FourthWall: The All-in-One Monetization Solution That Streamers Need to Know About

Welcome to another edition of the Independent Creator Podcast. Tonight we're actually going to be taking a look at a merch shop membership monetization feature, store, page, whatever you want to call it, that you can basically monetize your content, your live stream to your heart's content. That's right, we're going to be talking about FourthWall tonight and let's actually get into it.

What is FourthWall?

Well, FourthWall is a store and merch store, a place that you can set up monetization for your live streaming space so that you can offer an alternative to instead of, especially on Twitch, especially now that Twitch has just announced that they're going to be raising the subscription pricing in many different countries. So, and it's a given that they're going to be also up, up, up in the price of subs for the US as well. So it is a good idea to move away from first party, especially if you're like, like I said, streaming to Twitch to a third party, which I would highly suggest, like that's what we're going to talk about is a service called FourthWall.

Well, FourthWall takes care of everything that you can think about for monetization, your content. One of those is creating a website for you. Well, most of the time, which you would have to do in the past, you would have to go into like Ko-fi or you would have a Patreon or some other kind of service that you would have to sign up for and get started. The thing is though, is that most of your data and your content would only live in that particular platform. There was no really way to take it somewhere else. And your website, I'm using air quotes, really did not look any much different from other Patreon or Ko-fi sites that people will design.

Now, FourthWall does give you the option to have nine different themes that you can choose from and you can customize those in many different ways. So you have like hundreds of combinations that you can use on your particular website that you want to use.

Website Builder and Customization

Like I said, we had our ultimate website builder. So like I said, you have nine different ones, different themes, but you don't have to use their themes. If you have the code and you made your own kind of site, you can use that as well within FourthWall. And the nice thing, it all integrates with a merch store.

So I know a lot of content creators and live streamers love, you know, to offer a t-shirt with a logo, their logo on it, or if they had a custom design graphics designed, they can put that onto a shirt, coffee mugs, t-shirts, hoodies, mouse pads, hats, whatever you name it. And it's all print on demand. So you don't have to really say, "Oh, well, this is going to be a limited line. I'm going to have to order like a hundred shirts." No, all you do is set it up, just put your design wherever you're made onto wherever you want on the shirt and then sell that. And whenever someone visits your site says, "Oh, I like that shirt. I'm going to purchase it." They put it in a cart, go through the process of buying it. And then FourthWall takes that order, sends it off to the print on demand. And then as the name and title, it's print on demand.

Link Management and Platform Integration

You also got your homepage for your links. So a lot of people like to use Linktree. Linktree is a great service, but it's one of the things where it's not customizable unless you want to pay the extra per month to get a custom domain or have something customized for it. So here on FourthWall, you can have your custom domain. So for me, I have shop.twotonwaffle.com goes to my store. And right there, just right there at the header, just below the header is all my links that I have set up ready to go for when people visit the shop, they'll be able to see it.

Now, for other things, I know we talked about just recently how Lifespace has introduced a pages feature, which takes the basis of like Linktree, but if for your Lifespace account. So whatever you have put into your Lifespace account shows up on this page and it's completely free. It's as long as you have a Lifespace account, you got one.

So I think what you have to see is that FourthWall is kind of geared more for a Twitch audience and streamers. That's not to say that it's only dedicated to just people who stream on Twitch. We see that with Lifespace, with the direct integration with your FourthWall shop into your page, that it shows up as a tab and also into the Lifespace. Your Lifespace pages, as well as links to your shop, like your products. And it's all right there, just below like your Discord, Twitter, you know, the rest.

Platform Compatibility and Features

So there is options that you're not stuck to just Twitch to use a service like FourthWall. You can use it on Lifespace. You can use it on Omcast. You can use it on YouTube, TikTok. As we see here, it has e-commerce integrations to TikTok, Twitch, Gifting, YouTube, Merch Shelf. You can do thank you notes. So if somebody buys something from you or does a giveaway through your shop, you have an option in your dashboard to send a thank you notice, a post, or you can also do a video as well to say, "Hey, thank you for buying the t-shirt. Awesome." And ideas are just off the wall of what you can provide to your community, your customers, and thanking them for buying your stuff or buying a membership.

