Ranjit Kumar (Geekyranjit)

Ranjit Kumar is one of the most famous Indian tech YouTubers.

His YouTube channel, Geekyranjit is the most subscribed English tech YouTube channel of India.

Early love with technology–

Ranjit hails from Hyderabad and since his childhood, he is a nerd and loves tinkering with software and gadgets.

While studying eight grade, he decided to make a career in computers and shared this thought with his friends to which they made fun of him.

But this couldn’t kill Ranjit’s love for computers.

During that time, he used to have a desktop computer with an old CRT monitor with a disk operating system (DOS).

As it didn’t have a graphical user interface (GUI), Ranjit used to type commands.

Wanting to become a game developer-

While in his school, Ranjit used to practise BASIC programming languages and also play games on computers.

At that time he wanted to grow up to become a game developer and this started his obsession with computers.

Learning programming-

Initially, Ranjit didn’t have his own computer, so he used to use the computer of his elder cousin at night to do programming and play games.

As at that time, he didn’t have the internet, so he learnt programming by reading books on Turbo C.

Even though learning the C programming language was challenging, Ranjit loved learning it and he also wrote a few programs.

Eventually, he became very skilled at the C programming language.

Later, Ranjit tried to learn the Assembly language but as he found it very difficult, he gave up learning it.

Working for his uncle–

One of Ranjit’s uncles observed his passion for computers and offered him a computer on the condition that he should do some of his office work.

He happily agreed to his uncle’s offer and thanks to that computer, he was able to learn Linux.

Choosing B.Com (Hons.)-

Ranjit chose to study Bachelor in Commerce (Honours) and while studying B.Com he had a lot of free time which he used to learn programming.

During that time, he used to daily spend around 18 hours working on his computer and create programs.

Ranjit didn’t attend the college regularly and sometimes even when he attended the college, he used to tinker with the computers there.

While in college he also taught about computers to the engineering students.

Working at a startup-

Later, Ranjit joined Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) for a six month course.

Here, he befriended Hari who later convinced him to work at a local startup in Hyderabad.

In 1997, both of them joined as programmers in that startup.

There, in addition to working as a programmer, Ranjit also worked on networking hardware and thanks to his knowledge of Linux, he also managed the Linux servers.

In this startup, he worked on dynamic websites and E-commerce and was paid a monthly salary of ₹4500.

Here, Ranjit got a chance to work with Perl, a high-level programming language and he also worked on many commercial projects on Active Server Pages.

Resigning from his job-

After working for a year in the startup, Ranjit’s friend, Hari resigned from his job and moved to the United States.

While leaving for the United States, Hari invited him to the United States but as he had no plans for going to the United States, he stayed back in India.

And Ranjit too resigned from his job.

Freelancing and Funtoosh.com-

After resigning from his job, Ranjit started taking freelancing projects related to commercial dynamic websites.

Thanks to his knowledge of programming, he succeeded in getting many freelance projects from the United States.

Meanwhile in 1999, Ranjit also started a website by the name Funtoosh.com to showcase his skills and work.

He built this website from scratch on Active Server Pages and it took him around five months to completely build this site.

Success of Funtoosh.com–

Within a few months, Funtoosh.com started receiving good traffic.

As the traffic continuously climbed up, this website demanded more servers.

At that time servers were expensive and also Ranjit and his partner had financial constraints, so they decided not to buy extra servers.

So, Ranjit had only two options, either to shut down Funtoosh.com or manage it with the existing resources.

Thankfully, he chose the latter and migrated the site from Active Server Pages to Linux using LAMP and thanks to this, the performance of Funtoosh.com increased manifold.

25 million page views per month-

Within a few years, Funtoosh.com started getting around 25 million page views per month.

Ranjit used to invest all his earnings into his site for maintaining it.

During that time even as the traffic was great, the earnings from the site weren’t impressive at all but the experience of operating this website greatly helped him in his freelance work.

Using LAMP for his clients-

As LAMP was free and robust, Ranjit started using this for his clients.

As he worked with small clients with small finances, they appreciated him working on LAMP.

Earning handsomely-

As Ranjit was doing the freelance projects of the United States clients, he was able to charge around $60 per hour and earn handsomely.

He also hired a couple of people to help him.

As Ranjit was catering to the United States clients, he needed to be awake all night.

In 2003, he got married and in 2005, he was blessed with a daughter.

His wife’s name is Tripti and daughter’s name is Palak.

And around 2005, Ranjit started getting bored from working on the freelance programming projects and wanted to do something else.

Starting Tech2Buzz-

One of his friends observed his passion for gadgets and advised Ranjit to start something related to it.

So, in 2007, he started a technology blog by the name, Tech2Buzz.

At that time, Ranjit was simultaneously working on his freelance projects and his blog.

Even though he was disappointed to see many people copying the content of Tech2Buzz, he continued working on his blog.

Quitting freelancing-

The 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers negatively affected a lot of the U.S companies.

And thanks to this, Ranjit’s freelance work also got severely affected and he was getting paid a lot less.

As he was already bored with this work, he quit freelancing and started posting gadget reviews on Tech2Buzz.

Entering YouTube-

From 2009, Ranjit began watching many YouTube videos and got impressed by the videos of Jon Rettinger.

Jon Rettinger through his videos inspired him to start a YouTube channel.

On January 6, 2011, Ranjit started Geekyranjit YouTube channel with an aim to review gadgets for the Indian audience and at that time he was 34.

He put more emphasis on creating videos for Geekyranjit rather than writing blog posts for Tech2Buzz because his blog posts were getting copied whereas he was confident that not many can copy his videos.

Also, at that time, Ranjit used to get a lot of comments on blog posts relating to the products, so he thought that explaining through videos would be easier.

During that time, there wasn’t a monetisation program for YouTube in India.

Facing rejections-

In the initial six months, Ranjit reviewed all his gadgets on YouTube and wrote to many companies for review units but he was disheartened as almost all the companies didn’t even reply to him.

Only Asus replied to him and sent him a Wifi Router (Asus RT N13U Wifi Router) for reviewing.

So, Ranjit decided to not to request the companies for review units instead he started purchasing all the gadgets for reviewing.

Huge losses-

Ranjit set aside over ₹10 lakh for purchasing the necessary gadgets for reviewing on his YouTube channel and hoped that within two years, his YouTube channel would grow big enough to sustain on its own.

But even after investing all this money over a period of two and half years, he couldn’t break even.

Ranjit grew very disappointed as he couldn’t succeed as a YouTuber even after daily working for 14 hours on his YouTube channel and investing huge amounts of money in it and so he thought of closing down Geekyranjit.

He grew very worried as he had a family to support.

Even after two years, the companies weren’t sending Ranjit the review units and this added to his pain.

Sticking on to YouTube-

Ranjit was confident that he could easily earn around ₹1-1.5 lakh if he returned to freelancing but thanks to the positive comments on his YouTube videos, he continued working on his YouTube channel.

Later, as he was earning negligible amounts of money with his Tech2Buzz blog, he stopped working on it and started completely focusing on his YouTube channel.

Breaking even and becoming successful-

Even during those difficult times, Ranjit’s wife completely supported him and his work.

Luckily after three years, he started breaking even.

Eventually, Ranjit started making profits from his channel and now he has more than 3 million subscribers on Geekyranjit.

He was able to survive for three years without making any money only because of his beneficial habit of saving money which he picked up since his first job.

Starting GeekyRanjit In Hindi-

On August 21, 2016, Ranjit started GeekyRanjit In Hindi for catering to the Hindi audience.

He doesn’t have a team and works on his own on both his YouTube channels.

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