In the past few years, social media platforms have opened avenues for artists from varied backgrounds to showcase their talent and many have also gained massive recognition and success. One such story is of Tejas and Ishpreet of DanceFit, who have now become the first dance YouTubers in India to achieve a milestone of 5 million subscribers. The duo from Nashik is not only dance sensation online but have also collaborated with many celebrities like Nora Fatehi, Guru Randhawa, Yo Yo honey Singh, Rakul Preet Singh, Divya Khosla Kumar. However, their journey to 5 million hasn’t been easy, but definitely inspirational.

Tejas Dhoke, a law graduate from Nashik and Ishpreet Dang who hails from a conservative Punjabi family from Sangamner always had a passion for dance. The duo finally quit their secure jobs in 2016 and took the plunge to pursue dancing and started taking classes in Nashik. While they had people enrolling, there was a lot of apprehension from many, and that’s when Tejas and Ishpreet started uploading their dance videos online to give the world a glimpse of their work. In 2018 Dance fit hit 100 k subscribers, but they were far from established. Recalling those days, Tejas said “We were paying rent of the studio from whatever we were earning and were also facing a lot of oppose from our families. There were times when we didn’t even have money to buy a meal and would spend nights at our studio itself. But making Youtube videos also pushed our classes which helped us get out of our worse situations. So crossing 100K was really mind-blowing for us.”

Tejas and Ishpreet shot all their videos in Nashik itself until one day they got a call from one of the agencies or label in Mumbai to collaborate with an artist, this left the duo dumbstruck and opened new avenues.

Talking about their journey Tejas said, “Our journey has not been easy. My mother passed away when I had started dancefit. On 13th day from her death, we launched our second youtube video.”

Ishpreet added, “There were times when I had to stop going home because of opposition from my family. Even today, Tejas and I don’t have a place to live in Mumbai. The day we have to shoot, we travel from Nashik to Mumbai for about 6 hours and then shoot for 6 hours and travel back. We as dancefit want to teach dance and entertain people. Spreading love and happiness through dance has always been our motive.”

Recently because of COVID, DanceFit underwent major changes, ” Our studio was on the verge of closing and we barely managed to keep it running. We had to let go of our team members because we could not pay them. However, in May we started online classes, which surprisingly got us a good response. We had 100s of students joining in from across the country. Because of them we could sustain it all and come back on track.