June 2, 2026
If you’ve spent any time in gaming spaces online lately, you’ve probably come across Sunny (@sunnysirl, twitch.tv/sunnys). In just three years, she went from learning what Twitch was to signing with 100 Thieves.
As part of Raidiant’s Game Changers Collective Tactical Tuesday series, Sunny sat down to talk about how she actually got there.
Start where you are, not where you think you should be
Sunny didn’t come into content creation with a pre-made, well-thought-out strategy. She grew up a competitive figure skater with essentially no social media presence, then downloaded Twitter and started talking to people.
I didn’t really have a tactic to it. I was just posting whatever I wanted on Twitter, making friends, and then I would stream and sometimes my friends would come into my chat. That’s pretty much it.
She started streaming Rainbow Six Siege and Valorant every single day during her first year of university, figuring out each platform one at a time as her audience grew. Twitter first, then Instagram, then TikTok, now YouTube. Just showing up consistently and adjusting as she went. The Twitch partnership came in under a year.
I started realizing I could make some sort of living off of this. That’s when I was like, okay, what if I took a gap year and see how far it takes me.
Forget discoverability, build omnipresence instead
One of the most important things Sunny said (and one that many new creators miss) is that Twitch offers no discoverability for smaller streamers. The platform won’t push you to new audiences. So if you’re only streaming and hoping people find you, they won’t. Her answer to that? Be everywhere, all the time.
You should be so consistent on all of your socials that people can’t avoid you even if they try. A TikTok a day, a Reel a day, an Instagram story, posting on Twitch. Just being everywhere is the most important thing, if somebody sees you, you need to be the one creator being shown so much because of how much you’re posting that people can’t avoid you.
If she were starting today, she’d go straight to TikTok and Reels as the priority. Short-form is where the reach is. But she also flagged that YouTube is specifically one of the best platforms for women creators to grow on.
I think it’s so important for girls to put ourselves out there on YouTube, because on other platforms it can be kind of heavily male-saturated. When I checked my analytics and talked to other creators about it, YouTube is the best platform for girls to grow on. Spamming your stuff on Shorts is super important.
One platform at a time if you need to, but get on short-form first. And don’t overthink when you post.
I’ve had videos bang that I posted at 2 a.m. There’s no perfect time. Think about it, do you remember all the times you picked up your phone throughout the day? No. People are on their phones constantly. Just post throughout the day and that’s it.
The ‘best time to post on Instagram is Sunday morning’ type of advice? She’s not buying it, and neither should you.
On networking: just make friends
Sunny doesn’t like the word networking, and honestly, her reasoning behind that is pretty solid.
You should never be outwardly quote-unquote networking. These are just people, you should be trying to make friends. A lot of people almost have this thing where they don’t want to reply to everybody or interact with everybody. But you have to talk to people. You yourself are your brand.
And she had a simple method: reply to everyone, show up everywhere, don’t filter who’s worth your time. She just genuinely wanted to make friends, and the connections followed. For in-person events, the same applies. Show up even when it’s uncomfortable.
I was so shy my first year of streaming, but I still showed up to every single event. Just putting yourself out there is going to put you above so many other people, there is this thing in the industry where everyone keeps to themselves, but people aren’t going to know you unless you put yourself out there for them to know.
And for jobs and opportunities? X (Twitter) is the industry’s LinkedIn. People post openings all the time. Follow the people working in the roles you want. Reply to their tweets. Cold DM with an idea already in hand.
If you see somebody working in your dream job, follow them. We’re all nerds at the end of the day. People post job openings all the time on X, I literally just saw one for FlyQuest and Team Liquid recently for a marketing internship.
The same logic applies to collabs. Don’t slide into someone’s DMs empty-handed; go in with a concrete idea so the only decision they have to make is yes or no.
When I’m cold DMing people for a collab, I make sure I already have a stream idea or a plan. I’ll say: ‘I’ve been seeing your streams, I really love them, I had an idea where we could do this, would you be down?’ If you give them an idea already, all they have to do is agree or disagree. Or leave you on read, and that’s fine too.
The arrival of 100 Thieves
Sunny signed with 100 Thieves in June 2024. The org didn’t create her career (she’d already built it), but it removed much of the friction that was slowing her down.
I think a lot of people don’t know how tedious content can be. There’s thinking of ideas, finding ways to pay for it, reaching out to other creators, seeing when they’re free, finding sponsors. 100 Thieves helped me get through that process. Now it’s not just me doing it all by myself, they have a whole team helping me.
Before the signing, she was handling everything herself: checking emails every morning, negotiating sponsorship deals solo, building her rate card from scratch. Her advice on rates: the industry standard is roughly $1 per average viewer per hour of content, but she was quick to push back on that for the women in the room.
The streaming industry right now has a lot of investment. A lot of people are trying to get into it. I would definitely encourage all the girls here to raise your rates a little more.
Getting signed wasn’t something she actively chased either. It came from visibility: being on socials constantly, showing up in collabs on other people’s streams, being findable. That’s also how the sponsorships came in before the org: they reached out to her.
The authenticity trap
There’s a version of ‘building your brand’ that actually works against you, and Sunny walked straight into it: when sponsorships started coming in and her profile grew, she instinctively pulled back (posting less freely, being more calculated, trying to seem more ‘PR’). It felt like the right move. But it wasn’t.
I thought maybe I need to change the way I’m appearing online a little bit, be a little more PR, post when I need to post, don’t just post whenever I want. And I hit a really big roadblock. I didn’t realize it until later where I was like, I’m not making as many friends as I want, I’m not doing as many cool things as I want. It’s because I was limiting myself without even realizing it.
Streaming is different from other industries where you can engineer a persona and maintain it. It’s too raw, too live, too long-form for that.
You are your brand. People can so easily see through it when you’re not being yourself or when you’re a little off one day. Never try to look cool for a camera. Just be yourself. And people will love that so much more.
The common mistake she sees among new creators is the same: trying to lock down an image before they’ve even figured out who they are on camera.
Don’t try to stick to a certain image or a certain type of branding when it’s so much stronger if you’re just your own brand.
Being a woman online: it does get harder before it gets easier
When asked whether the online hostility she experienced got worse as she grew, she didn’t hesitate to answer honestly.
I would not want to scare anyone, but I would definitely say it did get worse. The more people that you have looking at you, there’s also going to be more people that dislike you. We’re in a time period where people love posting clips on TikTok without context (this is just how people make their livings nowadays). It definitely got worse.
Her approach to managing it: one fully offline day a week, with friends who have nothing to do with the industry.
On that off day, I hang out with my friends who aren’t in streaming, some of them don’t even do social media. I disconnect, I ground myself, I remember who I am. Because the more you scroll, the more you read, it will get in your head. And that’s completely fine, because that’s human. But you can’t let that take over your brain.
The numbers going up and down is part of it too. She’s been there. Her advice: stop watching the tracker the second your stream ends.
I’ve exposure-therapied myself to doing things I know will get lower viewers, just doing it anyway, because I used to be so scared of dropping my average. If I have trust in my community, I’m going to do what I like, and the people who are here for me will come anyway. Don’t stress about numbers. It’s going to fluctuate whether you do everything right or everything wrong.
The one thing
At the end of the session, Valerie asked Sunny for one solid piece of advice for anyone wanting to start that same night:
I believe in myself so deeply that despite anything happening to me, despite whatever obstacle my personal life meets, I’m going to be exactly where I’m supposed to be. I’m going to believe in myself to reach that point, because I’m the only person in my life who can. Everyone in the streaming industry should view it the same way.
And then, predictably, she added just one more thing:
Just be cringe. Embrace it.