Rony "The RawKnee" Dasgupta's journey to becoming a YouTuber: Inspiration, challenges faced, road to success, and more

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'.

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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.

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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.

Thank you guys for 2.5 Million Subs!💜?🐸?🐽

— Rony Dasgupta (@TheRawKnee) June 19, 2021

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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.

#gstday reminds me of hitting 100K subs on YouTube!I hit 100K today in 2017 on The RawKnee Show.Oh the good old memories flashing back 😌

— Rony Dasgupta (@TheRawKnee) July 1, 2021

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.

BGMI me Pochinki nahi ho chalega, kintu Spawn Island ki kami hui to uchit matra me krodh kiya jayga.

— Rony Dasgupta (@TheRawKnee) May 10, 2021

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.