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Cozy streamers are being left behind.
That was my observations when I started streaming on Twitch in 2024. Indeed, the Twitch extension space was dominated by loud, obnoxious, aggressive experiences. With jarring sounds, chaotic aesthetics, and over-the-top designs that catered to a specific audience, there was nothing for more cozy spaces which actually make up a surprisingly big part of the women community on Twitch!
I thus decided to take the matter in my own hands and develop small widgets throughout 2025 that'd help streamers make their stream more cozy.
My coffee machine widget became the most popular by far. Streamers loved it. The feedback was clear: there was real demand for cozy, café-themed experiences in the streaming world. That's when I realized this could be bigger. Not just a widget, but a full extension that gave feminine streamers and vtubers the customizable, cozy experience they'd been missing.
While most extensions on the market were one size fits all, I knew Cozy Café had to be highly customizable to match each streamer's brand as most of them spent a lot of them working on their aesthetics.
As both designer and developer, I built the entire product from scratch with a vanilla HTML/CSS/JS front-end but using socket.IO to provide real-time updates to streamers and a Node.JS infrastructure on the backend hosted on Railway.
After the first release in December 2025, I quickly realised there were a ton of UX flaws waiting to be fixed!
Indeed, the official Twitch Extension development path makes it difficult to get beta testers. So with real users feedback in my hand, I prioritized the following improvements:
- Streamers were oftentimes unsure if their UI customization went through so I added a visual feedack when it was saving and pushing updates
- When they were busy, streamers sometimes missed the alert so I added both a chat notification to let them know a transaction went through as well as the possibility to replay alerts
While this is not a typical design project, it still felt very important for me to include
Indeed, it tells a lot more about who I am than any of my other projects. Because it's about:
- Being endlessly curious and learning how to code a back-end for scratch just because I want to give more tools to passionate streamers
- My user-first approach which helps me continuously improve the platform
I also learnt a lot of Product and Design lessons from this project.
First, underserved markets are opportunities, The Twitch extension space felt saturated, but it was only serving one type of streamer. By focusing on an underserved audience (feminine streamers, vtubers, cozy communities), I found a market hungry for alternatives.
Also, start small, validate, then scale. The 20+ widgets were my research phase. The coffee machine widget's success gave me the confidence to invest in building a full extension.
Finally, full-stack thinking matters. Designing the UX while understanding the technical constraints (real-time sync, performance, scalability) allowed me to create experiences that were both beautiful and feasible.
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After a month, the extension was installed on 1,500+ channels and gathered more than 10,000 daily users. Streamers are discovering and recommending Cozy Cafe to each other, driven by genuine fit with their aesthetic needs.
Pauline Baeni
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