The story Beyond Subjects is an ongoing journey of two individuals who wanted to be cool by starting a YouTube channel in the 8th grade which, in fact, they did but, also ended up creating a plain looking first generation website with the same name as the YouTube channel, “SinghTube Studios”. I along with my dear friend Harmohit Singh went on with this project as if it was a multibillion-dollar corporate project. Fun fact, we didn’t pay a dime for like four years since the day we began.
Our YouTube channel started out with a bang, at least that’s what I like to think about the 300 views I got in the first two weeks on the first video I published, but eventually, in like a month I realized it was a difficult task to produce a good-looking video with valuable content without any financial input. Moreover, Harmohit wasn’t much into the idea of YouTube which eventually led to me falling out of the motivation to continue.
Harmohit had already made a basic website for the channel on blogger.com so by the time our interest in YouTube died our priority shifted to learning about how to make a good website. We started posting content on the website which, by the way, wasn’t at all original. We were 14yr old prepubescent teenagers with zero knowledge of copyrights and piracy. We posted links that allowed viewers to download pirated apps, movies, and games. Thanks to being Indians, we had no clue that it was a violation. We did this for like a year or so until one of my cousins living abroad enlightened me about the consequences of our actions as per law. The very next day we sent our website into oblivion. It was heartbreaking but undoubtedly the right thing to do.
Then we started out again, the SinghTube Studios 2.0, but with a new name ‘Turrbaun’. To this day we don’t know what it meant, maybe it just sounded cool at that moment. This second attempt with a rebranding was a learning phase. We had a website, rather a series of websites on blogger and WordPress but, none of them stuck around for long. We experimented with codes, improving our methods to make the user experience better. We had websites but didn’t have a purpose for them.
We
messed around with codes for like a whole year, renaming the website one more
time as AENTM Corporation, where AENTM stood for Advanced Media Network of
Technology and Media. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? Even with this horrendously
funny rebranding, we had no idea what to do on the websites. By that time our 9th
grade was almost over and so was our enthusiasm for the website. But luckily during
those last days of 9th grade, my interaction increased with a few
great teachers who become my mentors. Mrs. Shefali Sehgal and Mrs. Amarharpreet
Kaur were two of the best Language teachers at our school who ignited the spark
of creative writing in me. With their efforts and support, I wrote my first
articles on spirituality. In the last 4 months of 9th grade, I had
written 5-6 Punjabi articles and 2-3 English articles which were beyond
academic requirements and of about fifteen hundred words.
When 10th grade began, Mrs. Amarharpreet met me on the first day and pitched the idea of having a platform where people could post content related to Punjabi culture. Immediately I realized that finally, we might have a purpose for our website. When I reached home that day, I called Harmohit and suggested that we should be pursuing this idea. His reply wasn’t really the one I was looking for. He asserted that he wasn’t really inclined towards making the site for cultural topics, rather he wanted it to be about something tech. I agreed with his point and proposed making a new website focused on cultural topics and making it a subsidiary of AENTM Corporation as if it would have made it a legit corporation. He liked the idea but didn’t want to spend time on making a new website. Meanwhile, I was very eager to move forward as finally I had a purpose for a website. That’s how the first generation Beyond Subjects was born, which at that time didn’t go by this name. Harmohit eventually hopped in and improved the theme and interface before the website was published.
The website was named “Viraasat-E-Anmol” which meant “heritage and culture are priceless”. It was the first time we spent any money; we bought a domain ‘viraasat.org’. We operated Viraasat-E-Anmol as a standalone website for a total of 3 years before it was finally merged with AENTM Corporation, which was obviously rebranded once again as Beyond Subjects in March 2022. Today we have a category on Beyond Subjects that has the same name and contains literature such as poems and spiritual articles including all the original content which was posted previously on that website.
Today we continue to run this website without any foreseeable rebranding or shutdowns as we have a perfect name resonating with our intentions for our website and for I am enthusiastic about putting my thoughts out in public as unfiltered as possible (yes we have a category named Unfiltered too). As for Harmohit, he’s a tech head always ready to make improvements to the code, making the existing things on the site better.
As I said at the start, the story of Beyond Subjects is an ongoing journey of two individuals who ended up making a website that now boasts about 40,000 views a year without any considerable monetary investment. Two friends who are growing together and, with god’s grace, will continue to grow together for years to come.
Godspeed.
Co-founder
