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Candelas’ recipe for a successful Twitch channel: “We are a very viral family” | Technique


Everything takes place in the kitchen of a real restaurant in Guadalix de la Sierra, a town north of Madrid. The cook, Thomas Candelas, 76, walks by the stove and complains: “I’m running around and around and you’ve got nothing to do, I’ve got two ovens, seven burners, I’m chopping and you touch your balls and I come running and no matter how much I want to run I don’t get there and over That, you get in the way, how much you used to do everything,” he says. The restaurant has started serving real customers who are waiting on their tables and Thomas is crying like a real chef.

However, there is a fundamental difference. His speech is being watched live by over two thousand people on the Twitch channel Arroz y Desgracias. “Don Thomas represents me in action,” one viewer responded in a Twitch chat, a platform best known for live video game broadcasts but whose variety show is growing, such as the IRL category (“Real Life,” for short in English.). In this way, Arroz y Desgracias is one of the four channels nominated for the Esland Awards, the main channels of the Hispanic community on Twitch, which are awarded on Sundays in Mexico.

Aarón Candelas looks at the screen in the small studio of Twitch streamer Arroz y Desgracias.
Aarón Candelas looks at the screen in the small studio of Twitch streamer Arroz y Desgracias. Santi Burgess

Candelas began in full lockdown, in the summer of 2020. Its initial goal was to show real service in a restaurant. But the product evolved and adapted as best it could: “In the beginning it was very dependent on my dad and me and the kitchen,” says Aaron Candelas, 26, Thomas’s son, assistant, and brainstem through the entire process. “But since Ainara [novia de Aarón] Sitting down, we begin to explore the topic of the family. Arroz y Desgracias started as a kitchen and today it is a family reality show. We are the most disorganized family, but we are also a normal family,” he adds.

Together with Aaron, Tomás and Aynara Pérez, mother Isabel González, who is in charge of the dining room of the restaurant and explains to customers who do not know what is happening in the kitchen, what are those cries (the kitchen is open to the dining room): “People who do not know that We have a channel on Twitch that they quickly figure out.” Customers are gradually moving from unsuspecting diners to the channel audience: “They book from Catalonia, from Ibiza, some motorcyclists for 18 people. A delegation from the European Community came to see if what we were doing was right,” says Thomas.

Aaron knows that the combination of the profiles in the family and his father’s natural charisma and cooking gives him an edge. Aaron and Ainara have their own Twitch channels, and focus on their video games. But so far they haven’t been able to stand out and that was thanks to the restaurant. “It’s 50% natural talent and 50% good prospecting,” says Aaron. “No matter how hard I try, it’s something I was born with. It just so happens that my dad is super, communicative very well, charismatic, and that it’s an exaggeration that you guys are petty, that we have a bad mouth, that the family is so viral and the profiles we’ve helped because I know Something about me, but Ainara also had a hand in what happens behind the camera,” he adds.

Tomás is an internet platform star who barely knows how to pronounce her name. I didn’t even know it existed recently. He still believes that he lives in a simulation: “They lie to me, they lie to me all the time. Now they tell me that 240 million have seen us, where did the 240 million come from?” These are the views of the Arroz y Desgracias account on TikTok, which has 710,000 followers. They also have large accounts on Instagram (119,000) and YouTube (65,000), but they all feed on Twitch streams. The channel is different content on Twitch and is further evidence of the slow but constant growth of the platform in the Spanish scene, which is approaching the type of entertainment offered by television, with the addition of nature and the constant presence of chatting with the spectators: “The first to be surprised is me. This young man passes us on the right, Without permission,” says Thomas.

Thomas is not only afraid of perceptions. He doesn’t quite understand what it’s about: “Aaron has some revolutionary ideas that his girlfriend supports and his mother funded, and the ideas they’re screwing up are me. But I don’t care, because I’m happy,” he says. Thomas knows the entertainment industry inside out. In addition to restaurants, throughout his working life he has had a school and a modeling agency. He directed the opening of the La Vaguada shopping center, working with then-mayor Tierno Galván. He has worked on TV with Pepe Navarro and Jesus Hermida. His first big hit was his talk about why restaurants don’t serve customers after hours. appeared in various media.

