App Expert: How to Build Viral Apps in 30 Days, Make Millions at 17, and Retire Before College

Today's guest made $20 million before graduating high school.

Last month, the app generated just over $2 million.

At 13, he built a website that let kids bypass school restrictions and play games online, selling it for $100,000 a few years later. He then took the profits and created Cal AI, a revolutionary app that tracks calories simply by taking a picture. He quickly scaled the business to $1 million a month and hopes to replace MyFitnessPal as the number one health app on the App Store.

The space is at least big enough where we could get to the $200 $100 million MyFitnessPal is doing, at least.

In this episode, we'll break down his exact blueprint for creating viral apps, explore how AI is reshaping health and nutrition, and see just what it takes to create a billion-dollar product at 18 years old.

I probably shouldn't share much more about this because of the specific copycats that will see it and replicate the strategies that we have done.

But Zach Yadegari, welcome to the Jack Neal Podcast.

Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, of course, man. We're in New York City right now, guys. I flew out here to see Zach and a couple other people. So yeah, excited to talk to you, man. A good place to start here. So Zach, you're still in high school. How much money did you make last month?

Last month, the app generated just over $2 million in revenue.

What is it projected to do by the end of the year?

By the end of the year, It's projected to exceed $24 million in revenue.

And you launched the app 10 months ago?

10 months ago.

And you're still in high school. Uh, you graduate in a few months, I'm guessing. So what would that put your app valued at?

With these things, it's always tricky. It's kind of subjective and different companies could value it very differently if they're looking to acquire it. But I would say without a doubt, it would have to be in the range of 40 to 120 million, which is kind of broad, but it is more nuanced.

Yeah, it's interesting multiples, especially with a subscription model, a consumer app. But yeah, I kind of want to talk about, let's just give people a taste of what your life looks like. Like, what did you, what were you up to before this podcast?

Before this podcast, I went to school, high school today.

And what did you learn?

I learned about integrals and my physics teacher was actually absent. Learned about inflation and GDP. So some cool little takeaways.

Interesting. Okay. And then kind of give me your backstory on this app, Calii. You made an app that— it's ranked number 8 health app on the iPhone. You made an app that lets people track calories by taking a picture.

I believe today it's actually ranked number 6 in the health and fitness section of the App Store. It's always changing. The backstory to the app depends how far back you want me to go, but growing up, I was always very skinny and I wanted to put on weight. To impress girls at my school, to be completely honest. And I started going to the gym, but quickly learned the best way to gain muscle is to eat in a calorie surplus. So I started tracking my calories on one of the most popular calorie tracking apps at the time. This was about 2 years ago, but 3 days after getting started, I completely quit. It was extremely tedious to weigh my food on a scale every single meal. Type out each ingredient that I ate. I knew there was a better solution, but at the time I wasn't sure what it was. The next year, all of these AI models started being released. OpenAI with ChatGPT, Anthropic with Claude, and I also started experimenting building mobile consumer apps. And so then almost a year ago at this point, I started speaking to my co-founder of Cal AI, Blake Anderson, and we decided to work on Cal AI.

And kind of give me the process of how did you get to that point of like developing an app at such a young age?

I was obsessed with video games. I wanted to play Minecraft, Roblox all day. And by the time I was 7, I actually wanted to create my own video games. So I begged my mom to put me in a coding camp, which she did. And that didn't teach me much as a 7-year-old, the few weeks there, but it sparked the interest. And then for the next couple of years, I would binge-watch YouTube videos all day teaching me how to create all kinds of different games. By the time I was 12, I put my first app on the App Store. It's a little soccer game where ball would fall from the sky. You would just tap to try to shoot in the goal. None of these projects really went anywhere, but they were filled with learning lessons, just how to build things. Then my freshman year of high school, COVID happened. Chromebooks were given out to all of the students to reduce contact, and unsurprisingly, students started playing games during school. So I saw a clear opportunity to capitalize on this. Basically, all of these game sites were scattered across different websites and they would have these obscure links be like qrstv.com and that would have games on it, or mathisfunxyz.com would have a game on it. So I saw potential to combine all of these games onto one hub site. I called it totallyscience.co so that it would be unblocked. And within the next 2 years, I grew that to 5 million users and then sold it at 16 years old.

