I Quit My 9 to 5 as a Growth Marketing Manager to Build a Creator Tracking Tool. Here’s What I Learned.

Every Monday morning for two years, I opened the same spreadsheet.

Columns for follower counts. Rows for engagement rates. Color coded cells for posting frequency. A system I built myself because nothing else fit what I actually needed.

I was a growth marketing manager. Part of my job was figuring out which creators were worth working with and which ones just looked good on paper. And every single week, the answer lived inside that spreadsheet.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

The moment I knew something had to change

The tools that existed were either built for enterprise teams with $2,000 a month budgets or so basic they gave me less than my own spreadsheet did.

Modash. MightyScout. Influencity. I tried them all. Great products. Wrong price for someone managing a lean growth operation.

So I kept updating the spreadsheet. Manually checking profiles. Copy pasting follower counts. Calculating engagement rates with a formula I had memorized.

One afternoon I spent four hours pulling data that should have taken four minutes. I closed my laptop and thought: someone should build this properly.

Then I thought: why not me.

Quitting

I want to be honest here. Quitting was not some dramatic cinematic moment. There was no speech. No slow walk out of an office building.

It was a quiet decision made at my desk at 11pm while looking at a half built prototype and thinking: I would rather bet on this than keep showing up for someone else’s vision.

So I did.

What I built

Brika is an AI powered creator intelligence platform. It tracks any Instagram or TikTok creator automatically, shows you what content is going viral in your niche, and generates a full weekly content plan based on what is actually working right now.

The thing I always wanted but could never find.

I built it in about three months. Solo. With no co-founder, no funding, no team.

It is live at brika.ai and we have real users tracking real creators right now.

What I learned

1. The problem you live with every day is your best product idea

I did not come up with Brika in a brainstorm session. I came up with it because I was frustrated every single week for two years. The best products are not invented. They are discovered through pain.

2. Shipping beats perfecting

The first version of Brika was embarrassing. Basic UI. Limited features. Half the things I wanted to build were not there yet. I shipped it anyway. The feedback I got from those first users taught me more than six more months of building would have.

3. Distribution is harder than the product

I thought building was the hard part. It is not. Getting people to care about what you built is the hard part. I have spent as much time thinking about cold DMs, Instagram content, and SEO as I have spent writing code.

4. Solo does not mean alone

I have no co-founder. But I have users who message me directly. A community of people rooting for Brika to succeed. Tools like Claude that I use as a strategic thinking partner every single day. Solo founder does not mean you figure everything out by yourself.

5. Early traction is more valuable than early perfection

A handful of real people using something you built from scratch in your bedroom at midnight is one of the most motivating things I have ever experienced. Every signup makes the next week of building feel worth it.

Where Brika is today

We are early. Growing every week. The product gets better with every conversation I have with someone who uses it.

If you want to check any creator’s engagement rate right now, we built free tools for that:

👉 Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator 👉 TikTok Engagement Rate Calculator

No signup needed. Just paste a username and get the data instantly.

And if you want to see what is going viral in your niche this week, track your competitors automatically, and get a full AI content plan every Monday, there is a free plan waiting for you:

Try Brika free

I genuinely hope it helps you the way I wish I had something like it before.

The honest answer to “was it worth it”

Ask me again in a year.

But right now, at this exact moment, building something from nothing and watching real people use it every day?

Yes. Absolutely yes.