Newsletters

Playing fast and loose with grammar and punctuation.

Lux Narayan
August 31, 2022
 - 
3
 min read
Newsletters

Playing fast and loose with grammar and punctuation.

Lux Narayan
August 31, 2022
 - 
3
 min read

Salut!

We’re just about coming down off our post-launch high this month. Thank you for all your support on ProductHunt—we were thrilled to be not just one of the top products of the day, but one of the top products of the week.

Nearly 800 upvotes later, we’ve been spending the month talking to those signups and others that are interested in using StreamAlive to learn more about their livestreaming goals.

There’s a lot more work to do to make onboarding easier and to replicate a large chunk of the “Wow! How did that happen?” we get during a 15-min-demo into the self-onboarding user experience. As a result, we’ve implemented Operation Sandbox to get everyone focused and aligned on this. More details in our next newsletter.

What makes a stream alive?

Perhaps the worst possible outcome for a livestreamer is to have no one show up for their live stream. The second worst outcome would be for people to show up and not be motivated enough to engage.

StreamAlive is built around three pillars of engagement:

  1. Tracking engagement
  2. Increasing engagement
  3. Converting engagement

So, how does StreamAlive help you with that?

I’ll hand you over to Swethaa who answered this question in her most recent blog post.

keeping up with the kool kids

Aside from conversations with signups, the older members of the StreamAlive team are being un-schooled by the young interns on how the new generation communicates.

You may have noticed that the headline above was all in lowercase. Let me explain why:

After our Product Hunt launch, Migma created the following graphic for one of the carousel images in our first post on Instagram:

As a stickler for grammar, syntax, and punctuation rules in the English language, the text in the image bothered some of us (I was the first in that line). Perhaps it elicits the same reaction from you?

I’m learning, however, that Gen Z plays fast and loose with grammatical norms. In fact, brands targeting them are also forging grammar norms in favor of meme-inspired content.

(Full disclosure: I still have no idea what this post by Vitamin Water means!)

I guess, 15 to 20 years ago, Millennials may have caused panic attacks among their Gen-X and Baby Boomer co-workers when they introduced emojis and smilies into their work emails.

Today, I fear the day when I will receive an email all in lowercase, completely lacking in punctuation, with words that are not in the English dictionary. I didn’t think a graphic announcing our presence on Instagram would cause me to question everything I thought I knew about the English language.

Time to cancel my Grammarly subscription then? Not quite.

For now, we’re going to keep the language rules for most of our communication, but I’ll hand over the reins of our Instagram account to my younger colleagues to manage as they see fit.

‘Till next time,

Au Revoir,

Lux

CEO & Co-founder