My biggest hurdle was explaining to my parents what I wanted to do and how I can make a career in it: Anshu “Gamerfleet” Bisht
Success as a video game content creator didn’t come to Anshu Bisht and his channel Gamerfleet in a fortnight.
His road to 300k+ subscribers was laid with some of the toughest hurdles, and Gamerfleet had to grind for years before reaching the notoriety he has today.
With just a bit of luck along the way, and chance encounters with some of the most notable faces in the industry, Gamerfleet has grown to be one of the biggest video game YouTube channels in India.
In an exclusive conversation with Sportskeeda Esports’ Abhishek Mallick, Anshu opens up about the initial years of Gamerfleet and what inspires him to keep grinding even today.
Here is an excerpt of the conversation.
Q. Anshu, why don’t we start by having you tell our readers a bit about yourself. Who is Anshu Bisht outside the persona of GamerFleet?
Gamerfleet: I’m just an introvert who gets awkward in most social gatherings. I am a different person filled with confidence and fun when it comes to GamerFleet, but I’m very shy when I’m Anshu.
Q. Can you shed light on some of the thoughts and visions that went behind your YouTube channel? How did you get started, and what inspired you at the time to keep grinding against all odds?
Gamerfleet: So, it was back in 2017 when I got my first Jio sim and entered the world of YouTube. I consumed a lot of content, and after watching some of the gaming video creators like Hemant_t & Pewdiepie, I wanted to do something like them. In the first year, I didn’t even know I could earn money from it, too. It was pure passion and love.
Q. Tell us about some of the hurdles that you faced along the way. What were some of the biggest challenges that your channel had to overcome during the nascent months?
Gamerfleet: The biggest one has to be explaining to my parents what I wanted to do and how I can make this a career. As I’m from a family background, where education was meant to be my priority, my parents wanted to give me all they never had.
So it was pretty hard to explain that I wanted to play games while I would earn from it. The second has to be me buying a PC on my own after completing school.
I'm from a lower-middle-class family where my father makes roughly 15k per month, so I could not demand such things from him. So, I gave tuition to elementary school children, saved money for six months, and bought a second-hand pc for around 7k.
Q. There was a sudden boom in viewership and subscriptions on your channel, right after you won the Fall Guys tournament against some of the top Indian YouTubers. Can you walk us through the event and how you felt about the success that followed?
Gamerfleet: I was actually introduced to Fall Guys by Samay Raina, and to be honest, and in the beginning, I was playing it just to impress him.
Later, I got to know that Tanmay Bhat gave my name to NODWIN for this tournament. So I was basically the YouTuber with the least subscribers in the roaster and known only by a few.
So, playing in the tournament alongside all the creators I’ve seen itself was a massive deal for me, but my goal was always to win the tournament and make Tanmay bhai feel that he didn’t make a mistake giving my name among such prominent YouTubers. So, I felt relieved after it, and it changed a lot of things for me.