We had the good fortune of connecting with Jed Caluag and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jed, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally?
I learned how to film and edit videos in middle school after watching YouTubers like Ryan Higa. I’ve been making all sorts of videos since then, but it was during covid that I entered the YouTube lifestyle vlogging space.

I made videos of my social and work life in Los Angeles, which included content of my day-to-day as a software engineer. After about 7 months of almost weekly vlogs, I decided to give full-time YouTube a shot and quit my coding job.

I decided to pursue this route because YouTube was turning into a sustainable job, and it was also a dream of mine since middle school. I figured that if it didn’t work out, I could always get another coding job. This was in 2021, and I’ve been full-time since then.

Please tell us more about your work. We’d love to hear what sets you apart from others, what you are most proud of or excited about. How did you get to where you are today professionally. Was it easy? If not, how did you overcome the challenges? What are the lessons you’ve learned along the way. What do you want the world to know about you or your brand and story?
Two of the main things I work on is my YouTube channel under the name @jedcal, and my startup RateMyDorm.com. The creative side of me has always loved making videos. I post content about my lifestyle, my job, and my fitness. However I do have a passion for coding as well, and other than YouTube, entrepreneurship in tech is also in the big picture for me.

RateMyDorm.com is a college dorm review website that I built and grew on my own. College students can rate their dorms, upload photos, and read student reviews about the dorms in their school. RateMyDorm has been seeing a lot of growth lately and it’s been great to see the site provide value to college students.

What helped me get to where I am today is identifying gaps in the market. For YouTube, I noticed there were only a few software engineer/lifestyle YouTubers. This fact led to a lot of my software engineer videos doing well in the algorithm back in 2021. For RateMyDorm, I was just trying to solve a problem. I noticed there was RateMyProfessors for professor reviews, but no website to rate college dorms, so I decided to build the platform myself.

I am really grateful to everyone who’s watched my YouTube videos and supported me. If there’s something I’ve learned along the way, it’s that an online personal brand can be really powerful and lead to plenty of opportunities outside of video-making.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’m really grateful for my mom and dad so this shoutout is for them. From buying me my first camera to supporting me throughout college as I majored in computer science, they’ve always supported what I wanted to do and gave me the freedom to follow my passions. Since they are entrepreneurs themselves, they were also fully supportive of my decision to go full-time on YouTube. Definitely couldn’t have made it this far without them!

Website: ratemydorm.com

Instagram: instagram.com/jedcal

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jedcal

Youtube: youtube.com/@jedcal

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