So when you were in middle school, you made a company that you sold for $100,000.

I started it the end of 8th grade, and then it was making $60,000 a year my freshman year of high school, my sophomore year. and then I sold it my junior year.

And what were you doing with the money at the time?

At the time, I saved it. I didn't spend it on anything. I actually didn't invest it either. So it was just sitting in a bank account losing value. But then when I started working on new projects, I reinvested it into marketing like Cal AI.

So tell me about Totally Science. So you create this website, uh, and then all the games you kind of sourced from other code or how did that work?

So these games were mainly ripoffs of other games, the popular games at the time. Fall Guys was one of them, Minecraft, and people would publicly share this code on GitHub. So we took those files and put them all on my site.

And then how were you monetizing?

We put banner ads. It was Google AdSense. That supported it. And I think there was a lot more potential to monetize it. If I could go back, I would've tried to strike partnerships with a company like Voodoo, get their games up, and then have a QR code where people can download and then negotiate a deal where I would get paid X amount of cents per download. It was a good amount of money for a kid, for sure.

And you said we, were you, did you have a team at the time?

So it was mainly myself. I had one other friend who was a developer. So the two of us.

I'm curious, like, how did you know all this stuff? Like, I understand some of the coding, but how did you know how to make a website, monetize it, run banner ads? Like, were you just— how did you know that something like that could even make money?

A lot of learning on the go. I built the site and grew it long before I actually monetized it. So I left thousands of dollars on the table by not monetizing it sooner. I don't actually remember what exactly sparked me to put ads on the site, but I remember I had my first month of 300,000 monthly active users and I thought maybe if I put ads, I'll make, I don't know, maybe like $20 a day. I put ads on. and the first day I made over $100.

And how did you grow the site?

I made TikToks myself. I would record my screen in class and the videos would be just text-to-speech. I wouldn't be in them. And it would say something like, I was bored in school, so I made this unblocked games website. Comment what game you want me to add next. And putting that, the prompt to comment, actually made it go viral because people would just comment games and it would be a loop where TikTok would see the high engagement and push it out to more people who would also comment.

Got it. It's really interesting that you were able to grow something that big. What was like, I guess, the emotional factor, not the logical factor of I want to do something cool, I'm solving a need as a business owner. Like, did you want to look cool to your classmates and like everyone's using Zach's website in school? Like, what was kind of the Did you— did that thought cross your mind?

The reason I initially built Totally Science was not to grow outside of my school. I wanted to have the site used solely by people in my school, honestly, to impress girls and impress people in my grade. I was never really a cool kid and I wanted more validation and status. So that was how I thought I would fix it, fix the problem, gain more status. But it turned into something much bigger. When I made the first TikTok, I was not expecting it to get as many views as it did. The first video, I was just bored during a class, and so I recorded the video and it got 60,000 views. It took me less than 5 minutes to record. The second video, it got over a million views.

And you probably weren't even thinking from the perspective of I'm making this TikTok to grow this website necessarily. You were maybe thinking, oh, this is— could be cool to get a viral video for status, or was it to grow the website directly? Like, how were you thinking about it?

So the first video I made, I was making it not to get a viral TikTok. I don't exactly remember if I was even trying to grow the website because at the time I didn't think I can monetize it. I didn't even know that you could put ads on a website to make money. I really was just bored during my class and thought, hey, I already got everyone in my school using the website. Maybe more people would like using it. So let me just show it to more people. And you know what, now that I'm thinking about it, it was because I love when people use something that I've created and I maximized it in my school. So to go even further, I decided to spread it outside of my school again, not to make money, but just to have other people using something that I created. It's a great feeling.