We'll get into that a little bit. But you can also set up promo codes. You can do giveaways, which is a great thing. I would love to see that integration come into Lifespace as well. You can do donations to your favorite creator through FourthWall. You have stream alerts and Instagram checkout. So there's a lot of connections to a lot of social networking that is highly, highly useful.

Product Catalog and Merchandise Options

Now, they have on here that you can do, especially for merch. For merch, you can use their products, and they have a lot of products that you can choose from. Like I said, there's hats, t-shirts, hoodies, ugly Christmas sweaters, mouse pad stickers, and a lot of other things that you can choose. You think of it, they pretty much have it. And you can design your merch through their pretty much, their easy to use merch builder. Think of it like a Wysiwyg kind of editor.

But you can also use FourthWall if you have your own website, and you are a maker and you create artwork or custom crocheted items or wood carvings or something. You can use FourthWall to sell those handcrafted items that you have locally through FourthWall to your customer base, your community, your viewers, and they can purchase. You can also use FourthWall to sell your own products. I have a phone case that I custom make that is all designed and be perfect for you to purchase for your iPhone or your Android device.

And you can also sell digital products. So let's say I actually, I did do this. I had another shop through FourthWall.com. And I had a overlay pack that you can use for Ecamm. Of course, I set it for free because I was just testing things out. But you can do digital goods, like MP3s, PDFs, zip files, and many different file types as well. You can sell that through your shop. So you're not just you have 40 products that you can slap your logo on and that's it. You can't do anything else. No, you're pretty much wide open doing a lot of different things that you can sell on your store.

Pricing and Business Model

Of course, easily customize your design. We talked about a little bit. You can use custom domains. So like I mentioned before, I have my shop is shop.twotonwaffle.com. And it takes you straight to my store. And as you can see here from different examples, you have different customizations that you can make your store yours. It's not going to have the same look as 100 other people, or 1000 other people. It's going to be like small variations here and there. You can customize it to make it your own brand and fit your own personality pretty much.

So they got it's free to use. There's no monthly fees, there's no upfront cost. They only make money when you do so there is a little bit of a I believe you get like 85% of the profits. Let's take a look here. Of course, you know, it says pricing for creators, it's free. And there's like I said, no monthly fee, no upfront cost. So they take 3% on digital products, 0% on physical products, which is great. The memberships, we'll get into that a little bit, is you can you they take 5% of the membership. So you get 95% of the subs that come through of your community and want to sub to you through your fourth wall shop. So they only take 5%.

You get unique tools to the light engage your community 24/7 customer support, quick reliable payouts. You can do accept donations with no fees. You get a lot of analytics. So with also ownership of your data fourth wall, you are the owner of your data and brand, you know, they'll never send marketing to your supporters or sell your information, which is pretty much pretty good.

Extensive Product Catalog

So let's take a look at the product catalog. I'm sure a lot of people are very interested. And let's put some stuff on some stuff, but my logo on some stuff. So of course, here we got you know, your tie dye or not tie dye, but garment dyed heavyweight t shirts, and many different colors. It's from 1495. Of course, you can bump the price up to get some more profit for yourself. You don't have to sell it at 1495. You also get a unisex premium hoodie. You get trucker hats, kiss cut holographic sticker sheets, a desk mat. And that's the what would you like to create as like the top. It's pretty much like the feature what a lot of people do or use.

You got knitted v neck vest, or cardigan without pockets, sweaters, and relaxed fit classic fits, t shirts, joggers, hats. These are the best sellers so you can the beanies. You got coffee mugs, picture frames. So like I said, whatever you think about is pretty much that's what they have available. Wall calendars. You got see like in a wellness like a duffel bag, visors, sports bras, yoga leggings, shorts. And they also have nice thing it's the all over the all over print yoga or all over prints, which is pretty cool you got like if you have a design that is a repeating pattern that you've had commission or you designed yourself. You can use that and on that as well for the all over prints. Yeah, mouse pads, joggers, you get tie dye hoodies, desk mats, eco friendly essentials. Yeah, bags, tote bags.

Now, I do have to say, a lot of this stuff. There are no minimums, so you don't have to worry about it. But they do offer other things as well like lapel pens. These. Yeah, there are minimum on the lapel pens like you have to have at least 300 orders or 300 ordered before it's printed, which is a great thing to think about and say, we have this, this pen design that we want to it's a limited limited edition. It's only going to be available for the next month. To have the design, we need at least 300 orders or three yet or pre orders for 300. And then once you get the 300, and then anything over it's great.

