Over on my Medium, I published “That Summer I Played Baseball Card QVC Host,” a breakdown of how I went from zero to content creator and what I learned from my experience hosting a live-shopping channel.
If you track e-commerce like I do, you’ve been reading that this format is coming to the U.S. and that it’s going to demand direct-to-consumer brands “get with it” quick. That’s why this experience was so important for me—nothing like rolling your sleeves up and doing the work to understand a unique format like this.
In the article, I share a brief walkthrough of how I decided on a market and platform, what I had to do to get the tech and hardware operational, and a few key observations.
I also offer this (free!) recommendation for the live-stream platforms. There’s a great opportunity to seize a unique value prop, a way to differentiate your platform and drive creator adoption: solve the post-stream logistics bottleneck.
Breaks had a few different forms and formats but it was fairly common to finish a stream and be left with hundreds of cards to sort by team (so the owners of the Atlanta Braves team ticket would receive all of the Braves cards, and so on and so forth).
I’d do this by bringing the stacks of cards to my living room and starting 30 different stacks on a coffee table while I half-watched a show or movie. Not so bad — but if I didn’t do it that same day and fell behind, it quickly snowballed into a real pain. I estimate post-stream handling and shipping took an average of 2 hours per stream. (And this really hurts your “is this worth it?” calculation.)Andrew Chapin’s Medium
This was easily my greatest pain point as a creator. Solve that for the creators and I’d bet you’ll see a lot of other platforms empty out quick.