Build your first Treats menu

The hardest part of setting up Gleem is not the software. It is deciding what you are actually willing to do, at 11pm on a Wednesday, for the fourteenth time that night, cheerfully.

That is the real question a Treats menu answers. Everything below is in service of getting an honest answer to it.

Start from a preset, then cut

Open your Treats page and browse the presets. They are menus built for different kinds of stream — pick the one closest to yours and apply it.

Then delete most of it.

This sounds wasteful and it is the most useful thing you will do. A preset is a list of ideas, not a recommendation. Going through it and thinking "no, not that one" about eleven things is how you find the four you actually want. It is much faster than staring at an empty page.

Everything a preset creates is an ordinary category and an ordinary Treat afterwards. Rename them, reprice them, delete them. Nothing is locked.

Five is the right number to start with

A long menu looks generous and performs badly. Viewers scan it, fail to choose, and do nothing. Five options is enough to feel like a choice and few enough to read.

Pick five things that are all true:

• You can do it in under two minutes. Anything longer stops being a request and starts being a segment.
• You can do it badly and it still works. If it only lands when you are on form, it will disappoint someone on a bad night.
• It does not need preparation. A Treat that requires you to alt-tab, load something, or find a file will quietly stop being fun by the third one.
• You would do it for free for a regular. If the answer is no, the price is not the problem — the Treat is.
• It is specific. "Do a voice" is a negotiation. "Read the next chat message as a pirate" is a Treat.

Write them as instructions, not invitations

The name of a Treat is a contract. "Song request" invites an argument about what counts. "Play one song on guitar, viewer picks from my list" does not.

Be specific about the limits in the name or the description, because the description is where a viewer looks when they are deciding whether to spend something. Limits are not unfriendly. They are the thing that lets you say yes quickly.

Ask a question when you need an answer

A Treat can prompt the viewer for text. Turn this on whenever the request is incomplete without information from them: a name to shout out, a song to play, a word to work into the next sentence.

Three things worth setting:

• The label is the question you are asking. "Whose name?" is better than "Text".
• The placeholder is an example answer. It does more work than the label does — people copy the shape of what they see.
• Optional or required. Required means the request cannot be submitted empty, which is right when the answer is the request. Leave it optional when it is a nice extra.

The answer arrives attached to the request in your queue, so you are reading it from your dashboard rather than hunting through chat.

Pricing, when you have no idea

You will not get this right first time, and it does not matter, because prices are trivial to change.

A workable starting shape:

• One cheap Treat that is the obvious first thing anyone tries. This is the most important one on the menu. It is how people discover that any of this works.
• Two or three middle Treats at roughly three times the cheap one. This is where most of the activity will end up.
• One expensive Treat that takes real effort. Most people will not buy it. It is not there to sell — it is there to make the middle look reasonable.

Set Trigger Ticket pricing too. Tickets are the free route, usually earned through Twitch channel points, and they are how a viewer who has never spent money tries the system for the first time. A menu where everything costs gems gets used by a handful of people. A menu where the cheap tier accepts tickets gets used by the channel.

Then leave it alone for a week and look at what people actually picked. That number will tell you more than any amount of deliberation beforehand.

Hide rather than delete

Treats and whole categories can be switched off. A hidden Treat keeps its settings and its history and simply stops appearing to viewers.

Use this constantly. Seasonal things, things that only work in certain games, things you are not in the mood for tonight — switch them off rather than rebuilding them later. Both the Treats page and each category page let you toggle individual Treats, so tidying up before a stream takes seconds.

What good looks like after a week

You should be able to answer these:

• Which Treat was picked most? Consider making it cheaper, not more expensive — you want more of the thing people want.
• Which Treat was never picked? Either its name is unclear, or nobody wants it. Rename it once; if that does not work, hide it.
• Did anything make you wince when it came in? Change it or remove it. A Treat you resent is a slow leak.

Next: how the queue behaves live, and what to do when a request arrives that you cannot fulfil.