Meet techies Manali and Anshul who write code by day and turn YouTubers in the evenings, introducing netizens to their world of riddles and puzzles! Along with their day job, they run a successful YouTube channel ‘Logical Baniya’ (colloquial for local trader).
Here is an excerpt from our conversation with the ‘logical couple’ where Manali shares passionately about their “work baby”!
“As long as I have known him, Anshul has always loved to solve puzzles and riddles and the riddle bug caught me too, when I married him. We used to follow a YouTube channel for riddles where most riddles were in English with no accompanying animation. Anshul is very familiar with math puzzles and tricks to solving them and wanted to share it with everyone. For example, how do you remember formulae like the volume of a cube. Know a trick as it stays with you forever!
In October 2017, we created a riddle through an animated video and shared it with our family for fun. The family absolutely enjoyed solving it. We realised videos connect with audiences better when it comes to teaching and riddles make learning more fun. We made a conscious decision to make videos in Hindi due to our natural command over the language and to establish a better connection with people. We integrated math puzzles into a story riddle. That video got over 20K views!
Initially, it was more of a side hustle, just a fun way to earn extra income since YouTube paid for number of video views. Our days were spent coding in our offices and evenings, creating videos at our home. But as our subscriber base grew, we started seeing a huge potential in this fun based learning method. We spent time developing stories and integrating mathematical and scientific concepts that we could teach. Anshul’s love for writing stories came to use when we started embedding puzzles in the story. Animated video with puzzles was a novel concept for the Indian market and it created an even bigger buzz for our channel.
The techie in us helped to make full use of video analytics and answer the simple question of what works and what doesn’t. I remember when we started back in 2017, we used to upload 2 videos a week since we needed 3 to 4 days to make one, all the while holding our day jobs. But after we crossed 1 million subscribers in a year, we hired an animation specialist to help increase the frequency of our videos. We officially registered our company Mind Your Logic Digital Studio in November 2018 and I took the plunge and became a full-time entrepreneur. Our work family has grown to 6 now with a subscriber base of 2M and counting. We have since launched 7 Android and iOS apps for puzzles, stories and games. Aspiring to 1M+ downloads on the App now.
Initially it was just about creating a balance between a job and a hobby. We never imagined it would grow this big, let alone become an entrepreneurial venture! But we found our passion and decided to pursue it wholeheartedly. Who would have imagined we would be changing careers and working for ourselves! This is just the beginning and we are excited to explore where life takes us from here!”
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