I can't help but wonder why people in this position don't give up earlier. It sounds like you need quite a bit of the right sort of self-promotion to get off the ground floor. Only once you've got enough of an audience will word-of-mouth start working for you.
I'm fairly new to Twitch, and I do this. It didn't hit me until I had decided to take a break and play off-stream, and then something really cool happened, and it made me kinda sad that I didn't have a record of it. I would have had I been streaming...
Speaking just for myself: my girlfriend and I and maybe a friend or two just stream video games because it's fun to play them. Friends usually pop in and shoot the shit with us in chat, but it's usually three or four people max. It helps that one of my sidelines is live video production, so our production quality is usually pretty good and streaming also makes me better for when I have to roll out somewhere and do a show, but still--it's just fun.
