection to our project and team. There was no doubt that we wanted to extend the stream team fast, and I was very happy about the baseline threshold I had built together with the GGPN streamer management, in order to provide fair, transparent, and scalable rules and infrastructures to all new and potential stream team members.

January 2021, 3 Stream Team members and growing

Now, why had it been not of interest for us to partner with 'streamers', if we casually just say it like that, for the first months of Pokercode’s existence, and now we were on the edge of signing three streamers within the short timeframe of one month? Well, I think it is important to understand quite some points here. First of all, as I have elaborated in my 'Inside the Pokercode' historical deep dive into Pokercode’s early days, a lot was left very unclear in the first months of our community’s existence. Initially, we had only started out as a one-off 'masterclass' but were soon to evolve into a sustainable, steady and long term community project, including changing and progressing product offerings in both our verticals, 'study'. So, Pokercode itself has grown up a lot, become way more mature, and could now present a way more professional and sustainable infrastructure for any signed and affiliated partner, brand ambassador, or, as in this case, streamer. Also, extending our product verticals towards our partnership with the GGPN provided the baseline of going towards mass adoption with the Pokercode, the same counts for our, now very well accessible and affordable, study offerings. This simply had not been the case in the previous months. Also, streamers who had reached out in the first months of the Pokercode just didn’t seem like cultural and personal fits to us, whilst this is 180 degrees different with Q, Moni, and Hansi. Last but not least, the motivation for each and every one of them was a very transparent and understandable one and paired with the fact it just 'clicked' and we saw a good chance to project our vision, of providing a sustainable, professional, and trusted community environment to like-minded poker players from all over the world, just seemed to naturally fit 100%.

Learnings, progress, evolution

As you guys might know, in pretty much any instance it is always the 'first time' for the Pokercode. Thus, loads of mistakes will be made, loads of errors are being experienced that could’ve easily been avoided, a steep learning curve is happening for the project leaders in the given venture. This applied to our study offerings (being very naive about offering an 'all-in-one' MTT master class and therefore delivering a 'final' and 'absolute' product), over to progressing it (engineering takes a shit load of time, thus nothing happens on the development side as a general rule of thumb), over to our partnership with the GGPN (suddenly we start offering online poker gameplay on our own site) and the Grindhouse project in Summer 2020 (sending 7 young poker players in a house together for two months in summer 2020, wanting to produce sick content out of it just like that). So, it was obvious, that the same would happen to the Stream Team project. However, the help of the GGPN streamer management, as well as the fact that we would see ourselves as 'partners' for the stream team members in the project, and not as 'owners' of the project, makes things a lot easier, and clearly defines the roles and responsibilities of the adventure at hand.

This was part #2 of our 'stream team mini blog series'. I hope you enjoyed the read, feel free to send me feedback over to johannes@pokercode.com The day after tomorrow, this mini-series will be concluded with part #3, 'Building Pokercode Stream Team: a status quo update'.

Greetings and good luck to you from Vienna, Austria,

Johannes from the Pokercode Team

CEO & Co-Founder

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