Akshika Golya, a content creator, social media strategist, and founder of Last Seen IRL from Jaipur, has worked with 150+ brands, spoken at colleges, and built a community event series that brings strangers together in real life, all built independently from the age of 19.
Akshika Golya: From Bullied Schoolgirl to Creator, Strategist, and Community Builder, A Journey Built on Believing in People
Akshika Golya has always wanted to be involved.
Even in school, she volunteered for activities, took on responsibilities, and somehow always found herself in the middle of things. She was the Deputy Head Girl. From the outside, she was always considered an extrovert. But there was another side to that phase of her life that the title did not show.
Akshika Golya went through a period where she was bullied and felt quite alone.
That experience changed something in her. It made her realise how much words, opinions, and the way people treat each other can actually affect someone at a level that goes far deeper than the surface. Slowly, Akshika Golya became more vocal about what she believed in. She started learning to speak up, take a stand, and create spaces where people could feel heard.
That realisation, born from one of the most difficult periods of her life, became one of the biggest reasons she eventually found her way into content creation.
Starting at 19 With No Roadmap
Akshika Golya started creating content at 19, at a time when she had no clear idea where her life was going. She was studying psychology because she genuinely cared about people and wanted to understand them better, partly because she knew what it felt like to struggle with her own mental health and feel like she did not quite belong.
At the same time, content creation opened up an entirely different world for Akshika Golya. She taught herself editing, started working with brands, and slowly built her own identity online. What began as something she was simply experimenting with eventually became her work.
There was no mentor handing her a plan. There was no perfectly designed career path. Akshika Golya figured it out by doing, by trying things, failing at some of them, learning from all of them, and continuing to move even when the direction was not entirely clear.
150 Brands, College Invites, and a Career Built Independently
Over the last few years, Akshika Golya has worked with more than 150 brands, served as a social media strategist for multiple Jaipur-based businesses, and been invited to colleges to judge events and speak about content creation and social media. Those achievements are real and significant. But Akshika Golya is honest about the fact that the journey did not always feel like progress from the inside.
There was a point where she felt extremely lost. She was doing things, achieving things, and still asking herself: what am I actually doing with my life? She did not have a conventional career path figured out. There were moments when she questioned whether choosing a completely different route was the right decision.
But somewhere along the way, Akshika Golya arrived at a realisation that shifted everything. Maybe she did not need to fit into one particular box.
She had always loved communication, people, creativity, experiences, and bringing people together. And that eventually led her to something that felt much bigger than content creation alone.
Last Seen IRL: Building a Community in Real Life
Last Seen IRL was born from a feeling that Akshika Golya knew personally and deeply: the feeling of being alone, and the desire to create spaces where people did not have to feel that way.
She wanted to create something in Jaipur that went beyond social media. A space where people could actually meet, talk, make new friends, and experience something together in real life. Not a digital community. A physical one.
In just a few months, Akshika Golya has already hosted multiple experiences and brought people together around a table who may have otherwise never met. Watching strangers walk in and leave having made genuine connections has been, in her own words, one of the most surreal parts of her journey so far.
For Akshika Golya, Last Seen IRL is not simply a business venture. It is a personal response to something she lived through: the loneliness, the bullying, the years of not quite feeling like she belonged. It is the community she wished she had when she needed it most, now being built by her for others.
What Four Years of Building Independently Taught Her
Akshika Golya has built all of this independently over four years. No perfectly planned roadmap. No institutional backing. A lot of figuring things out as she went, taking risks, learning from failures, and trusting herself even when she was not completely sure where she was headed.
She does not claim to have her entire life figured out today. But she has stopped seeing that uncertainty as something to be ashamed of.
If anything, the journey of Akshika Golya has taught her that sometimes you find your direction by simply continuing to move.
From being a schoolgirl who wanted to be involved in everything, to building a content career, developing a social media strategy practice, speaking at colleges, and now creating a community in Jaipur, the one thing that has remained constant throughout the story of Akshika Golya is her belief in people.
That belief is what was formed during the hard years in school. That belief is what drove her into psychology and then into content creation. That belief is what built Last Seen IRL.
And that belief, she says, is what she is still building toward, not just a career, but a life and a community that feels meaningful.
