The food YouTuber who started with a phone and no camera

Growing up in Bahawal Nagar

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Rana Hamza Saif to the studio after what he notes was a five-month wait to get him in. The conversation begins, as Muzamil’s conversations often do, at the very beginning — not the YouTube channel, but the city.

Rana was born and raised in Bahawal Nagar, a district in South Punjab that he says people routinely confuse with Bahawalpur, which is a two-hour drive away. The local economy runs on agriculture — cotton, rice, and large landholdings. His father was a physics professor at a degree college in the city. Rana lived there until 2016, when he was around nineteen years old.

Muzamil asks how much of the wider world Rana had seen before leaving. The answer is more than you might expect. His parents made a deliberate effort to take both brothers — Rana and his older brother Hassan — to Lahore and Islamabad every one or two months from as early as first or second grade, partly because relatives lived there, partly to give the boys exposure. Still, Rana is clear that his world before university was essentially Bahawal Nagar, with occasional visits to Lahore, Islamabad, and Faisalabad.

The internet arriving in a small city

Muzamil draws a parallel to his own experience of discovering the internet around 1999 and 2000, describing the feeling of realising the world had suddenly opened up. For Rana, the sequence was similar but slightly later — the slow mobile connections, the EDGE network on early phones, the gradual realisation that you could look anything up.

“Honestly,” Rana says, “jo hum matlab koi side areas hain jo main cities nahin hain, wahan par Google kar leta tha ke yaar kya cheez kaisi hai — aur woh hota tha ke yaar shuruaat mein to bilkul hota tha ke yeh to sab kuch bata raha hai.” (Honestly, in areas that aren’t main cities, you’d Google things and at first it genuinely felt like — this thing knows everything.)

His ambition at that point was straightforward: do a BBA, then an MBA, major in marketing, and become a businessman. He was clear-eyed enough to admit that, like most people in Pakistan, he had no precise idea what that actually meant in practice.

The LAC miss and the UCP years

Rana had set his sights on LUMS — he researched it, worked toward the merit requirement, and fell short by two percent. He moved on without much drama and enrolled at the University of Central Punjab for a BBA. He graduated with a 2.8 GPA, which Muzamil cheerfully contextualises by revealing his own was 2.2.

UCP, Rana says, was strict when he was there — no soap in the bathrooms, tight discipline — and has since opened up considerably. By the time he was finishing his degree, attending classes regularly had become genuinely difficult because travel was already running in parallel.

The more important detail from the university years is what happened in the first or second semester. Rana had been using Snapchat for about six or seven months before arriving in Lahore. Living independently for the first time, he spent a few days eating out and watching films, and then on the third or fourth day picked up his phone and recorded a Snapchat story. The topic: he had just returned from Dubai a month earlier and been struck by the fact that traffic stops for pedestrians. “Pakistan mein aisa kyun nahin ho raha?” he asked on camera. That video is still the first upload on his main channel.

140 kg to 83 kg, and the weight loss nobody should copy

Before the channel story continues, Rana mentions in passing that he weighed 140 kg at one point and came down to 83 kg. Muzamil stops him. How?

Rana explains that during his metric summer holidays, a cousin who played under-18 cricket invited him to a stadium training camp. Rana joined the running session. After three or four steps, he says, he was convinced he might not survive. That moment was the turning point. He lost the weight through methods he explicitly says are not recommended, and he has since gained back around eight to ten kilograms as travel and work have accelerated.

Building the channel: from 8,000 to 180,000

The YouTube channel started with the Snapchat stories repurposed onto Facebook and then YouTube. The first year produced around twenty-five to thirty videos, 7,900 subscribers, and views in the three-to-five thousand range per video. Rana describes it plainly: nobody was watching.

The shift came when he started doing food tours of Pakistani cities — travelling on weekends to places like Peshawar and filming what people ate there. He had grown up knowing Bahawal Nagar’s food and Lahore’s food, but had no idea what was famous in other cities. That curiosity became the format.

“Jab woh ek dam mujhe views dikhe na kuch din baad, yeh video food tours upload karne ke baad, to woh the 25k, 30k, 32k,” he says. (When I checked the views a few days after uploading those food tour videos, they were 25,000, 30,000, 32,000.)

From 8,000 subscribers, the channel reached roughly 180,000. Muzamil notes that this is approximately a 20x growth, and asks what changed. Rana’s answer is that the niche had crystallised: audiences understood that this was the guy who travels, eats, and shows you places. The identity was legible.

