Connect with us

Technology

Jessica Blevins interview: Wife and manager of Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins

Published

on


jessica blevins tyler ninjaTyler
Blevins

  • Jessica Blevins, 26, is the wife and manager of Twitch
    streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, who is one of the best
    “Fortnite” players in the world.
  • Jessica is one of the reasons Tyler is so successful:
    She manages his entire business, including coordinating the
    handful of people that comprise “Team Ninja.”
  • We talked to Jessica over the phone to learn more about
    her daily life, how things came to be, and where she and Tyler
    are going next.

Jessica Blevins is just 26 years old, but she has an incredibly
tough job: managing her 27-year-old husband Tyler, who is one of
the best video game players in the world.

Tyler, who goes by “Ninja” on Twitch and social media, spends
about 12 hours per day live-streaming video games in front of
thousands of people on Twitch. Most of the time, he’s playing
“Fortnite,” which has been the biggest game of 2018 by far. The
free-to-play game has
reportedly grossed over $1 billion
in revenue.

As the best player of the world’s most popular game, eyes are
constantly on Tyler’s Ninja stream. But behind the scenes,
Jessica is the one making it all happen. She’s up early in the
morning making phone calls, answering emails, and coordinating
Tyler’s entire enterprise, which she calls “Team Ninja.”

“We want him known in Hollywood. We want him known in the world
of sports,” Jessica told Business Insider in a phone interview.
“We want him as a household name, so we’re trying to move him
from just gaming to everywhere.”

The week I spoke to Jessica, she and Tyler had just returned from
attending the 2018 ESPY Awards, where they walked the red carpet
and sat among celebrities, including Pittsburgh Steelers wide
receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker
Mayfield, Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, his wife
the pop star Ciara, and Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron
Rodgers.

Jessica says attending the ESPYs put the couple’s recent success
into perspective.

“When [Tyler] grew so big on YouTube and Twitch, I thought it was
exciting, but I thought that’s where it was going to end,” she
said. “I didn’t think all the sudden, he’d be meeting celebrities
and we’d be invited to the ESPYs. These celebrities are wanting
to play with my husband. That’s insane.”

The daily grind

At home, Jessica and Tyler don’t share many meals together.

Jessica wakes up first. She’s up around 6 a.m. She takes out the
dogs — two Yorkies — makes coffee, and hits the computer. It’s
all about tending to emails and making phone calls before Tyler
wakes up, but he’s normally asleep for a few more hours; Tyler
wakes up later since he goes to sleep later. On most nights,
he’ll stay up until 1 to 2 a.m. streaming on Twitch.


tyler ninja blevins
Tyler “Ninja” Blevins playing Fortnite on a Galaxy Note
9 at Samsung Unpacked 2018.

Getty

Around 9 a.m., Tyler wakes up, and he and Jessica share a good
half hour together. They have coffee, discuss business, or just
talk about how their nights were — “couple-y things,” as Jessica
said.

“Sometimes when he goes live at night, I don’t have a chance to
talk to him until the morning,” she said. “So if I get any new
pitches or things I need to run by him, I’ll do that before he
starts streaming.”

But once Ninja gets online, he’s on for a long time. Tyler will
typically stream on Twitch from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. During that
time, Jessica handles errands: getting groceries, taking care of
their dogs, and handling more phone calls and emails. But once 4
p.m. hits, it’s officially “break time” for both of them.

Jessica feels strongly about “break time.”

“For awhile when we were dating, something had to change because
he’d just wake up and stream all day until he went to bed,”
Jessica told me. “And it’s like, this isn’t a relationship, we
don’t really have time together. He just didn’t have a schedule.
So the best thing he ever did was set a schedule.”

Jessica says the 4-hour break, from 4 to 8 p.m., is “good for our
relationship, and it’s good for him.” But once it’s 8 p.m., Tyler
gets back online and “streams until whenever.”


tyler blevins jessica ninjaJessica
Blevins

As for Jessica, she’ll answer even more emails — there are always
more emails — and often fall asleep on the couch with her two
dogs. When Tyler gets off stream, he’ll wake her up and take
everyone to bed.

It almost didn’t happen

Jessica Goch and Tyler Blevins almost never met.

In 2010, when Jessica was a freshman at the University of
Wisconsin – Whitewater, her boyfriend at the time invited her to
attend a “Halo” tournament with him in Lacrosse, Wisconsin,
called Focus Fire.

