Daily Inspiration: Meet Nicholas Maldonado

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicholas Maldonado.

Hi Nicholas, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I’m Nicholas Maldonado, aka Nixstah and I am a 24-year-old content creator living in Los Angeles! My journey started years ago as as a kid, as young as three years old I was fascinated with video games and would always play them. My favorite games were Halo and Call of Duty, and even though I was a kid I noticed I was actually good at playing the games, especially since I played every single day. Fast forward to 2020, I had just transferred from my community college to UCLA, where I was studying economics, and then COVID hit. Staying at home in quarantine allowed me to play video games a lot more than I had been in the recent years as I was so busy. After playing for a few months, I kept seeing so many other streamers becoming very successful and thought to myself that I might as well live-stream my gameplay and make videos about it just for fun!

So in January 2021, I went live for the first time and began to post on TikTok under my handle, Nixstah. Things slowly started to grow on the content side, meanwhile, I graduated from UCLA that same summer and also started working a full-time job as a bank analyst. Then in November 2021, every aspect of my content began to exponentially grow bigger and bigger every month. By April 2022 I had achieved 100k followers on Twitch, and over 1 million on TikTok. This pushed me into making a decision to quit my new job and focus on being a full-time content creator. While it was a tough one to make, with the support of my family and my community I knew it was the right one. I have now been gladly creating content in the gaming space for over a year full-time, and am so happy I made the decision to go forward with this as my career.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The road has definitely not been smooth. In gaming and content creation as a whole, there are lots of ups and downs. A great example comes down to seasons. During the summer viewership is at an all-time high due to people being at home from work and school. Though going into the fall, when summer vacation is over, viewership takes a massive decline. While there are struggles such as this, I think it’s important to look at my gaming career as a marathon and not a race and to look at the bigger picture rather than just the decline in the moment.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am known for both making comedic videos on Call of Duty and Fortnite and also playing both games at a professional level. When it comes to my work my day-to-day revolves around first brainstorming and recording content throughout the day, then editing any videos I have footage for which is something that I specialize in after teaching myself how to edit my videos. After this, I will then go live on my Twitch stream to play Call of Duty Warzone. When it comes to my livestream many watch me instead of others due to my ability to play the game exceptionally well while also maintaining conversations and being highly engaged with my viewers at the same time. The large community that I have been able to build throughout the past three years of creating content is definitely what I am most proud of.

Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
For anyone just starting out in content I seriously recommend to not pursue what everyone else is doing. Try very hard to think outside the box and find ideas that are not being done yet in your space. I wish someone had told me that as at first, I was creating news content around Call of Duty, which did not make me unique as many other content creators were doing the same thing. Due to that, my growth flatlined. The second I began to do unique content was when everything began to take off on every platform.

Contact Info:

• Website: nixstah.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nixstahh/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Nixstah/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Nixstahh
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nixstah