7 lessons we learned while building a Gen Z brand to 1.6 million subscribers
I was 25 when an investor told me that my co-founder & I had no business building a fintech company. No finance background. No tech background. Just a big idea about Gen Z and money.
Four years later, Frich has 1.6 million subscribers. We did it with almost zero paid acquisition.
Everyone talks about product. Nobody talks about brand. It gets dismissed as the fluffy stuff, the nice-to-have, the thing you figure out later. But brand is the reason we're here. Brand is what got us partnerships with Capital One, T-Mobile, and Visa. Brand is what made millions of Gen Zs trust us with something as personal as their money.
Here's what actually worked.
<div class="frich-tip">Brought to you by MOO: Don’t underestimate the importance of a strong brand. In a market that’s as saturated as it is today, creating a memorable brand that stands out is key. One way to do that is by bringing your brand into the physical world with good quality merch. Here’s the brand we trust. </div>
1️⃣ Your personal brand is your cheapest growth channel.
I heard “you have no fintech experience” from pretty much everyone. I’m a former model trying to build a finance company for Gen Z. Nobody was going to hand me credibility, so I had to build it myself.
The cheapest way to do that was my personal brand.
Early on, I started speaking at universities. This is one of the most underrated growth channels when nobody knows who you are. Business clubs, entrepreneurship groups, women-in-business organizations - they’re always looking for founders to speak.
Our early talks were tiny. Sometimes only 15 people in a classroom. We filmed everything anyway and posted it on socials.
At the same time, I started posting regularly on LinkedIn.
We were seeing in real time how Gen Z actually thinks about money - what stressed them out, how they spent, what financial decisions they were making. Instead of saying “here’s what I think,” I shared “here’s what 50,000+ Gen Z users are actually telling us.”
That built credibility fast.
And here's what most people get wrong: you do not need a huge audience. You just need the right people to see your work consistently.
What to do:
- Pitch yourself to 10 local universities and entrepreneurship clubs.
- Film every talk (even on an iPhone) and pull 2–3 clips.
- Post on LinkedIn 2–3x a week: one insight, lesson, or data point.
- Focus on consistency, not virality.
2️⃣ Borrow credibility from people bigger than you.
When you're small, nobody knows you exist. You can spend months trying to build an audience from scratch, or you can get in front of someone else's audience in a week.
But nobody bigger than you is going to promote you out of kindness. You have to give them something worth their time.
Think about what you can offer. Maybe you organize an event and put them on stage. Maybe you bring them into a professional podcast studio and interview them. Maybe you feature them in your newsletter with their own segment. Maybe your mission is something they genuinely want to be part of.
This is our model. We work with creators who are often individually bigger than us. They lead their own segments, bring their audiences to us, and we give them a platform and production support they can't build on their own.
The key is simple: figure out what they need, and be the person who gives it to them.
What to do:
- List 10-15 creators or founders who are 5-10x your size and share your audience.
- Think about what you can give them: an event, a podcast feature, a co-branded piece of content, a segment in your newsletter, a connection to your community.
- Make sure they can reuse whatever you create across their own channels.
- If it makes them look good, they'll promote it without you asking.
3️⃣ In-person events got us to 50,000 users
Everyone assumes events mean a venue, a budget, a whole production. Ours started as 10-15 people classroom talks and pop-ups. We almost always found someone to sponsor the food or drinks, or a university that gave us the space for free.
This is how we built our first 50,000 users.
The real value isn't huge reach. It's that your first events are where you find your super users. The people who actually tell you what's working and what's not. They become your first ambassadors.
What to do:
- Start with 10-15 people. A dinner, a talk, a roundtable.
- Reach out to brands that might sponsor food or drinks. Most will say yes if you position it as access to your audience.
4️⃣ Merch turned our community into a marketing engine.
We sent out our first merch boxes to our interns expecting a few Instagram stories. Instead, people wore it everywhere. It’s important to pick items that people actually want to wear - for us the best performing things were t-shirts, totebags and stickers.
But if the physical stuff feels cheap, it hurts you. We use MOO for everything that’s affordable but feels high end: business cards, stickers, event materials, merch packaging.
What to do:
- Design merch your community would actually wear.
- Use MOO for business cards, stickers, and event collateral.
- Do a scrappy photoshoot with your community wearing your stuff.
<div class="frich-tip">Brought to you by MOO: Don’t underestimate the importance of a strong brand. In a market that’s as saturated as it is today, creating a memorable brand that stands out is key. One way to do that is by bringing your brand into the physical world with good quality merch. Here’s the brand we trust. </div>
5️⃣ The deals you turn down matter more than the deals you take.
Early on, we made a list of what Frich would never do. No Buy Now, Pay Later. No payday loans. No financial products designed to exploit the people who trust us. We wrote it down and stuck to it.
We've walked away from deals that would have been real money when we needed it. But this is how we built a community that truly trusts us.
What to do:
- Write down your brand values. Then write down what your brand will never do. Be specific.
- Say it publicly. Post about it. Put it on your website. The brands you want to work with are looking for partners who have standards.
6️⃣ Leverage your data for press.
Nobody's going to write about you because you launched a new feature. But they will write about you if you have data nobody else has.
We started running reports on what our Gen Z users were actually doing with money. Not surveys. Real behavioral data from our community. How much they're saving, what they're spending on, which financial decisions stress them out the most.
We packaged that into data reports and pitched them to journalists. Not as "hey, write about Frich." But as "hey, here's data about Gen Z money habits that your readers would care about." Forbes picked it up. Business Insider picked it up. We got press not because we were a big company, but because we had numbers nobody else could get.
What to do:
- Build a list of 20-30 journalists who cover your industry. Send them the data with a one-line pitch.
- Don't ask them to write about you. Give them data that nobody else has.
7️⃣ Invest in your brand before you can afford to.
When we started Frich, we had no money. But we acted like a brand from day one.
We designed everything like it mattered. Our social posts, our newsletter, our event materials, our business cards. We spent time on how things looked and felt before we had any reason to. People told us we were overthinking it.
Because that's how you get taken seriously before your numbers earn it. When a brand partner opened our pitch deck and it looked like a company 10x our size, they took the call. When someone picked up our business card at an event and it felt premium, they remembered us. The quality signaled that we were real.
What to do:
- Invest in design early. Your pitch deck, your socials templates, your website. It doesn't have to be expensive.
- Never hand someone something that feels cheap. Your business cards, your merch, your one-pagers. If it's not something you'd be proud of, don't send it out.
