New Delhi: Tech creator and influencer Naman Deshmukh found his interest in technology and gadgets at a very young age. From tearing apart devices to searching the web about a product to know more about them, Naman had a humble beginning to his content creation journey. The situation was such that while he was trying to balance both his work and his passion, the pandemic forced him to sit at home. Fortunately, the situation gave Naman more time to explore his passion.
With growing popularity, Naman decided to quit his job and pursue content creation as a full-time job. Today, with 2.7 million followers on his TechplusGadgets Instagram account, Naman is not only one of the most popular tech content creators, but has also been honored by meta as the content creator of the month.
in conversation with ABP Live During a video call, Naman shared his journey, discussed his secret to reaching a mass audience and how meta got to him.
Here are some excerpts from the interview:
What made you want to post videos about research and technology?
When I was in university, I was very involved in technology. Whenever there was a new product in the market, I was eager to learn about it. Since I didn’t have much money at that time, it was impossible to buy all the products. So I was doing research on the internet itself and trying to make videos. But there were foreign YouTubers who made videos about the new smartphones and talked about them to the audience. This further fueled my interest in technology.
What was your most popular reel that made a big splash in your follower base?
At first I focused on YouTube along with my business and then we went from 1,000 subscribers to 10,000 subscribers in four months and back to 50,000 subscribers in four to five months. And after 1,00,000 subscribers I changed jobs and moved to Bangalore, after which Covid hit and eventually I got the space and time to do what I wanted. Then I was asked why I was doing my job when the payment we were getting from YouTube was good enough. I started doing it when Instagram reels started trending. People were commenting and sharing which made me realize that there are more people here who want to watch videos. So, as the number of followers increased, I also got a few updates from Instagram.
Quitting your job and making the leap into tech content creation is a big leap. What made you take such a risk?
After a certain amount of follower growth, it got stuck because there wasn’t much growth. So I decided to quit my job and make content as a full-time job. That’s when I decided to create content to educate people about technology who aren’t that interested in technology. As a result, this led me to create videos in simple language so that everyone can understand, after that we got a big jump in our followers and within 6-7 months we had 1 million followers on Instagram.
Today, people are engaged in phone photography. So, which do you think is better for non-professional photographers than a DSLR or a mobile camera?
Honestly, you can’t compare the two because DSLR is a dedicated camera for photography, but at the same time phone cameras have reached a different level. People even make movies with the help of phone cameras. In fact, we also only use the iphone to make our reels. So I don’t think you need a DSLR if you are a short content creator. If you have a budget then it is good to buy a DSLR but if you are a beginner I think you can buy a smartphone worth 50,000-60,000 which will help you both in shooting and editing your videos.
On the other hand, if you are a professional photographer or videographer, I would suggest buying a camera.
Has Google/Meta contacted you to look better?
Not for looks. But what happens is that the meta keeps track of growing profiles and provides them with managers to solve problems. They have special classes that you can attend if you need to ask something or have a problem. At that time, my videos reached 30-40 million, so I opened a separate account on Facebook and started sharing my content. What happened on Facebook was that I only uploaded 30-40 videos and we reached 1 million followers, which was a pretty big deal. That’s when they noticed me because everything we did was organic, there was no advertising. This led to the meta recognizing us and they gave us a manager who announced that they nominated us for Creator of the Month. We had no hope because India itself has many creators. A few days later we received a letter saying that I was the creator of the month of November 2022.
What’s the craziest/weirdest request you’ve received from your followers?
Initially, people were asking a lot of questions about smartphones, what to buy and what not to buy. After that they started asking me about laptops – about 30-40 thousand laptops can be bought. Recently I have noticed that the questions are more about AI. People ask me if there is any trick to get all my tasks done automatically or my homework to be completed by itself. This is because I make a lot of videos about artificial intelligence and some of them are popular. There are new tools I’m making videos about, and I get a lot of weird questions about them because people want to do all their work with AI.
What works best for Indian audiences in terms of tech content?
My understanding is that you should be extremely simple and not deep in technology. If you really want your content to be viewed, you need to be very simple with your words and explain it to people in simple language. You won’t believe it, when we write scripts, we spend hours behind each word, looking for easy words that people can understand. But, maybe if you have a specific niche related to hard game content – then your audience is people who understand the game and everything, you can use technical terms. So it depends on who your target audience is.
How did you reach out to brands and get them to share their devices with you?
The first brand that arrived had emailed me first. They said they have a headset worth 1200 which they will share with me and I had to review it. At first, I thought it was a scam why would someone send me a product to review. When I asked for my address and phone number, I gave it as there was no harm in it, and within 1 week the package with the product arrived. Back then, it was a big deal for me to have a brand send me a product for free.
Gradually, brands continued to approach me for collaborations and product reviews. After some time I realized that we can even contact brands for product reviews. So, I organize PR contacts for brands, talk about me and ask if they are interested, they can send me products. Some would agree, some would not. Now, when you join a brand, you end up on their list, and so the cycle goes.