Gronkh is now one of the biggest German streamers on Twitch, but his path to the top was anything but easy. In his streams, he regularly gives insights into his difficult beginnings, when he had to fight for survival and find creative ways to make ends meet.
Who is Gronkh? Erik “Gronkh” Range (47) is undoubtedly one of the most influential personalities in the German gaming and streaming world. He regularly inspires a large fan base with his Let’s Play videos and entertaining live streams.
As a veteran of the German content creator scene, he celebrated his breakthrough with Minecraft Let’s Plays. Over a period of more than three years, he published 1,278 episodes, totaling over 21,000 minutes of gameplay.
You can find out more about Gronkh here:
Gronkh, the man with the voice – career and life of Germany’s most famous Let’s Player
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How was the streamer doing before he became successful? Gronkh is now one of the biggest and most influential content creators in Germany. But the path to this success was anything but easy for him.
Every now and then he talks in his streams about a time when he had to fight for daily survival. Back then, he says, he had to turn every penny over several times. He often didn’t know how he was going to finance his next meal. In one of his most recent live streams, Gronkh talks again about this difficult phase.
“Is this perhaps a wanted poster?”
What does the streamer confess now? During a recent stream, Gronkh received a surprising message from his chat: There was supposed to be a picture of him hanging in the cafeteria at the University of Braunschweig. This information initially surprised him. However, he quickly found a possible explanation.
The streamer says that he actually secretly ate in that very cafeteria, even though he never studied there. “The food was just very cheap, so I saved money,” he explains with a grin. He asks jokingly: “Is that a wanted poster?”
He posed as an employee of a tax office
Does he have any other methods? But Gronkh goes even further and reveals another creative method he used to save money during his training. At the time, he and a fellow trainee sneaked into the nearby tax office, took the elevator up and sat in the canteen there. The two of them pretended to be employees of the tax office: “We always pretended that we worked there.”
“When other people were there, we talked about things – I think we made a lot of noise by discussing financial matters or something else we still had to pursue,” says Gronkh.
But instead of appearing inconspicuous, he now believes that this made them even more suspicious. “I think they already knew that,” he admits. Nevertheless, they managed to regularly eat cheaply using this ruse.
Former Twitch streamer Ludwig Ahgren also reported in one of his streams how he cleverly got free food and drink in his job at Snapchat and was able to save money that way. You can find out more here: YouTube: 27-year-old millionaire tells how he was fired from Snapchat after stealing $2,500 worth of food