The critics, the circle, and who stays

At some point during the early growth, people from Rana’s social circle began to mock what he was doing. He does not name anyone, but he describes one person specifically — someone he respected, from a well-regarded circle — who publicly defended him against the criticism. That moment stayed with him.

“Woh log jo is se pehle wale the, wahi aaj mere saath hain,” he says. (The people who were there before all this — they are still with me today.)

The ones who mocked him and later came back around were welcomed politely but did not re-enter the inner circle. Rana is direct about this: the people who support you in the early stages are the ones worth keeping. Later in the discussion, Muzamil frames this as the value of having people who can strip away the public persona and just connect with you as a human being — and Rana agrees completely.

COVID, the Sargodha video, and 2.1 million views

By early 2020, the channel was growing steadily. Then COVID arrived and everything stopped. Rana went back to Bahawal Nagar, tried making indoor content, watched his views drop, and kept going anyway — two or three videos a month.

When restrictions eased in September 2020, he made a trip to Sargodha. The video got 2.1 million views in one week.

Muzamil asks what he thinks caused it. Rana’s answer is that the niche had been established firmly enough that when travel resumed, the audience was primed. The food tour identity had been built slowly enough that it held. Every video after that Sargodha trip performed strongly. “Dobara se kaam pehle se bhi tez ho raha tha,” he says. (The work was moving faster than it ever had before.)

He uses an analogy that Muzamil clearly enjoys: paye — trotters — cooked slowly overnight taste completely different from paye rushed in two hours. The slow cook is the point.

The second channel, Shapek Gang, and the logic of separation

By the time the main channel had around five lakh subscribers, Rana was feeling the pull to make different kinds of content — travel vlogs, personal videos, things that had nothing to do with food. He tried a few on the main channel. The audience pushed back, not aggressively, but clearly: this is not what we come here for.

His solution was a second channel called Shapek Gang — named after a word he uses constantly in his videos, a kind of verbal tic that had become part of his identity. The logic was clean: the main channel stays focused on food and city travel; the second channel can be anything — motorcycle tours, vlogs, random ideas. The Hunza bike series and an Egypt series both ran on Shapek Gang.

“Agar wahan par koi cheez random hai to woh main cheez ko monopolize nahin kar rahi hai,” he explains. (If something random goes on that channel, it doesn’t dilute the main one.)

YouTube as a business, and why diversification is not optional

Muzamil asks the harder question: can YouTube actually be a full-time business in Pakistan? Can you employ people, grow, and rely on it as a primary income source?

Rana’s answer is nuanced. He has built a small team — double-camera shoots are now standard, travel is collaborative. But he is also clear that no single platform should be the whole structure. COVID proved that any business can collapse. YouTube could be banned. A TV channel could close.

“Yaar at the end of the day your job is not YouTube,” Muzamil says. “Your job is becoming a food connoisseur.” Rana agrees immediately, and adds that he is actively working toward e-commerce — online stores, products, anything that builds a revenue base independent of any single platform.

He is also candid about the creator landscape more broadly. The names at the top of Pakistani YouTube, he says, are mostly the same names from two or three years ago. New voices are not breaking through at the same rate. He mentions Daud Shami and Hassan Raheem as exceptions, but says the space needs new energy — new niches, new formats, new people willing to do something genuinely different.

Pakistan thirty years from now

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Rana to look ahead. He is twenty-four, nearly twenty-five. Pakistan will be a hundred years old in thirty years. Having grown up in a small city, travelled across the country, and now seen parts of the world — what does he think Pakistan looks like in 2052?

Rana is careful. He says he stays out of politics in his videos and will stay out here too. But he will talk about people.

He describes arriving in the north of Pakistan and watching the sunrise over a mountain from a hotel window and feeling something close to awe. Then he describes what else he has seen: drugs becoming fashionable in smaller cities, talent going unchannelled, communities in backward areas that can be genuinely dangerous — not in a cinematic way, but in a quiet, limiting way that he himself only understood once he left.

“Itna talent pada hai Pakistan mein lekin sahi jagah use nahin ho raha,” he says. (There is so much talent in Pakistan but it is not being used in the right places.)

His prescription is simple and personal: keep good company, stay humble, do your work with enjoyment and peace. Travel, he says, is the fastest cure for arrogance. “Jab aap travel karna shuru karte hain aapko lagta hai ke you are no one. Tum kuch bhi nahin ho.” (When you start travelling you realise you are no one. You are nothing.)

Muzamil closes by noting something he says he always tries to name when he sees it: Rana’s character. It is, he says, a dying quality. Rana’s response is to deflect the compliment immediately — which, in its own way, proves the point.