Yeah. So was that your first viral TikTok?

That was. Well, actually, no, that's not true. During COVID I recorded skits and a few of them got over a million views.

Gotcha. So you were in, in middle school during COVID Yes. That's crazy. I graduated senior year during COVID like we missed our whole senior graduation prom and stuff. But yeah, that's really cool, man. So this leads into Cal AI. I've seen people claim that you use the money from Totally Science to fund Cal AI. Is that kind of the case?

Yes. So I put everything I made from Totally Science, it was $130,000 that I put into Cal AI. And Blake Anderson, one of my co-founders, also put a significant amount of capital.

Gotcha. Okay. And then the project you were working on before, it was, what was it? Grind Clock.

That was the first app that I had built. It was a motivational alarm clock app where a motivational speaker like David Goggins would wake you up screaming at you, let's go, get out of bed. It's time to carry the boats. Get to work. This app did pretty well. It got over 20,000 downloads in the first 2 weeks, but it was the first app I had ever built. I built it with one of my other co-founders with Call AI, Henry, and we had a lot to learn about app development, so we didn't see that project out to its true potential.

So it was totally science and then use a little bit of the money to make, uh, Grind Clock, and then you went straight to Call AI.

So GrindClock didn't cost us any money to make because we were programming it ourselves, but we made GrindClock, made a few other small projects, and those were mainly just us learning app development because before that we had only ever done web or game development. And then Cal AI is the one that we decided, let's put everything we learned to use.

So tell me about some of those other projects before we get into story of building Kaliyog.

Right after Grind Clock, we built an app called Flex. The idea was that it would be a social competitive fitness app. Users would join a group with their friends, their gym bros, and every time one of them went to the gym, they would take a picture of them showing that they were there. You could take a picture flexing in a mirror, a pump pic, or it could just be a picture of the gym to prove that you're there. This was our second project, so there was definitely a lot about it, even the idea that I would rework today, but I think that a variation of that idea could still work. We did a little bit of marketing there and we actually had a few groups of people using the app with their friends. So cool to see. But social apps I think are harder to take off. Than a utility app, which is really what I've become really good at over the past year.

Why do you think that is?

Because with a social app, it's almost like it needs to be well-built enough to support tens, hundreds of millions of people, or it won't work for anyone. And then as opposed to a utility app, Yeah, utility app, you only need one person to get value because social apps, they have the cold start problem. You need other people on the app to provide value and make someone else want to join.

Interesting. Yeah, I want to get into some of that stuff about, uh, just other apps in general and where there are gaps in the marketplace as well. But yeah, so Call AI, um, how long did it take you to build a $100 million app?

Well, the first version of Call AI we spent a month working on before we launched it. We spent more like 3 weeks, but then the App Store review process took another week. We launched and we launched with a few influencers to test out the product and saw that it worked, so we kept going. But the first version was really simple. It had 2 screens. The settings page and the calories left for the day page, one button to take a picture of your food. That was it. That was the proof of concept, the MVP.

Gotcha. And then you said you launched with influencers. Where did that kind of strategy come from? Did you already know to do that or did your co-founder Blake kind of help you with that?

So Blake, before we co-founded Calii together, had been working on two apps. Riz GPT and Umax both had amassed millions of downloads from the influencer marketing strategy. The pitch that I made him, he was very locked in on Umax. He was full-time grinding on it. He was actually in a startup accelerator, and I texted him, hey, I know you're locked in on Umax, but if you could share the strategies that helped you grow those apps and could provide help with the marketing. I'd like to co-found an app. Henry, me, and you will do all of the development, we'll do all the marketing, the groundwork, and he would just help with the high-level strategy. And so that's what we did, and it's worked out very well.

And those other apps by Blake, Umax and Riz GPT, how successful were those, those apps?

They both were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Kala AI has surpassed them, but they were an integral step to getting here. There were many lessons that we've taken away and that Blake has shown from those other apps that we directly put into this.

