A 17-year-old built CaliEye, an app that scans food to show calories instantly, and made $1.8 million in one month. It charges a monthly subscription and spreads through creators who post casual videos of it in use. The model mirrors 2016 dropshipping: simple product, marketing handled by performance-based creators.
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You know, there's one called like CaliEye. It's a crazy story. He's 17, did 1.8 million last month. Wow. And it's an app on your phone where you can scan your food and it tells you how many calories. Wow, that's cool. And simple. Simple. Yeah. And it's all distribution. They have— I have no idea how many creators on retainer that they're paying, but a lot. Yeah. And they figured out how to do the content to where it works, where the videos are like naturally integrated into the person's life. And these are the types of videos they're doing really well. It'll be like a fitness influencer, just like, here's a day in my life, and it's like 5-second B-roll. I'm scanning their food. Someone comments What app is that? They make another video or they drive conversions that way. What's the revenue model for a business like that? They have a paywall. I don't know their exact pricing, but it's some small amount per month to use it. I don't think this is going away anytime soon. Building products like that, they solve one core problem, like a very niche problem. Even in the past, I've tried MyFitnessPal and it's annoying having to log your food manually every single time. Yeah, I would never use something like that because of how annoying it is. So it's like it solves one core issue. It's got a little viral factor, can be easily integrated into these day in the life videos. Me and my friends say that like these mobile apps and even some of these B2C software, kind of like dropshipping in like 2016, right? Because you can build it, all these products, so easily now. Yeah. And then you can arbitrage, you know, the marketing with these performance-based creators that a lot of people haven't picked up.