At 10, Amit Sharma’s mission was to find a way to make his toy motorcycle fly. Now 23, he builds monster bikes with giant tractor wheels, and rides them around in his village, in videos that get up to 60 million views on YouTube.
Sharma’s content has landed him at #4 on YouTube’s list of top creators in India for 2021, in a top 10 consisting almost entirely of gamers. His content is a wacky mix of science experiments, bewildering stunts and weird hacks, with videos titled ‘Making Biggest Bubble From 1000 Chewing Gum’, ‘Driving Our Bus Underwater’ and ‘We Made Shoes of tape… Will These Work?’
In life, he’s a shy young man from a farming village 50 km from Alwar in Rajasthan. Online, he’s Crazy XYZ, a celebrity YouTuber with 17.8 million subscribers. He’s essentially a hustler, a pied piper, going where the crowds are and also where they’ll follow.
His science experiments started when he was a child, he says, and were encouraged by his parents, both government school teachers. “I still have the curiosity of a 10-year-old,” he adds. “I go looking for answers to the weird questions that pop up in my mind. The fun part is that millions around the world have the same questions, so they watch my videos.”
Moving to the nearest English-medium school, 20 km away, at 14 changed his life. “I couldn’t fit in, had no friends, I struggled with the language. The fall from being the local ‘cool kid’ to a nobody left me feeling extremely alienated. I remember telling my parents that I wanted to drop out.” His parents persuaded him stay on and focus on what he loved: science. He ended up at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, in 2016.
“At the IIT, I found myself watching a lot of YouTube videos in my spare time and I thought, I could make these too,” he says. His first channel, TopNmost, listed popular things to do, places to go and stories to read. He went on to create about 80 different channels, using each one to study a different audience demographic and understand the YouTube algorithm better. In 2016, copyright issues saw YouTube take down all his channels, amid a major cleanse.
“This was the second time I almost gave up,” Sharma says. “But I was too close to being successful to quit.”
He started over, with a channel called Prayogshala (Hindi for Laboratory), a place of crazy experiments and hacks on things like modifying cricket bats for better grip; and a second channel, The Indian Unboxer, which now has 3.1 million subscribers. His degree in metallurgical and materials engineering help immensely with his videos for Prayogshala, he says. By 17, he was monetising his YouTube content and earning enough to buy more and bigger equipment. The crazy adventure had begun.
The biggest trick in the game, Sharma says, is learning to adapt. “When I saw people reacting well to a video of a hack to repair worn-out cricket bats, I renamed the channel Sportshala. I kept changing genres every time I felt my viewers were losing interest.”
By 2019, he had to pick between a cushy job that would pay ₹1.5 lakh a month, and continuing as a YouTuber for less than half that sum. “The entrepreneurship bug had already bitten me so took a big leap of faith and moved home from Roorkee. I brought seven friends on board and we decided to put out a video a day.” They did exactly that, with no exceptions, for 18 months. (The team now uploads a video every two days).
The more revenue his videos earned, the stranger and bolder they became. “We started doing destruction videos of road-rollers running over motorcycles, cars being dropped into wells, TV sets being crushed by cement mixers. These always grab eyeballs,” Sharma says. “We also do prank videos, travel videos and challenge videos to ensure that the content never gets boring or repetitive.”
Sharma currently owns a rundown truck, a road-roller, a bus, and about a dozen second-hand cars that will be more or less destroyed in upcoming videos. He’s also bought a high-end Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle that he uses (very carefully) to draw eyeballs.
His most expensive videos, the destruction ones, cost about ₹1.5 lakh each to make, and earn him three to four times as much in revenue, he says.
This is it for him. There’s no looking back. “Like everything else, this lifestyle too comes at a price,” he says. Being a celebrity YouTuber means having fans show up at his door from time to time, having tracked him down using Google Maps and clues from his videos. He is forced to change his phone number every few months to avoid desperate calls seeking employment, guidance and, sometimes, marriage.
He’s had to interrupt this interview three times, to finish work on his next video, which has been carefully planned and timed. When he isn’t shooting, he’s ideating or researching. What kind of downtime does he get? None, he says. The race is endless.
“Sometimes I wish I could reclaim a part of my old life, but this is the destiny I have chosen for myself and I will give it my all.”
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