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Being an extremely camera-shy person, I, The RawKnee, never thought of being a YouTuber. It all started when I was in school and was smitten by a bug to be ‘cool’ among my friends. It was then (in 2010) when doing something on YouTube occurred to me, because back then being there on YouTube was ‘cool'.
I wanted to be on the platform just so I could brag to my friends about it. I just wanted to have fun and upload anything and everything in order to be active. I loved to edit pictures and videos, and therefore, between 2010 and 2012, I uploaded all possible random videos – from photo compilations to 3D software tutorials to instrumental Bollywood music. Surprisingly, some of them even worked and got good views.
As I was passionate about editing, I got into a filmmaking and visual effects course. During my course, I had to make a lot of short films and videos. I took this as an opportunity to upload my course-related projects and assignments on my YouTube channel.
All this while, I was behind the camera. With time, I started consuming a lot of content by many creators and started following them. This pushed me to look at YouTube as a serious career option, and that's when I started 'The Rawknee Show'.
How ‘The Rawknee Show’ happened:
The Ellen Show and Dwayne Johnson have been great inspirations to me. I used to follow and watch both of them very closely. I am a fan of Dwayne’s personality and the aura of The Ellen Show, and I wanted to create something with a fair mix of both.
In 2015, I gave it a shot and that is when I started my first YouTube channel, The Rawknee Show. It was a whole different genre of content that I was making on this channel in 2015-16. By the end of 2016, I got into roasting and that made me reach where I am today.
Why and how I started The Rawknee Games
I have enjoyed playing video games since my childhood. I remember getting my first video game when I was about 3 years old. As I grew up, I started looking up to gamers like PewDiePie. I always used to admire the life they had.
I always thought – they (gamers) could play games the entire day and chill, and I had to invest time in creating engaging scripts for my show. That is when I planned to get into gaming.
However, I was 21 back then, and like every Indian family, mine expected me to focus on building a stable career that could help me earn. Thankfully, my family understood that I was doing well when they saw me attracting fan attention online and offline.
With time, they too started watching my videos. But then, I wanted to get into gaming. It was a difficult task for me to convince my family that I would now play games on YouTube. And that is when I started a new channel dedicated to games – The Rawknee Games. While The Rawknee Games started as an excuse to play games and do some live streaming, it has now become a full-time career that I look up to.
Challenges I faced while beginning my streaming career as 'The RawKnee'
During 2010-2015, I wasn’t serious about YouTube as a career. So, nothing mattered to me, not even the views. However, when I started my first channel, I had a lot of expectations from it as I had invested a lot of effort and time in creating content.
t was a tough time for me during the beginning as I struggled to get even 10 views and 5 subscribers. It took me two years to get to 1000 subscribers, and by then I had made 300-400 videos.
This sluggish growth was a disappointment and I was frustrated. I tried everything, but nothing worked. With close analysis, I realized I wasn’t being myself. I was trying to enact and be someone else. I was trying to create The Ellen Show with Dwayne Johnson's personality. Hence, people couldn’t connect with me.
I addressed this challenge by working on myself and showing my true personality. And once it was ‘me’ on the channel, people started connecting with me. However, with The Rawknee Games, I didn’t have to face a lot of struggles as I was already experienced and had good reach on my first channel, some of which got diverted here.
I am blessed and thankful for my journey, since people have had harder challenges. With my journey so far, I have come to a conclusion that all one needs to do is be themselves and have a lot of patience. Viewers don’t come overnight.