Gotcha. And then, okay, so you were kind of following Blake before, and then you reached out to him. That's right. What kind of motivated him to do a project with you as opposed to just be a consultant, for instance?

The motivation was that I think he really believed in me. He knew about the website I built and speaking to him a few times, I think there was a lot of chemistry. So we knew if we worked together, we could really make something big.

And at what point did you reach out to him? Was it after the MVP of the product?

No, he was actually involved in the ideation phase.

Okay, gotcha. So from the very beginning. And, uh, what was your decision to kind of co-found this with a few different people? Because a lot of people are just kind of lone wolves. They do their project and hire teams underneath them. Why did you guys co-found?

We decided to co-found together Well, I think the whole thing about co-founders is that you are splitting the pie, but I think that working with really good people, you can go way farther than on your own. We have a really good team. We actually, there are 4 co-founders total, another one, Jake, who we brought on a couple months after starting Calii. And everyone has been crucial to the success. Henry, who's our CTO, for the CTO, if we want to move as fast as we are with development speed, we need someone who actually cares about the future of this project. So him having equity is extremely important. He now leads a team and is pushing everyone. Jake, he leads our marketing team at this point, and it's the same thing for him. He's incentivized to push everyone. Blake is no longer super involved as much as he was early in the company. He's now working on different projects. He's actually locked in an apartment for the next— well, it's a 90-day challenge. It's already been 30 days where he's livestreamed 24/7. It's called PMF or Die. But he was very crucial, him having equity. Without it, He would not have been willing to share as much. And for myself, I have worn many hats throughout this company. Early on, I was a programmer, then I was our lead marketer, and then I was the lead product guy. And now I'm working more on the business rather than in the business, looking for our next huge levers, doing recruiting and talking to other founders. So I think each of these pillars, it's necessary that everyone's incentivized. And that's how we've grown so fast and why we've gone so far.

And then do you mind me asking, uh, the equity splits, is it fairly even or is it in your favor since you're the CEO, or how does that go?

It's 30, 30, 30, 10. Jake having 10 only because he joined a couple months after.

Give me the step-by-step blueprint of idea to product to TikTok marketing, just kind of blowing it up in general. Yeah, sure.

I always like to think about things from a marketing-first perspective. I like to find an idea that is eye-catching, that is captivating, that is useful, and then build a full product around it. With Cal AI, that was the take a picture of your food. It tells you the calories and the macros. So we took that one aha moment feature and built the whole calorie tracking product around it that uses the same things existing apps would use, like the whole food database barcode scanning. But that's the main feature that we market ourselves around. There are many other apps that do similar things. TurboLearn AI is a new AI app that just came out. Their whole thing is record a lecture and then it will generate notes from the lecture. So that was the aha moment part. And then they built the whole experience around it where it's now quizzes that you could generate and it's a full immersive study tool, but that's the main feature. That's the framework I generally use to figure out an idea to work on. And then it's just about building the rest of the product, getting an MVP out, which I don't like to spend more than a month on, which should basically be that main feature and then the minimum amount of components around that to still give a good user experience. After that, I usually reach out to the first couple influencers that I think are the ideal influencers for a project. People that have an audience in the niche of the product that's super, super close together. In the beginning, you want to be very specific, but then you can start to become more broad as you expand. And after proving the proof of concept, then it's just about scaling up everything, the marketing, making the product better. Finding the idea.

And what does your target avatar look like? I know it's a fairly general product, but have you noticed that one type of influencer converts better or one type of audience downloads the app in particular?

Different influencers definitely have different returns of conversions. We— this is the hardest thing about influencer marketing is predicting ahead of time how well an influencer will perform for your product. It's something that we've built out internal tools to help us with. It's also something where growing up on social media, I think we have an advantage.

Like, is it ages, uh, 18 to 22 female? Is it, uh, 65 plus? Like, is there a specific range that outweighs the others?

