Chapter 1 of 5
What Gleem actually does for your stream
Most streamers reach the same wall. Chat is friendly, the regulars show up, and somewhere in the middle of the stream somebody types "can you do the thing you did last week?" — and it gets lost eight messages later. Gleem exists for that moment. It turns the things you are happy to do on stream into a short menu viewers can pick from, and puts the picks in a queue you can actually work through.
There are three parts, and they only make sense together.
Treats are the menu
A Treat is one thing you will do: read a message in a silly voice, play a round as a specific character, do a ten-second drum fill, thank someone by name. You group Treats into categories, give each one a price, and that is your menu.
The menu is the whole product, and it is worth taking seriously. A good one is short, specific, and made of things you would be happy to do on your worst day. A bad one is long, vague, and full of things you agreed to at two in the morning. "Do a request" is a bad Treat. "Play one song on the keyboard, your pick" is a good one.
You do not have to invent it from scratch. Gleem ships preset menus built for different kinds of stream — pick one that is close, then rename, reprice and delete until it sounds like you. Everything a preset creates is an ordinary Treat afterwards, so there is nothing to undo later.
Treats can also ask a question. If the Treat is "shout out a friend", it can prompt for the friend's name, and the answer arrives attached to the request — so you are not scrolling back through chat trying to find it.
The queue is the work
When a viewer picks a Treat, it becomes a request in your queue. The queue is deliberately boring: a list, in order, with a name, what they asked for, and whatever they typed. You start one, you finish it, you move on.
You open the queue when you are ready to take requests and close it when you are not. A closed queue is not a broken queue — viewers can still see your menu, they just cannot add to the list. Being able to say "the queue is closed for tonight" without apologising is most of what makes this sustainable.
If something goes wrong — you cannot do it, you misread it, the request was rude — you refund it. The viewer gets their money back and the request leaves your list. This matters more than it sounds: knowing you can always hand something back is what lets you accept requests without anxiety.
The panel is where viewers meet it
Your menu lives in two places. There is your Gleem page, which is a normal web page you can link anywhere, and there is the Twitch panel, which puts the same menu inside the Twitch player where your viewers already are.
The panel matters because of how far people will travel. A viewer who is enjoying your stream will click something under the video. Far fewer will open a new tab, find your page, and come back. If you only do one thing after building your menu, put it on the panel.
There is also an overlay — a browser source for OBS that shows the current queue on stream. It is optional, and it is the single best advertisement for the whole system, because it makes the queue visible to people who have not used it yet. Somebody sees three names on screen and understands the idea instantly.
What viewers actually spend
Viewers pay with one of two things: Gems, and Trigger Tickets.
Gems are the currency. Trigger Tickets are free passes you hand out — you set the rules for how viewers earn them, typically through Twitch channel points. Tickets exist so that someone who has never spent a euro can still take part, which is both fairer and, in practice, how most people try the system for the first time.
Both are covered properly in Gems, Trigger Tickets and what viewers pay with. For now the only thing worth knowing is that you will want both: gems for people who want to support you, tickets for everybody else.
Where to start
In order, and none of these take long:
- Build a menu of five Treats. Not fifteen. Five things you are certain you can do on a tired Tuesday.
- Open the queue for one stream and see what people pick. It is almost never what you expect.
- Put it on your Twitch panel so viewers can find it without leaving.
- Adjust the prices after a week, once you know which Treats people actually want.
The next article walks through building that first menu, including how to pick prices when you have no idea what anything is worth.