So you kind of like got to think about like, oh, that'd be a great thing to do is, or like the plushies plushies are depending on which one like the custom this custom plushy is a minimum of 300. So if you have someone that has designed and you commissioned a someone to make you a plushy fourth wall can do it for you, it's just you know you just have to have at least 300 orders or 500 for the squish plush, or the custom plushy with small accessory. Again, that's 300. So they offer a lot of stuff I know a lot of streamers and content creators love you know to have a plushy I would like to have one to like a waffle one. That'd be great. But not at this time.

So yeah, like the product catalog is very extensive, there is a lot available. Let's, let's take a look at hats you have all different types of hats. This is one of the hats that you can get. This is which one is this. I think this was the vintage dad hat. I'm showing up one of my, my hats with my logo on it on the front. It's embroidered. And they also do embroidery. So that's, it's just not screen printing it's also you can do embroidery, which is a great thing because opens up even more options that are available to your, your community.

Membership Features: The Game Changer

Now, let's actually move away from March because March. Everyone can do March. That's great. And this is this is a great feature that they provide. But let's actually take a look at memberships, so I'm going to have to go into mine. So you can also set up a what's called a third party. So instead of people subscribing to you through like YouTube or Twitch or LiveSpace or anything like that, you can offer, hey, subscribe to me on my fourth wall account, just go to shop.twotonewaffle.com and you can set up a tiered system that is perfect for your community instead of you know, the 499 sub tier one sub on Twitch.

Here you can also, let's see where perks and tiers right. So right now I have a 499 per month, that I can, which is also another great thing here let me let me explain is you can have integrations with Discord. So, let's say someone goes to my shop. And once and joins up on the membership pays five to $5 per month, they get access right into my Discord that I have a category that is just for paid members or I call VIP members. So it's automatically taken care of, you don't have to keep a spreadsheet of who's paid for that month who is no longer, I was about to say no longer viable but no longer paying. And you don't have to keep track of it, it's fourth wall does all that for you, you don't have to worry about keeping a spreadsheet going. And it's integrated in with Discord.

Let's actually create a new tier here. And let's see, you can also do a one time discount for new members. So, for first time members, let's do like a 30% 30% discount. And we're going to do for like time limited so starts and ends for the next for the next two weeks, you can have this 30% discount for first time members that join up.

Now, let's actually I know $200 Yeah, but let's go ahead add tier I have to title it test. And let's take off the time. So I have this 200 per month, let's go ahead add a perk. It's a custom perk, I can do a Discord role, I can do members only discount. So if you become a membership member within my community, you get like 20% off all merch store items. You can also do members only products that are available to the members, you can do a private RSS feed. So if I wanted to do this podcast, or something else that is only available to people that are a member through my fourth wall account, then they'll get access to that feed.

So in the curse, custom perk is you can do whatever you want, like supporter, let me put a title there. And you can also do a supporter that different this thing, that's what is included, I'm getting ahead of myself, you can have like tier one, it offers two items or two different perks. Tier two offers everything that you get in tier one, plus, you can do two more perks that added bonus tier three, so on and so forth.

Membership Strategy Examples

So you can see that there is a lot of things that you can tie into it just right off the bat, especially if you have a lot of merch items, say like if you have a lot of limited time merch that Oh, if you become a member, you get an extra 20% off of the merch line. Okay, great. So I'm paying $5 a month, and I get $20 off my merch products or my product purchases. Great. That's, that's double bonus for me. And I'm also in their private discord. Great. So there's a lot of things that you can do.

So they also have a couple ideas. So let's take a look at five membership strategies from fourth wall creators. So you can do merch clubs. Like this one person, Miss Megzi does a like a gun squad. So if we can look into it, but so they do they do different tiers, they got like a $5 per month of 15 per month, and a $30 per month. So for $5, you get a discord special role channels and events, and members only goon squad products, which you can you can also provide, you know, handcrafted like, I had like an idea of is one signs up as a sign signs up for a particular tier. Send out a postcard, thank you get like a personal message and stuff like that. But of course, that'd be like on like a 20 or $30 tier. Because you know, price of sending stuff to the mail gets pretty high. But it's a good idea that not many, not many people do.