Yes, there actually is. We found that most of our users are between the ages of 15 to 25 years old. And they're men. So we're really hitting the newer generations that maybe haven't even tried calorie tracking in the past or hadn't known about it.

And do you think that is because of the UX of your product, like the design? Do you think that's because of the utility of the product itself, or is it possibly your marketing strategies have led to that demo?

Primarily the marketing strategies, the reflection of our demographic is analogous to the breakdowns of audiences of the influencers we're actually working with. We mainly work with bodybuilders and other people that post fitness content on Instagram. So naturally, because it's social media, it's going to skew towards the younger ages.

That's interesting. It's something I've given a lot of thought to making tons of content over the years is that I have no idea how to make a, Like I know how to make a video viral for men, but I don't know how to make a video viral for women. I've had some videos go viral, like 50/50 split, or some have been disproportionately appeal to women, but it's a hard thing to replicate as a guy because you know the kind of content you consume with a male brain and the kind of content females consume is a bit different. And yeah, it's just something hard to play with that I've recognized. Have you? Worked with a lot of female influencers as well?

We are starting to work with more because we definitely want to hit the female demographic more than we are right now. But there are fewer female influencers in the fitness space than men, for sure.

And have you noticed that it's a different type of content they make as opposed to the men?

They do make different content. Some are the same. A very common trope is just the what I eat in a day videos or my daily routine videos where they will show doing their hair, going to the gym. So those stay pretty constant whether it's a male or female bodybuilder. But then there are females who are more into the mindfulness, the talking to their girls straight into the camera versus the guys who are flexing and not talking. We have over 250 influencers right now that we work with. And at this point, I'm not managing most of them. So there are so many influencers. I'll get texts all the time from people either in my school or that I'm friends with. They're like, no way you signed this influencer. No way. This just came up. That's sick. I'll be like, oh, sick. I didn't know we signed them either. That's pretty cool. Yeah, the team is just running. It's a well-oiled machine. That's what I like to call our marketing team.

What's the number one mistake brands make when working with creators.

The number one mistake is that they can't accurately assess the ROI of the influencer ahead of time. They either don't know how or they think it's impossible, and so they will overspend crazy amounts on marketing. And it is hard to measure, especially when you're massive scale. So companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, these billion-dollar brands, if they have an influencer post, they're not going to see any difference in their data of 10 million sales in a day to go from 10 million and 1 to 10 million and 100. They're not gonna notice that.

Why do you think that is? Do you, or let me ask you your strategy. Do you employ a creative for them to follow, or do you specifically reach out to people with, we have this idea for you? Or do you kind of let the creator take creative liberty?

We give the creator creative liberty. They're the professional. They know what gets views on their account. And we don't want to suggest a video that's just going to completely flop.

And then your creators, do you pay them like flat rates or is it CPM model affiliate?

The CPM model and affiliate model is every brand's dream. But that's the problem. And how so many brands get it wrong is that No influencer will accept that deal because there are 50 other brands that would just pay them upfront for the same thing, guaranteeing them a payment whether the video flops or goes viral. So that's why it's very important to predict the ROI ahead of time so you know, okay, I can spend under X amount and it's going to be profitable. And many brands, like the big brands that are making these mistakes, they just throw a ton of cash and I believe they just put it under the category of brand awareness. They don't know if it's profitable. They don't know. They can't measure the direct response. And that's what we do really well. That's how we've scaled so fast.

Yeah. What's your secret there to knowing if an influencer is going to convert for the brand?

There are many things. It's very nuanced. To explain our strategy high level, we have a few internal tools that we've built out which help us with this. We analyze influencer profiles. Followers don't matter at all. It's only the views they get. But then not all views matter equally. Not all views are valued the same. You have to also assess how strong their community and following actually is. You have to assess the niche, the gender, all of these micro factors that are at play with every single influencer, your demographics, to really calculate a profitable ROI.

