Royal Oak Cabin (Build in Public)

Rajan posted his first video on August 30, 2024, with no script and no plan — just placed a tripod in his eBay shoe-selling office at the University of Virginia and filmed himself working. He did this every day for the first 20 days, shooting 30–40 minutes of raw footage and cutting it down to ~1 minute. His very first viewers were UVA classmates who found him organically through Instagram's geographic algorithm. He responded manually to every single comment and DM, and even visited commenters' profiles to find something personal to reference — if someone posted cars, he'd say "nice cars." He also physically approached people at bars who recognized him and bought them drinks, treating every real-world encounter as community building. For the first 3–4 months he documented his shoe-reselling business (thrifting and selling on eBay), growing to roughly 30K followers. He never strictly boxed himself into the shoe niche — he occasionally posted about a rental property he bought and other topics — which meant his audience was following *him*, not just the shoe content. This made the later pivot to real estate painless. He also joined Content Academy (run by Mino Lee) early on, primarily for the community of small creators rather than formal instruction. He bounced ideas with peers, and credits most of his craft development to simply making videos and learning by doing.

University of Virginia setting provided a highly visual, credible backdrop and an initial captive geographic audience via Instagram's local algorithm. Five years of hands-on eBay shoe-selling gave him a ready-made niche and genuine expertise to document. His tennis teammate brought him the real estate opportunity that became his breakout series. Partner Renzo handles all construction/operations, freeing Rajan to focus 100% on content distribution — a clean founder split most solo creators lack.

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Posting 2–3 times per week during the shoe series produced slower, more linear growth compared to daily posting. Taking long breaks between posts (up to 7 days) limited momentum. Rajan explicitly notes that random viral/meme-style videos do not convert to followers or series investment, and he deliberately avoids them as a primary tactic. He has also largely neglected TikTok and YouTube Shorts, which he acknowledges as a platform-concentration risk.