BENGALURU: With 14 million Facebook followers, 1.5 million Instagram followers and 180,000 Twitter followers, RajnikantVsCIDJokes (RVCJ) has managed to make a name for itself on social media. There are around 800k followers from Bengaluru alone on their FB page, with more than 60 per cent of their subscribers in the age group of 18 to 35 years. “There are teenagers, students and office-goers who tend to get frustrated after a hard day’s work. They want someone to make them laugh to relieve some tension,” says Shahid Javed Ansari, founder and CEO, who is an MBA graduate.
Engineer Harpreet Singh Bajwa, co-founder, adds, “Our content is a perfect mix of humour, information and facts. Since we know the right ingredients in terms of what interests viewers, making content viral is not a big task for us. We make dull and boring topics interesting too.”If Rajnikant and ACP Pradyuman from crime show CID were to wrestle, who do you think would win? RVCJ’s co-founder and MBA graduate Ankit Mor, says, “We all know the answer to that, it will most probably be Rajini sir, but Pradyuman may spring a surprise with this tactics, you never know.”
The journey so far wasn’t easy. The three founders, Shahid, Harpreet and Ankit, who call themselves ‘three idiots’, left their high-profile jobs to dedicate themselves full-time to their website, which was launched in October 2014. “Launching the website was easy, but taking the decision to stay dedicated to it full-time, was difficult. That is when we realised that this venture needed full-time effort, and all three founders decided to dedicate ourselves completely,” says Shahid. Ankit adds, “The biggest challenge was to maintain a balance. This is something that many start-ups today are lacking, and hence, they end up getting themselves into horrible situations. Balance between your work and personal life is something that determines success.”
And keeping balance wasn’t that easy for Ankit. “At times, even I felt low when many of my friends, colleagues and family members asked me to get a ‘real job’. But somehow, I kept going, believing that this would click,” he adds. They say the idea for the page was not planned. “I was an Orkut migrant on Facebook, who was interested in humourous content.
Rajinikant sir’s movie Robot had released back then, and many social media groups were quoting and using the film’s dialogues for creating content for their pages,” says Shahid. He adds, “Also, at the time, CID was rocking the entire industry by doing promotions with Salman Khan for his upcoming movies, such as Wanted and Bodyguard. Every page on Facebook and on various groups started rolling out memes. And that’s when he was struck with the idea of merging both together. “And from there, within three minutes, the most important chapter of my life was scripted – Rajnikant V/s CID Jokes,” he signs off.