I'm Jake. The first line of code I wrote was in 1999. I've since spent my career building increasingly complex software systems at Daxko, Wildbit, Shipt, and Fetch. I've built infrastructure that handles tens of thousands of user requests per second and provides services for many millions of users.

My experience that shaped Daybreak the most was Wildbit. Small, profitable, bootstrapped, and truly people first. They built Postmark by staying lean and opinionated and doing right by users. No VC pressure, no pressure to exit, just a small team building software they believed in.

That's the model for Daybreak. Rob and I are purposefully building focused software for a specific community outside the big tech ecosystem.

We're not interesting in capturing your attention so we can put more ads in front of your eyes or in using your content to help train addictive algorithms (to put more ads in front of other people).

Software doesn't have to come from big tech. The best tools I've used in my career came from companies most people have never heard of. Companies that stayed small because they wanted to serve specific community really well. Here are some things we are committed to on Daybreak:

Equal visibility. Every creative gets the same treatment. We don't rank through opaque algorithms. Your work and your profile are what people see, not a manufactured popularity score.

No ads. Our business model is the product itself. We'll never sell ads against your portfolio or inject "sponsored" photographers above your listing. Ever.

Your images stay yours. We don't scrape them, don't use them to train models, don't license them to third parties. We also have strict bot rules in our robots.txt, llms.txt, and through Cloudflare’s security tools. Feel free to DM me on our Discord or send me an email at jake@jakehuggart.com if you'd like to learn more.

Aligned incentives. We don't need hockey-stick growth or a hundred million users. We need to create value for our community so people join, engage, and upgrade to premium. That’s it—it’s pretty simple.

Come share your work. If you're tired of performing for algorithms, we'd like to offer you something better: a place to share your work that’s designed and built for creatives. Join us (and upgrade to premium!)

P.S. Why is the featured image a muddy bike? If Jake's not building software or spending time with family, he's probably on a bicycle somewhere