And is more so just— are you thinking about who has a loyal audience that will do whatever this creator says, or are you thinking about who is capable of making an ad creative that will go viral? And convert?

We don't necessarily care about virality. We do care about getting views, but the way we usually structure deals is we expect the video to get just as many views as their regular videos will get. So we don't try to apply some crazy formula. We just want them to plug in our product into the content that already works really well for them and almost sneak it in there. Our integrations are extremely subtle for Call AI, where a lot of creators will make videos where they're just at the gym going about their day, and that's their usual video. And so we'll just ask them to add in a screen where they sneak in Call AI.

Yeah, that's very good marketing. Um, and then do you have them like disclose it as an ad?

Well, some creators do. We have it in their contract that they are supposed to follow all laws around making content.

So the FTC guidelines, so you're not really involved in that. You don't have to ensure that that goes well. It's interesting. So I'm guessing that would convert fairly well because it's getting their normal audience. They're interested in the product. I'm guessing you probably have some accounts like commenting like, oh, you use Kali AI to do this and it gets people looking at it. But for your ads specifically, I know you've been playing with ads the past few months. Is it the same type of videos that are getting high ROAS or like return on ad spend that do well on TikTok for you? Or is it a different type of video entirely?

Are you talking about paid ads?

Yeah, yeah, paid ads.

So I have to be careful what I say here because I know there are so many Cal AI clones that are going to watch this.

Oh, that makes sense.

And rip the strategy. So many clones. It's very— I don't want to say random, but we've found specific categories of videos that really do well, and it's seemingly random. Hmm. It's not necessarily the videos that go viral that have the best return on ad spend.

That was my guess. Yeah. I was thinking that, uh, the type of videos that go viral or the ones that you're doing with these influencers where it's hidden integrations, they wouldn't do super well on, uh, paid ads because you kind of need congruency. Like when I was running paid ads, uh, for some different offers, I was realizing, I was like, oh gosh, you literally have to be very direct about what this ad is. Like, you have to be like, want to track calories with a phone? But I'm sure that won't work. All you Cali AI clones out there, don't do anything like that. But interesting, man. I have ads been converting for you better than organic?

We are very small with our paid ads right now. We—

what are you spending a day, if you don't mind me asking?

Right now, only about $3,000. And at one point we were at $5,000, then we scaled down because we switched from no free trial to a free trial. So we had to reset our campaigns and then we started to really focus on scaling influencers more. So put paid ads to the side and now we're finally dialing in on paid ads again.

You're spending $100K on paid ads and you're making 2 million a month?

The paid ads are by far the least of our marketing efforts. It's really our influencers, organic videos that drive the traffic.

That's insane. How much are you spending on influencers a month?

We're spending in the six figures.

So about 250 influencers. Are partnerships with big influencers worth it?

They can be. I think a lot of people like to go after micro influencers and think that they'll get the better ROI. It's interesting because the smaller influencers, the ones with 10K followers, they'll actually try to charge you these absurd, absurd rates. Like 10K for a video that will get 1,000 views.

10K.

Some of them will. It is insane. So I actually prefer working with the bigger ones, but we will work with any size as long as we could calculate that it will be profitable at the end of the day.

It's really interesting. Yeah, Zach, I don't know how much you know about my background, but I started as a TikTok creator and like had a brand agency and it was really interesting seeing the evolution of, it was like there were TikTokers and you ran brand deals with them and it was like kind of a set rate, like someone with 5 million followers, maybe make like $5,000. Someone with 10 million followers make like $10,000, something like that. Maybe a little higher depending on the niche. But I think in 2021 when the stock market crashed, like companies' strategies just went completely to micro-influencers because they were charging like $100 for a post and it would do pretty well and you could just test a bunch of them. But yeah, it's, it's kind of weird that that strategy of working with large TikTokers isn't really a thing anymore. It's more like large YouTubers, large Instagram people, and there's not really a space for people with 1 million to 15 million followers. It's like people with 40 million followers, 50 million followers get all the brand deals and then people with less than 100K get all the brand deals. Is that kind of what the strategy now that brands are using or you guys are using?

