Nine-year-old Kenyan boy teaching computer hacks

From left ro right, Francis Muchiri, Megan Wambura and Elvis Njagi. [Denis Kibuchi, Standard]

"When we gave in, there was this particular day I was transporting a computer. He is very inquisitive, so he started asking me questions like, 'You know what, I can even help you repair it.' To stop that back and forth, I told him, 'Fine, I will come tomorrow and we shall repair it together'", says Ben.

That was a big (but good) mistake, as Elvis spent the rest of the weekend pressuring his father about it, until Muchiri called Ben about it, wondering what they would do.

"We already knew that he was passionate about computers but we did not know where to start," says Ben.

"Remember we were doing this so that we could stop him from nagging because it had become problematic. At one point when I wanted to buy something sometimes I would even go to another shop because I had a case to answer in this one! So we started the channel on March 27. It was meant to stop the nagging but that just made it worse."

Elvis was hooked. He explains that his father came up with the name 'Evolve.'

"Then I came up with the idea of 'with Elvis'. So it became Evolve with Elvis," says Elvis.

They made an error in the name, writing it as 'Evolve', but you have to wait a month to change the name on TikTok. When they tried to do it, the audience was in an uproar and said they preferred the first name, it was more unique.

"It was a beautiful mistake," says Ben.

It could also have been Evolve with Elvo but Elvis preferred his name in full, so it stayed. Muchiri says that in that first week, they decided that if they got 1,000 followers in one month it would be good.

"But shock on us," he says. Elvis' third video would be about flipping windows, but none of them anticipated it would also flip their world around.

"When the third video went up, we hit 70,000 followers in 12 hours. When we started, he was doing it alone. There was nothing special about the third video other than the fact that there was a visitor called Megan. She was the game-changer. It hit 2 million views in 12 hours on Easter Sunday," says Ben.

Elvis' father, Muchiri, calls the video magical, still uncertain how exactly it happened. The video did not pick up the day it was uploaded. It had been up for four days before it suddenly went viral.

"We made it, then we forgot about it. It was on Easter Sunday and I started seeing a lot of traffic on TikTok. In a minute I was getting like 1,000 followers and I was asking myself what was happening. I called Ben and he had switched off his phone. I told him to go and see what was happening on TikTok," says Muchiri.

The producer, Ben, explains that the video continues to do its magic, as two weeks ago, three months after it went up, the video suddenly shot up from 2.9 to 3.9 million views in a few hours.

He now has a team of producers, a manager (his dad), introducer (Megan) and they joke that Elvis is their employer.

"Now it is no longer to quiet Elvis. It is serious business. That is how the team was formed. We had to have a serious discussion. We had an audience that needed a video every two days," says Makau.

His audience is very supportive and they donated $600 (Sh84,720) to buy him a new computer since he was using an old computer that ran on the now-outdated Windows 7. They shoot around five videos at a go, uploading three to five per week. Initially, it took them three hours to shoot, but they have whittled it down to one and a half hours. Ben explains that each 30-second video takes four hours to edit, and has to be done in three takes - where Elvis is speaking, recording what is happening on the screen and recording the keyboard.

Elvis will also start teaching coding, how to make an app, which he is learning, and will move on to artificial intelligence. He has partnered with Virtual Learning Solutions (VLS), a global Microsoft Education training partner, to learn coding.

After our interview, he spent the better part of the day with VLS Executive Director Ann Wanjiru, who took him through a 12-step coding process through solving fun puzzles using Minecraft and was awarded a certificate of completion. What is the best part about all this for Elvis? "I get to learn some new things about the computer and people always say that I am awesome, I teach them new things. They make me feel happy," he says.