You also get discounts, early access and exclusive merch drops the 5% discount. So unlike their 15 is pretty much the same, but they get a 10% discount. 30 is you get a 15%. Yeah, but sweet, simple and digital have a digital product your community loves give them a simple option unlock even more access, stay up to date on the latest and show their appreciation for what you do.

Patrick Sterling, a great content creator. If you are looking to find more information about DaVinci Resolve, he does a lot of stuff with DaVinci Resolve. And of course, he has here is a $5 per month. Support the channel on an ongoing basis $100 worth of DaVinci Resolve products and Discord premium access.

Manuel Gardner Fernandez is a $10 per month you get private member feed, unlimited tabs more perks coming soon. They are a musician and content creator with a thriving creative community offers digital products in the form of unlimited guitar tabs to members, adding value and accessible price without stretching his bandwidth.

So as you can see, you can just go through and get some ideas. Say, Oh, this would be perfect. I can. I would love to do that. Like this one. It's like a ASMR baby or $11 a month, a one non ASMR vlog a month, three videos a month, three audios a month, three members only live stream one archive Patreon, a behind the scenes post and 10% merch discount.

Sticker clubs, which is great because if you do like 250, you get a monthly gift giveaway, entry junk box updates. I don't know what that is, but it sounds pretty interesting to me. Monthly newsletter products. See what's coming soon behind the shifty sheens. So I would suggest if you're really interested of monetizing your, your, your content, definitely, I would say, give fourth wall a look and go through these, these ideas and just write down, Oh, this would be interesting. What can I do? Or what can I provide my community to, for them to want to subscribe to me on a membership tier through fourth wall.

Giveaways and Gifting Features

Now, excuse me. The giveaways is another great idea that they do. Let me see. Go through to Twitch because that is integrated mostly through Twitch. Let's see. Yeah. Oversized feet, oversized t-shirt features. So you can do a gifting and sub discounts. So you can do live merchant memberships gifting. So you can let you can, you can do it, or you can let your viewers do it as well. So if you're, if you're running a stream on Twitch, one of your viewers can go to your shop, order product and have it gifted to a member of somebody in your chat, which is great. And that person will get a link to your shop to claim the free item.

So, and you can also do that as a giveaway too. It says, give away for three subs on my fourth wall shop says enter type in exclamation point, enter and do it that way. And your viewers can do the same thing is you, you're not having to do it all the time. You can rely on a, on the generosity of your viewers to give your give back to the community as well.

You also get stream alerts. You had to set it up, set that up through stream labs or stream elements. They at this time don't currently have a service that is from fourth wall for alerts. I believe they probably going to be working on that, but at this time they have other things or they're wanting to get taken care of first.

So you got a lot of people that are Twitch centric that has just basically just for, you know, the merch, the giveaways, the gifting, sub gifting, the merch gifting and, and stuff like that. That's all through Twitch. I would love to see something come to live space where you can have that capability as well. I know with live space opening up their API, more than likely we might see something like that come down the line. Hopefully this year I have not seen it requested on the discord. I might just go ahead and put that. It's like a, Hey suggestion, since the API is open, let's get some fourth wall integration, more integration to make life space a little bit more. And that does, that does not sound good. More better. And it's just, you know, get, get to going, make sure it's going good. I don't know where I was going with that, but yeah, I'm sticking to it.

My Personal Store Setup

So you can see that there is a lot that is available for a content creator through, you know, fourth wall. So let me go ahead, open up my shop here. So this is, I, it's not fully customized. I made some changes here and there, but you know, it's not what you would see from people who have a team that can do this stuff for them. I don't have a team. So I do this all myself.

So here you have know that the top of heritage is one theme that you can use. You have your, your social links here, right? Just underneath the header. You also have members only postings that is only available to members, to your members. You have recent videos. So right now this live stream is showing up there. So you can also have it where it shows your latest YouTube videos, latest Instagram reels, and Tik TOK shorts. If you want to have all three, one or two, whatever you want.

You have your become a member, you have your, your tier levels here, then your shop, your, your merch store. So I have a couple of different ones I set up real quick just to have, it's not really placeholders, but you know, it's there. You can also do make a donation. It's a one-time donation. You can put your name, a message, the amount you do a custom amount. And then when you send it, if I was on the, my other profile, it would come up with a alert and chat or a TTS. You can have it read. So it's great. You can have that, that done as well.