For us, we will work with people in the middle range, that middle zone. We will also work with people under 100K in followers. To be honest, we don't care at all about followers. We only care about the views. And if we can negotiate a deal that's profitable, then they could have zero followers or 100 million followers. We'll do it.

And then I'm not sure what you want to make public. I can cut it out if you want, but like, what's your CAC or like cost of acquisition for—

so for influencers, we don't look at CAC. We don't calculate it that way.

Or for, for the app. Yeah.

Well, for the app from influencers, calculating a CAC is not the best metric. The best metric is actually RPM versus CPM. So revenue per 1,000 views versus the cost per 1,000 views and our RPM, it varies per influencer, but could be between $5 and $20.

Got it. So $20 for 1,000 views.

That's crazy. Well, $20 that we would make from 1,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then, okay, so 6 figures on influencer marketing, $100,000 on paid ads. Where's the rest of the— budget going to? Because I know you guys don't take any cash out, right?

We have been reinvesting all of it.

So you've made like $0.

Well, it's interesting. Apple does payouts 2 months after you actually earn the money. So we are scaling with the revenue we generated 2 months ago. But at our growth rate, the costs every month keep going higher and higher. Where we have very little left over after spending the money from 2 months ago, even though if we waited for the payout from Apple, if we could fast forward time, we would be heavily profitable and have millions of dollars coming in in profit personally.

Hmm. So if you got the money faster, you'd be scaling faster is what you're saying?

Yeah.

Is there any other, uh, method you can go about that? Like getting bank loans or—

There definitely is. There's also services where we could get paid out and then they'll take a percentage when the Apple cut finally comes in. We haven't heavily considered any of those only because I think even if we could scale faster, it wouldn't be as efficient. So it's not worth it. It's not worth the extra cash. We make good use and we're very resourceful with the money that we do have coming.

Got it. So Cal AI, uh, how long did it take you to hit a million downloads on your app?

1 million downloads. We likely hit that by late July. So that would be 3 to 4 months after launch.

Geez, a million downloads in 3 months. And what were the biggest contributing factors? Just influencer videos that went viral or influencers?

We didn't even start paid ads at that point.

What's the most amount of money you've made from a TikTok?

From a single TikTok? We've made likely upwards of $50,000.

Okay, so it's just running it en masse. And then this is a lot of recurring revenue. Is there high churn on the app? Because I know it's fairly common with subscription models to have extremely high churn, especially ones that have a specific gimmick that people want to try out, but yours is more of a utility. A lot of those apps that, oh, you could see what you looked like in in your high school graduation photos. Like, it's like you subscribe for a week and then you cancel it.

Yeah, totally. We have not been able to see churn yet because 95% of our subscriptions are yearly subscriptions, and so we haven't had a chance for any of them to renew.

Oh my God, 95% of your subscriptions are yearly. How do you do that?

Well, we give a very generous discount to yearly subscriptions. It's either $10 a month or $30 a year with a 3-day free trial.

Hmm. And who came up with that offer?

We A/B tested so many different prices and paywalls and found that that was the highest converting.

So that was the highest revenue offer, or that was the one that led to the most amount of people subscribing for a year?

That one led to the greatest amount of revenue per user, per download. So it had a mix of the most people subscribing to it. And even though each subscriber, it was less money than when we tested the $70 a year subscription, because more people would subscribe to the $30 a year, we would make more money on average per download.

And then is it in the Android store as well?

It is.

And then does a large part of your revenue come from Android or is it mainly Apple?

Android sucks, bro. That's less than a 10th of our revenue.

Okay, so if I wanted to do this, I, I'm a 23-year-old guy. I know there's some young listeners of this podcast. What would be the first step to making a million-dollar app?

I would say that the first step is to find that aha moment, that cool, captivating piece of technology that provides value. So for us it was take a picture of the food and it tells you the calories.