She almost didn’t go. The week before the tournament, Jessica
broke up with her boyfriend. And Lacrosse was a
3-and-a-half hour drive from Whitewater. And the event
was taking place during a terrible snowstorm.

“I found out later that Tyler had to drive an extra hour through
the snowstorm and almost didn’t go to the tournament,” Jessica
said.

And even though Jessica ended up going to the tournament — after
much urging from her ex-boyfriend to support him despite the
breakup — and met Tyler, they still couldn’t get together yet.


jessica tyler blevins ninjaJessica
Blevins

“[Tyler] had a girlfriend at the time still so we didn’t really
talk, just kept in touch once in a while throughout college,”
Jessica said. “I didn’t want to be disrespectful and reach out.
But I’d creep on his Facebook every once in a while.”

About three years later, Jessica and Tyler reconnected — over
Twitter, of all places. She tweeted at him and he immediately
DMed her back. They exchanged numbers, started texting, and made
moves to meet in person.

“Since he’s a Lions fan, and I’m a Packers fan, we had a bet: If
the Lions won, I’d go visit him, but if the Packers beat the
Lions, he’d have to come visit me first. The Packers won so he
came to visit me at college, and we started dating right away.”

It’s now five years later, and Tyler and Jessica have just
celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary.

Understanding the business from the inside-out


jessica tyler blevins ninjaJessica
Blevins

It’s not easy to be married to your manager. But Jessica
understands Tyler, and more importantly, she understands the
nature of streaming video games on Twitch.

After all, Jessica is a Twitch streamer in her own right.

Jessica, a.k.a. “JGhosty,” has nearly 200
videos on Twitch, and over 320,000 followers on the platform. Her
first videos were posted in October 2014, when she streamed
popular games like “Slender Man” and “Minecraft.” Eventually, she
started doing what Twitch calls “IRL” streams, where you live
stream what you’re doing “in real life” — creating, painting,
dancing, or in Jessica’s case, cooking.

“You have to continuously find new recipes, which isn’t always
the easiest thing when you do a couple of cooking streams per
week,” she said. “It’s a big process.”

Jessica admits that initially, though, she tried Twitch streaming
because of Tyler. She wanted to understand why it would take so
long for her boyfriend to respond to her texts while he was
streaming.

“I started streaming and the very first day I streamed, I didn’t
text him for over an hour,” Jessica said. “I literally responded,
‘I get it. I’m sorry.'”

Over time, Jessica’s role in Tyler’s life has evolved from
girlfriend to wife and full-on business manager. But it started
naturally, out of a desire to see her partner succeed.

“Living with him, I started to see him responding to these
potentially really good opportunities super quickly so he can
just go live,” she said. “He wouldn’t be capitalizing things,
he’d be sending super quick almost like text-type stuff in
emails. And I was like, ‘you have to be professional with this.’
He was like ‘I don’t have time, I need to stream.’ So at that
moment was when I was like ‘OK, yes I stream, but I’m 100% able
to start managing him.’ Those companies deserve to have
professional responses, and know that somebody’s taking the time
to read them and work with them.”


jessica blevins tyler ninjaJessica
Blevins

In 2016, before Ninja became synonymous with Twitch and
“Fortnite,” Tyler was just playing “Halo” and beginning to dabble
in another kind of battle-royale game called “H1Z1.” He had a
couple of thousand Twitter followers; nowhere close to the 3
million followers he has there now.

So Jessica needed to bring business to them; she would write
emails to big companies like HyperX or AlienWare and pitch Tyler
to those companies. She would get on the phone with them, and
talk about how they could make a sponsorship work.

“Now, it has really done a 180, because it’s endless amounts of
companies reaching out to us to work with Tyler,” she
said. “Before, I had all the time in the world to do it. Now, we
need more people on Team Ninja to help take care of these emails
and making calls.”

Jessica says it hasn’t always been easy being Tyler’s manager. At
times, she says she has to have tough conversations as his
manager, and not as his wife. But speaking as his wife, and not
his manager, Jessica says she has no problem with how much Tyler
plays video games.

“I look at it as, he’s not playing video games all day; he’s
working all day,” she said. “And I have so much more respect for
him, and I’m so proud of him, because I get to say my husband
works all day, he works so hard, and he really does so much for
our family. So it’s not hard for me at all. I giggle. I laugh
every day. He’s funny, and I get to hear his streams first-hand
at the house. He keeps things so fun, and without the stream and
how hard he’s worked, we wouldn’t be blessed with the life we’ve
had.”

Continue Reading
Advertisement Find your dream job

Trending