So there is a lot of things that you can do with your, with your short, short, your store. I know earlier that the little technical difficulties is totally threw me for a loop. Now I was just on a roll. I was going through all of a sudden, Oh, you're on mute. Great. Number one issue that all affects all streamers and content creators can't have a stream without something going wrong.

Analytics and Business Intelligence

So let's take a look at our analytics. Shall we? So you can see if your, your profit margins, the line goes up, right? So you have your total members that you have members change, which means churn rate. So you have people coming in as new members and the ones that are dropping off, they're not renewing their subs. I can do how many orders have been placed through average order value. So if you get like people are buying like a $22 t-shirts, but not the $30 limited time one or the highly customizable, highly customized one, then you may want to start changing out your, your product plans, whatever it is in the industry sales by country unit sold top tiers. So you have, like I said, you have a lot of analytics that you can use.

Platform Integrations

Connections or integrations with outside parties. So of course you have your YouTube product shelf. If you're a part of the YouTube partner program, you have the capability to have just underneath the player. Are you probably seeing it on many creators or many different channels products that are being sold like t-shirts, whatever ads, mugs, fourth wall does provide you that option to if you're in the YouTube partner program to have your shelf. So that's another option. That's another avenue to advertise your store to people who are watching your videos or your live streams and on YouTube.

Same thing for Tik TOK. You have Twitch gifting. And so as you allow your viewers to give products and memberships for chat when you're live. And there's also a little indication on your website that tells people who come to your site that you're live on Twitch, and they can click on that and it gets taken to your Twitch channel.

You also have a stream alert stream elements alerts. I had that connected stream labs. We don't talk about stream labs. You have your membership discounts for Twitch subs. So let's say somebody subs to your Twitch channel. You can offer them a discount on your fourth wall membership or whatever. So, you know, for whatever reason, they want to pay twice. Okay. Because you know what, they want to get those sweet emotes in Twitch, but they still want, you know, the fourth wall stuff that you offer.

You got members only discord server. So let's say you have your discord server is completely locked down. Well, yeah, you can do that too. You can have it. Well, if you join up my membership, you get access to our community only discord server, which is a great option. Instead of having it open to the public, you can provide a better product offering to your membership tiers.

You have highlight Tik TOK videos on your homepage and share thank you notes to your Tik TOK audience or account. You have same thing for Instagram feed. Clavio. It's a account to sync support emails and send custom emails. Beehive, especially for, I had this set up because I was going to go through Beehive, but I kind of went back on that since I'm going, everything is through ghost. The website blogs and newsletter is all going through my ghost account on two ton waffle.com. Lay low is a, an announcement, promote your drops directly to your supporters. Ship station is managing the shipping experience of products you're responsible for, for fulfilling. That's a tough one.

So you have a lot of integrations with different other companies that you can make your business a lot better, smoother, and easier for your audience.

Product Creation Process

And going through, let's take a look at promotions really. So right now I have like a, it's the waffle club. It's a promo code. So if you put in waffle code or waffle club as a promo for a merch, you do get a 10% discount. I do have a giveaway. Do not have a giveaway link. So giveaway links, let recipients easily redeem free products from your store. Okay. So that's what you can do as well.

You have your products here that you can. So if we want to create a new product, we'll design something new. Choose a t-shirt. Yeah, we'll do this one. So you can have, you know, and of course it's, it keeps up to date. So like this one, we saw that the maroon color is out of stock and this one's partially out of stock. So a lot of these are out of stock, but you know, fourth wall does keep it up to date with their print on demand partners. I think they go through printful. I want to say, I believe that's their, their partner.

So you can do a customized, customize the back front inside label left sleeve, right sleeve. And of course, you know, the more that you have on the product is going to increase the price of the product. So let's go ahead design now. And it gives you a easy to use product designer. So I have a couple of images here. I got my sandwich pirate icon or my emote. You just click on it and automatically puts it in here. Then you can change the position, the sizing. And let's also take a look at the preview. What it might look like.

