Hello Steemians! My name is Phalgun Shenoy and I am here after my friend @firepower introduced me to steemit. I got very excited when I got to know about steemit, a blockchain based social media platform, where you get tokens called ‘Steem’ when you contribute to the ecosystem. What’s more interesting is that at the time of writing this, it’s at the 26th position in terms of market capital ($252 mil) and is trading at $1.04 per Steem. I must be dumb to not have started posting already on probably the most rewarding blogging platform of the current time, but better late than never, here I am!
I am originally from a coastal city in India called Mangalore, the same place where @firepower is from. Coincidence? I think not. Currently, I’m residing in Bangalore, which has made me realize the true value of Mangalore. Bangalore is also known as India’s Silicon Valley and is a hotspot for startups. Even my startup, Marvelens Studios, which deals in video production services, is based out of Bangalore. Bangalore is exploding with population & pollution, and it’s not the best place to live on Earth that it used to be once upon a time, I heard. That said, you’ll love it if you’re into clubbing because Bangalore has the largest number of pubs in India. Due to this, you get very good doughnuts over here.
I got in love with computers when I got my first desktop, an 800 MHz intel Celeron, in 8th grade. Playing games on it didn’t interest me much and soon my parents got me a broadband connection. Yeah, that’s right, I was born in 1992 and I’ve never used a dial-up connection. Soon I started exploring various software and stumbled upon Microsoft Frontpage and I got busy designing websites. Exploring deeper got me introduced to the blogging world in 9th grade when I first discovered Wordpress. Wordpress was at a very nascent stage back then and I had it up and running on a server. My blogs were doing well and I was earning a (very) decent amount of money from sponsored articles until 2008 when the Great Recession occurred and it literally wiped off advertisers from the market.
Since then, I’ve mined & sold AdWords coupons on DigitalPoint, took up freelance programming jobs, done eBay affiliate marketing on a large scale, ran an automobile blog (torqueinduction.com), became a professional writer (thedroidguy.com/author/Phalgun), a Software Engineer for an Indian MNC named Infosys, and a YouTuber. My journey in the video space started about 6 years ago when my friend Naeem Mohammed shot a video of me reviewing his car with his new DSLR camera. It was an impromptu satirical car review and people loved to watch me blabber nonsense. I started making videos like this one:
Soon, I made a sketch with my friend Fardhan Ahmed, where we also learned how to edit in Sony Vegas, a software I highly recommend to somebody who’s interested in making videos and has no clue.
At a certain point in time in 2015, I was very unsatisfied by the kind of work I was doing at Infosys, and I think it’s a phase which every Indian IT professional goes through. My IT job was among the “30 Things That Made Me Cringe”, which made me want to join BuzzFeed, and I felt it was relevant because I had been writing articles for a long time and I had a funny brain. All the blogging experience I had was in the technology category, and I wanted to show something relevant. With some help of a colleague, Naresh Kumar, and armed with a new DSLR, I headed to Bangalore to make a comedy video. I had seen Sahil Khattar from BeingIndian do voxpop videos, and I wanted to replicate something similar. Naresh and I hit the streets of Bangalore (MG Road) and I started questioning people about Gandhi Jayanti and chatting with random people, while Naresh kept rolling (camera). I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.
The video got featured on scoopwhoop.com on October 2nd, and that was a major win for us and the video ended up getting about 35k views that day. We headed to Bangalore again and shot a video about Dusshera, which didn’t do well. Not losing any steem, we shot one more video about the November Blackout Hoax that was going on then.
The video was featured on BuzzFeed and StoryPick. Again, it was a major win for me as it got featured on BuzzFeed. Now I was sure I could go to BuzzFeed with a cool portfolio. Soon, I was on a call with somebody from Google, encouraging me to go ahead and make more videos. Then came a call from Culture Machine, the company behind BeingIndian YouTube channel! LOL. They wanted me to freelance for their new South Indian YouTube channel called PutChutney, and all I had to do is continue doing my voxpops and deliver one video weekly. The best part was that I could still keep my IT job, but soon I started finding it hectic because IT job + shooting + editing started taking a toll on my mental health. One had to go, and IT job was the obvious choice.
Post that, I started a company named Marvelens Studios Pvt. Ltd., along with Naresh and a good friend, Satish and we produce corporate videos, advertisements, and engaging videos for brands. My latest voxpop video was for a brand called Tinder. Hah! I got right swiped by Tinder.
I’m also currently working on a new satirical show called What The Week, along with a major brand called YourStory.
As visible, there has been a major improvement in the production quality from when I started, and I’m working towards improving the quality every single day. A lot is left to be achieved and I see a mountain ahead.
Oh and, did I mention that I’m a biker as well?
On Steemit, I’ll be regularly sharing my comedy videos, my thoughts on current affairs, and some resourceful articles. I currently hold no cryptocurrency, and I see me joining steemit as my first step into the Crypto land. Please follow me @shenoy and stay tuned; and wear helmet.