"Hi Mum, I'm on the Telly"

On Saturday 13 December 2025, for ~23 minutes I was the most watched gaming Livestreamer on TikTok, globally.

Yes, me. A 43-year old first-time CEO… testing a game I helped build… on TikTok Live.

When I started streaming back in October 2024, I was a bit of a nervous wreck… and I had a fair bit of shame to be honest (oh my Piet, really - a TikToker?). “What if someone recognises me?”... etcetera.

These days, I see Live streaming as a superpower and something that I believe any product person worth their beans should do in order to succeed in this day and age. And if you’re in a start-up, it’s the most amazing way to empower yourself to 1) continually test your own product 2) get real-time player feedback, and 3) grow your community like crazy.

In case we haven’t met, I’m Pieter. I was part of the team who helped scale Miniclip SA into the giant it is today, and left after 13 incredible years to start up on my own. Whilst I was there, I had oversight of ads monetisation, marketing as well as business intelligence - a big team & a big budgets.

These days, I’m Founder & CEO of my first start-up, Half Moon Studios where I personally stream our content a few times during the week as well as every Saturday and Sunday mornings. Whilst streaming, I transform into “Uncle Bob”, my streamer alter-ego. Although admittedly, beyond the name - it’s basically an even more enthusiastic version of myself.

Anyway, where were we: Back to this Saturday… This Saturday was something else! I had the attention of nearly 30k people during my 1h50mins stream. My concurrent viewership (CCV) peaked at 4,259. On average people stayed for over 2 minutes… many were there for the whole thing. For a brief moment in time I was quite literally the biggest gaming streamer on TikTok Live.

How did we get here? Well, not by accident that’s for sure. We’ve been building towards something like this, ever since starting Half Moon Studios.

A brief history: in Q2 of 2024 we were the team responsible behind the TikTok hit game Word Quiz Live. It was originally intended to be a game with an AI Host that ran 24/7 instead of a Livestream. It used the livestream’s chat, gifts & taps as inputs. It became wildly popular with over 3m MAU after 60 days, before TikTok decided to create a policy to block (things like) it.

That was a huge bummer, but it forced us to rethink our purpose. And rather than creating AI-streams, we now build games with human streamers in mind to be able to play our games WITH as many as 256 of their viewers at the same time*.

It’s been 14 months since we started building our latest game: Ball Guys: Stumble & Fall. We launched it as a prototype after only 3 weeks of building. It was essentially launched in black and white, and we’ve been adding colour (and features!) to it ever since.

The first ever stream in October ‘24 vs. the game in December ‘25.

Over the last four months, over 50 TikTok streamers have requested access to stream our game live. It’s great content for the streamer who can play WITH their viewers, it’s great for us because players need to download our app in order to play together with the streamer.

And through our streaming we’ve been building an incredible community. This afternoon I asked our 1600-person Discord to come and test and brainstorm one of our new features… and within 5 minutes, we had 100 people on stream giving their perspectives and ideas.

Because that’s the power of building in the most public way possible. And there is literally nothing more satisfying for me than to tell the rest of the team that I’ll do a quick livestream to test some new ideas out with our community. It’s like QA & Q&A magic.

Should you know of other product people who are building in public & “on stream” like this, I’d love to meet them! Or… if you know a product person who would benefit from this, please forward this article & I will gladly personally talk to them about my experiences.

And if you just want to keep in touch, come and join our busy Discord channel. You’ll get notifications when I’m livestreaming too!

Thanks for reading!

Uncle Bob / Pieter

*On Saturday, the game broke when I got 221 concurrent players in the game at the same time - so we’ve still got some work to do on room stability.