I met one of the most important women in my life because somebody owed me beans on a livestreaming app. Which sounds pretty ridiculous when I say it like that, but that’s basically what happened. I was pissed off at somebody, decided to spend 20,000 beans to help make them lose a competition, and somehow ended up meeting a woman who would become a pretty big part of my life.
Back in 2020, I was heavily involved in BIGO Live. And when I say heavily involved, I mean there were days when I was moving hundreds of thousands of beans around, coordinating with people all over the country, and trying to figure out how the hell I was going to win whatever competition was happening that week. For anybody who wasn’t around back then, BIGO was a livestreaming app where viewers could send virtual gifts to broadcasters. Those gifts cost real money, and broadcasters could earn money from them. There were also PK battles, where two broadcasters competed to see who could receive the most gifts within a certain amount of time.
We took those competitions pretty seriously. Probably way more seriously than we should have sometimes, but there was a lot of money involved. BIGO ran events with special rewards, and I remember some competitions having rebates as high as something like 140% for winning. I’d have to go back and check the exact percentages, but I remember the rewards being substantial. And in certain events, if you lost, you didn’t get any of those extra rewards. When you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of beans, that’s a pretty significant difference.
That’s where trading came in. If I had a big PK coming up, I’d start reaching out to people I knew and trying to line up support. Maybe one person could send me 20,000 beans, somebody else could send 50,000, and another person might be good for 80,000. Between those three people, I’d have 150,000 beans lined up for my battle. But most of that wasn’t free money. We were trading, which meant that if somebody sent me 50,000 beans for my PK, I was expected to show up at one of their future PKs and send them 50,000 back. Sometimes I’d send first, sometimes they’d send first, and sometimes we’d be arranging trades with people who had battles coming up later that same day.
I actually had all these PKs scheduled in my phone calendar. If you could look at my calendar from 2020, you’d find a ridiculous number of appointments that were nothing more than reminders to show up for somebody’s battle. And I wasn’t necessarily going because I wanted to watch. I had to be there because I owed somebody a trade. You couldn’t forget that somebody had a PK scheduled, either. If they’d already sent you 50,000 beans and you didn’t show up when they needed you, that was a serious problem. Your reputation was basically your credit score. The more reliable you were, the more people trusted you, and the larger the trades you could arrange. But if you got a reputation for not returning trades, good luck finding anybody willing to help you.
The whole thing got complicated pretty quickly, especially when you had multiple people sending different amounts and everybody had their own battles to worry about. You also had to be careful about how much you committed to a competition because losing could get expensive. Let’s say I lined up 150,000 beans in trades for a battle and somebody sniped me at the last second. Sniping was when somebody from the opposing side dropped a bunch of gifts right before the timer ran out, leaving you almost no time to respond. Now I’ve lost the competition, I don’t get the winner’s reward, and I still owe everybody their 150,000 beans.
Meanwhile, as I remember it, BIGO kept roughly 70% of the regular gifting value. So I couldn’t just take the beans I’d received, cash them out, and send that same amount back. It didn’t work that way. You might have to use your monthly broadcaster pay or your own money to cover the difference, and depending on how much you’d committed, that could get pretty ugly. People absolutely got burned doing trades, and there were some substantial amounts involved. I remember situations where people were left waiting on hundreds of thousands of beans that were supposed to be returned.
The big tournaments were even crazier because some of them had multiple rounds, almost like a playoff bracket. You’d win one battle and advance to the next, usually against somebody stronger. You might need 40,000 beans to get through the first round, 70,000 in the second, and 150,000 in the third. Then suddenly you’re in the championship against somebody with an enormous amount of support, and you’ve already used most of the resources you had available. Maybe you need 200,000 beans to compete, but between everybody you know, you can only come up with 140,000. At that point you have to decide whether you’re going to risk even more money trying to win or accept that you’re probably going to lose. And that’s a tough decision when you’ve already put so much into getting there.
This is also why organic gifting was so important. If somebody came into your broadcast and sent gifts because they genuinely liked you, those were beans you didn’t have to trade back. That could make an enormous difference, especially in a competition where every bit of support mattered. Having people who actually enjoyed your broadcasts and wanted to see you succeed was worth a hell of a lot more than having a bunch of people willing to trade with you.
Anyway, I could probably write an entire article about the trading economy alone, but all of that explains why people got so upset when somebody didn’t return a trade. Which brings me to the reason I started telling this story in the first place.
There was a broadcaster I knew through BIGO, and we’d done trades before. At some point she owed me beans and didn’t come through. I don’t remember exactly how much she owed me without going back through old records, but I remember being pretty pissed off about it. And apparently I decided the appropriate response was to go into one of her PK battles and help her opponent win. Very mature, I know, but that was the kind of shit that happened on BIGO back then.
So I went into this battle, found the woman she was competing against, and sent her 20,000 beans. I wasn’t trying to arrange another trade, and I wasn’t expecting anything back. I was doing it because I wanted the person who owed me beans to lose. It was basically me spending money to be petty, which probably tells you something about how seriously we took these things.
Now, what’s funny about this is that I had absolutely no idea who the woman I sent those beans to was, but she knew exactly who I was. Apparently she’d already heard of Cody80 and was kind of fangirling over me. By that point I’d built up a pretty good following on BIGO, so it wasn’t entirely unusual for somebody to recognize me when I went into their broadcast, but I certainly wasn’t expecting anything to come out of this particular encounter. I was there because I was mad at somebody, and I figured I’d help her opponent win and go on with my day.
Instead, we ended up getting to know each other, and eventually we developed a relationship that went well beyond livestreaming. We had some pretty incredible experiences together, along with some difficult moments. The relationship itself is probably worth a few stories of its own, but I’ve always thought it was funny how we met in the first place.
If that original trade had been returned, I probably wouldn’t have gone into the PK looking to get even. I wouldn’t have had a reason to send those 20,000 beans, and there’s a good chance we never would’ve met. Obviously, there’s no way to know that for sure, but it’s strange to think about how something that seemed like such a minor incident at the time ended up affecting so much of what happened afterward.
I had no idea who she was when I walked into her broadcast that day. I was just pissed off at somebody who owed me beans, and I wanted to make her lose. Somehow, that turned into a relationship.
Not exactly the most romantic introduction, but it’s definitely one of the more ridiculous ways I’ve ever met somebody.