Thirty-three million views in sixty days, made by two people on a phone. Here is the actual stack.
Some links on this page are affiliate links, marked affiliate. If you sign up through one I may earn a commission, at no cost to you. Nothing is here because someone paid for placement — everything listed is something we use. Full disclosure.
Every reel on the account was filmed on a phone, usually one-handed, usually while he was asking what I was doing. There is no camera, no rig and no lighting. The single most useful thing we own is a small tripod, and we forget it most of the time.
Free, made by Meta, and built for the format we publish in. It handles the captions, the cuts and the export, and the insights it produces are the ones on our partnerships page. For a two-person operation posting reels, paying for a desktop editor would buy us very little.
Used for the YouTube side — keyword research, seeing which topics have real search demand before we spend a day filming one. It is the reason several articles in The Journal exist in the shape they do.
This site is plain HTML and CSS, written by hand, with no framework and no build step. That sounds masochistic and mostly is not: it loads instantly, there is nothing to update, nothing to be hacked through, and no monthly fee. The cost is that site-wide changes need a script rather than a click.
Free, and enough. We look at which articles people actually finish and which ones brought them here from search. That is the whole analysis.
Both run the shop on our links page. They do the same job in different apps, which is why we use both — some of our audience lives in one and some in the other. Neither influences what goes on the shelf.
Everything above is organic — we have never paid to put a reel in front of anyone. The question we get asked most by other people building small accounts is whether paid amplification is worth it, and TikTok's Ads Manager is the one most often recommended as a starting point, on the grounds that its entry cost is lower than the older platforms and its setup is simple enough to run without an agency. TikTok also offers ad credits to some new advertisers to offset early testing. ONE HONEST SENTENCE ABOUT YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE GOES HERE — what you spent, what happened, or that you have not tried it yet and are about to. If you would rather look yourself: TikTok's own getting-started guide.
Scheduling tools, for now — posting takes a minute and the apps reward native uploads. A desktop editor, because the format does not need one. Anything with a monthly fee that replaces a thing already free. And a team, which we will need eventually and do not yet.
The honest summary is that the expensive part was never the software. It was sixty-three reels in sixty days, and a Frenchman who did not know he had agreed to any of this.