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Some stories are about strategy. This one is mostly about persistence.
Jack Friks dropped out of college during his final semester because he was convinced he would be a miserable employee. He wanted control of his time and his work. So he tried to make money online - for four years.
He tried print-on-demand. Affiliate blog posts. Over 2,000 YouTube videos in under two years. Crypto - which he made money from, then lost all of. He learned to code. He built an app that struggled to grow. Three months before his breakthrough, he broke down crying on a walk with his fiancée, convinced he had wasted years going nowhere.
Then he built Post Bridge - a social media scheduling tool for small teams with AI-friendly workflows - almost by accident. Today, it generates $35k USD in monthly recurring revenue, up from a plateau it sat at for eight months before doubling in the last six.
Here is how he got there, in his own words, with some added context.
How Post Bridge Actually Started
Post Bridge was not a planned product. It was a solution to Jack's own problem.
While trying to grow his first app, he was posting multiple short-form videos per day across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other platforms - all manually. That did not scale. So he built an API-based scheduling solution for himself.
He shared it on X. Despite having very few followers at the time, the post spread widely - apparently he was not the only person dealing with this problem. The demand signal was immediate and clear.
He built the first version in about a month. It only worked on a handful of platforms - a fraction of what it supports now. He did it alone, and still runs the product solo, with the occasional contractor brought in to clean up specific things.
The TikTok Validation Method
For his first app (before Post Bridge), Jack used a validation approach worth noting for anyone building something new.
He used ChatGPT to generate mockup images of the concept, then posted a TikTok with a simple premise: "What if you could do X?" Three people commented saying they wanted it. He built it.
From there, he posted nearly daily - showing progress, explaining the idea, building in public. By launch day, 4,000 people across TikTok and Instagram were following along. A few bought it on day one, despite the product being rough.
He is honest about what happened next: the app was not valuable enough, and the hype faded. But the validation method - test the idea with a short video before you build it - carried forward into how he thinks about new products.
Pricing: No Free Plans
Jack has a clear position on pricing that he has arrived at through experience.
He does not offer free plans. His default is either a hard paywall or a card-required free trial. His reasoning: free users filter out the wrong people. Charging, even a small amount, forces you to provide real value - and filters the people who are genuinely interested from those who are just browsing.
He builds every product for himself first, sets a price, then releases it. One exception is a freemium couples app that generated meaningful revenue - but that is the outlier, not the model.
"Charge for your product. Don't fear low sales. This filters out noise and forces you to provide real value. That is a very good thing."
The Tech Stack
Post Bridge runs on a straightforward setup that has evolved based on cost and practical necessity:
Next.js for the frontend with a separately hosted backend for the API.
Unkey for API authentication and rate limiting.
Supabase for the database - though he moved to Cloudflare R2 for object storage after Supabase egress costs reached $1,000 a month and climbing. R2 runs at zero egress cost.
Vercel WAF added after early DDoS attacks on the public API. He also added rate limits and enhanced monitoring as the product scaled.
Total infrastructure costs: $100 to $200 per month. He built everything alone and continues to run it that way.
Building in Public: What Actually Worked
Growth for Post Bridge and Jack's other apps has come almost entirely from content - specifically short-form video and consistent posting on X.
He posts new features when they ship, but has learned that feature announcements get stale quickly. His better approach: find new ways to explain the core concept over and over. He created a single TikTok format and reused it around 300 times with incremental modifications - running it until views declined. That single format drove over 30,000 downloads to one of his mobile apps.
He also maintained a YouTube dev log for a year, documenting his build process in real time. He is honest about one thing: his X following grew mostly after his success, not before it. Building in public helps - but it is not a shortcut to an audience.
The Hardest Part
Jack does not dress this up. The hardest part was staying in motion on the bad days.
He describes the feeling of watching savings run out while still uncertain whether anything would ever work. The daily videos became such a fixed part of his routine that he made them on vacations - but some mornings, he still woke up doubting everything.
His answer to how he got through it is not inspirational. He just kept going. He credits having people to look up to - Marc Lou, and Pieter Levels before him - for helping him see what was possible. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant shaped how he thought about work and life from early on.
The advice he leads with: follow your curiosity and interests rather than what appears to be the best market. People who enjoy their work do not feel like they are working. That tends to matter more than market timing or business logic, especially at the start.
Where He Is Headed
Post Bridge is at $35k MRR and Jack is focused on continuing to grow it. He runs multiple products simultaneously - Post Bridge is the main one, but not the only one.
He shares his thinking and updates on X, and writes on his personal website. If you want to look at the product itself, Post Bridge is worth spending a few minutes with - especially if you or your team manage content across multiple platforms.
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