I think knowing it gives it a little preview like that. It's all rump crumpled up or you have a model wearing your shirt, the sandwich pirate pirate sandwich. So it gives you an idea what the, your, your design would look like on an actual physical product. And then, so we'll go back to design. You can upload images. You can also do different colors that you want. So we want, okay, so we got black is, is already selected. We can do a brown shirt and then you over here on your right, you can change the look or the color. So you can see what your design looks like on that color.

You can do a left sleeve design. So let's go back to artwork and I want to put my logo on the left sleeve. Okay. And let's take a look at a preview. So what it does, it builds the preview. As you can see, since I put that design or that, that extra spot, it was 11 now it's 1399. So you have to keep that in mind. The more stuff that you put on a product, the more expensive it'll be. So had the model wearing, but of course you don't really get a good idea of what it actually looks like, but it does give you a representation of what the product, the final product will look like, which would be pretty cool.

So I'm just like, Oh, let's go with that. Go next. So they're generating the product page. And here is where you'd be able to title it, give it a description, a selling price. So right now, excuse me, is it wants to sell this t-shirt for $24, which, okay, it's not a bad price and I'll make $10 per sale. That's pretty freaking awesome. I'll get $10 per shirt, but let's just say, let's do, let's do a $15. Of course it says you're selling price must be at least 1699 or higher. Okay. We'll do 16 or overdue at 1699 or let's do, since it's gonna freak out, there's $17. I'll make $3 per sale. That's a good cheap shirt. You know, you don't want to go too low because people perceive it as, you know, it's cheap means it's garbage. No, not the case at all.

And then you can do a little zoom in effect by hovering over the picture. And this is like the last step before you hit publish. So you can, like I said, you can also generate AI, AI is in everything. So you can make AI do the work for you. So that's why I hit the button right now. So it's, I don't know why it's, it gave the product name as a pirate taco adventure t-shirt. That's not a taco as a sandwich, but it's AI it's okay. And it gives you a description as embark on a whimsical journey with our Bella canvas, super soft t-shirt featuring a playful cartoon of a pirate hat on a taco. This light lightweight, comfortable shirt is perfect for those seeking a blend of humor and fashion set sail with two ton waffles, unique creation, which yeah. Okay. It didn't get it right out of the bat, but you can just change it from instead of taco pirate sandwich.

So now it's a pirate sandwich shirt and I might actually put that up there, but I don't, I don't know. I'll think about it, but it gives you an idea of course it tells you it's made to order orders arrive within five to 11 days of being placed and supporters pay the cost of shipping based on the weight of their order during checkout. So the customer pays the shipping, which is perfect because you don't have to deal with shipping costs, estimation estimates, taxes is all done automatically. And you're pretty much clear to go. You're you're good. You don't have to do anything else. So creating products are actually really, really easy to do.

Final Thoughts and Recommendation

So let's go ahead, get out of here. Not set that up. I mean, it's a good idea to do a pirate sandwich pirate, but yeah, that's, that is pretty much it for fourth wall. It offers you a lot of things that you can offer your, your community. You can do memberships, you can do merch, you can do all sorts of stuff, donations, a webpage for your content as a content creator. If you don't want to create a website somewhere else, you can do it all through fourth wall completely, completely for free.

So again, I highly suggest checking out fourth wall for yourself. If you're, if what you've seen right now is great and you think you can make a go of it. Awesome. I will have a link, a like a, a, it's not really, it's not an affiliate. It is affiliate link. So it's a referral link. So I'll have a link in the description that if I, if you refer up to what it is, refer up to three of your friends to fourth wall, you each get $10 once they made three or more sales, which is great because you get, you get free money, which is, which is pretty freaking awesome.

Their app as well is great. It gives you pretty much what you see here, but on your phone or your, your mobile device, and there's so much you can do with it. I myself use it. I love it. And I have set up a couple of things as you saw that is available. So if you want to join up the shop link is in description, the referral code there or referral link as well, but that is going to be it for tonight's episode.

Do be sure to subscribe on whatever podcast player of your choice. It's available on Apple podcasts, Spotify, pocket casts, and many different places. YouTube, be sure to join our community at two-ton waffle.com. We'd love to see your, your smiling faces there. Even though I won't be able to see your faces, but I know you're smiling there. And thank you for joining me on this adventure of the independent creator podcast. And I'll see you next time. Have a good night, everybody.

The Independent Creator