Aaron studied video game design and worked in the networking sector before seeing he had the best material at home: “If you want to see this on Twitch, there’s nowhere else to do it, this is the goose that lays the golden egg at the moment we have.” Harun divides the years of rice and calamities into seasons. Now they are three. “I treat it like an entertainment product,” he says. Despite his culinary origins, he immediately saw that family disputes and fights raised the counter: “People want to see chaos, they want to see the world burn. A little house on the prairie won’t work. Now if my dad burns something and throws a frying pan on the floor, bubble: one thousand viewers Up.” That pearl was something he couldn’t miss. “Kitchen room professionals Live … damned chaos”, is his autobiography on the networks.

Beginnings with zero spectators

It wasn’t always easy. In complete confinement, Aaron was considering options should the restaurant close again. This is where the funding that allowed him to continue at the university came from. His first idea was to sell at home and thanks to the channel, customers can learn how to make their own menu. But they were unable to close shop again. So, in August 2020, he thought: “Why don’t we test the camera in the middle of a service.” “I didn’t give him much choice at first,” he admits.

The first months were difficult. Aaron conducted a market study to determine which platform was the best. The first challenge was the name: until the appearance of the latter, he threw terrible options: “The first salad, the second divorce”, “Cooking family members”, “How to lose a family in two steps.” By name, he chose Twitch, but there were three-hour services where there weren’t any viewers.

Those who watch Twitch may think that large audiences are common, but this is not true. There is hardly an audience for most of the channels. “We saw ourselves and that’s it, it’s very complicated,” says the young man at the time. Within a few months, cooking content creator Carmenog sent them her audience at the end of the stream (this is what Twitch is known as “raid”). “This is how we were able to hit the first milestone on Twitch: going live and getting at least one person,” he recalls.

“Then we got to the point where I sat down and made the first good decision: I’m going to treat Arroz y Desgracias as if it were a video game,” he says. In April 2021 they made their first investment: they spent 2,000 euros to buy a computer, several cameras, a good microphone and a high-speed connection. With the audience persona, he saw that they had good, original and innovative content and that he needed to publish.

In these months, he’s also seeing that entertainment has more nuance than it appears: “I realize people are looking for entertainment on Twitch, not knowledge or culture,” he says. From there, there were two key moments: One, changing categories on Twitch. They were in the “kitchen”, where fewer people entered, and went to the “just chattingAnd It is the category that gamers use when interacting and responding to live chat rather than playing games. And secondly, invite others to the restaurant streamers of its class and size.

Then came the boom: In February 2022, his TikTok account imploded. The first video got 150 thousand views. This innate spread fueled Twitch, which in turn increased the hours: “I also realize that the hours we put in compared to a big content creator are few. We work 50 or 60 hours, but we have to hit 150 hours,” says the son, “that’s why they also open the restaurant during The key to success isn’t a button, it’s keys like those on a piano, he adds.

Now, in addition to the potential Esland Prize, on their way into the future they face two challenges: how to keep growing and how to make money. Arroz y Desgracias’ plans to expand their community are not small. Aaron wants to “improve” the kitchen: “Neon lights, two speakers, and every day is like a video level. An order comes in, it sounds through the speakers, it sings things to you and the chat can interact with you, take it away from you,” says Aaron. His father replied, “He’s a crazy loser.”

The other great plan for 2023 is “tortilagedon”: make the world’s largest tortilla (13 meters, they’ll need all the eggs in Castilla la Mancha for two days, according to their calculations), and above all, turn the flight around: “Engineers are needed,” says Aaron. Throwing 3-4 tons in the air sounds like an impressive challenge: “We want to achieve six figures in a live show.”

The other goal is money. Another €6,000 has already been spent on improving materials to achieve a television-level production. But the channel continues without interest. Earn around 3,000€, which only comes on Twitch, thanks to subscriptions and ads on the platform. TikTok account does not give income. “I earn what it costs me,” says Aaron, who pays an editor for YouTube, another for TikTok and wants to integrate more profiles: community manager, content manager, graphic editor.

Not all channels have such infrastructure behind them. But the picture and sound quality of the Arroz y Desgracias broadcast is appreciated. Other finalists in the Esland category are Keddie and Luna Clark. Keddy actually won last year and is the leader in Spain when it comes to carrying a camera around all day and narrating his daily life, which is travel in general. Viviendoenlacalle is the channel of Johnny, who has spent seven years without a home and was able, thanks to his Twitch subscriptions, to rent an apartment at the end of 2021. Now he continues to share details of his life with his dog Donna.

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