What are some other examples of that? Like what are some other AI apps that you're looking at? Some other ideas you've had perhaps like of aha moments?

So I mentioned TurboLearn earlier, which is cool. You just record, get notes. There's another app.

Why is that viral though?

It's viral because it's—

People don't have to listen to their lectures.

They don't have to listen to it. Yes. The hook is basically I'm watching TikTok in class and then someone's taking notes for me. AI is taking notes for me. Some other ones. I saw an app recently. I forget what it's called, but you go through a quiz and then it tells you when you're going to die. And then after you subscribe, it will help you give you lifestyle tips to improve your lifespan.

That's a good one. Do you think they have high churn though? Because most people are there for the when I'm going to die.

I think they totally have high churn.

What are some other things you've seen that have been successful?

There's this app recently that came out by a friend of mine. It's called Quitter. It helps guys quit porn. It gamifies the experience as milestones and streaks. And their aha moment is the panic button. So when you click it, it will pop stuff up on the screen like text yelling at you. Saying, do not give in, remember why you started. It will show you a quote of your reason to get started, which you put in on the onboarding. There are just countless of these. I would, if I was looking for an idea, go on the App Store and scroll through the top 200 of different categories in the App Store charts of the education space, health and fitness space, lifestyle, games, and find something that is appealing and then use that as inspiration. Either find something that hasn't been innovated on in years. It's kind of like MyFitnessPal. It stagnated for years. Or to create something completely new.

Let's do that. Let's, let's give people an exact what they would do because you're a believer that anyone can do this, right?

Yeah.

Okay. This is a good one. Duolingo. How would you make an AI version? Duolingo.

It's funny you mentioned Duolingo because that's actually something my co-founder Blake is doing right now, a Duolingo where you could learn anything. So he's basically building an app where you can enter any topic you want to learn about, describe it, and then AI will generate the course material in a very dynamic way to learn anything you want.

So do you think the most effective use of this AI version of apps thing is maybe researching what are some possibilities that GPT and these AI models can do and looking for gaps in the market there? Or do you think it's looking at preexisting apps and just implementing AI?

I think both. Looking at models is a good idea to do as well. There was a model that came out recently where you can upload an image of a person and an image of clothing, and then it will generate you an image of the person wearing the clothing that you uploaded. So you could easily package that into its own app. Virtual try-on closet, you could call it Closet AI is probably what I would name it.

Closet AI. So, and that's already being built?

No, no one has built that.

Okay, so, so you just came up with this? Yeah. Okay, so Closet AI, take a photo of someone, then take a, then upload a photo of an outfit, describe like the fit of the clothes, whatever, the background. And then how do you build that?

So there are APIs that were released, application programming interfaces, where you can use this AI model right now. I would build out— I would use Cursor, which is very helpful for writing code with the assistance of AI to generate. First, before coding, it's important that you design the app. So I would use Figma to make the designs, put buttons. I would keep it very simple for the MVP, something where the home screen you have the ability to upload any picture and see your past images uploaded. And then it would— I would keep it very just limited buttons on everything. I would go in Cursor, code it up. It wouldn't be anything too complex. ChatGPT could really guide you through it. I believe that right now there are a few limitations with the AI models where it can't do everything. I believe it specializes in dresses, shirts, anything for the upper body, but it's not as good. It can't do shoes, for example. But AI models will come out soon that can do shoes. So it's the, it's a kind of app where it will get better and better as AI progresses. So it will grow with the technology, which is always cool and always a good idea to build something that will grow with the technology. And then I would, I would probably try out a few get ready with me influencers.

You said, so Figma, um, How do you like— does that website automatically build you an, a UI, like an app interface without doing anything?

It does not. You have to do it yourself, but it's not super complicated. Watch a few tutorials. If you can get good at Figma, that's a very valuable skill.

Hmm. If you had zero coding experience but you had a general idea of TikTok and like what looked good, uh, as an app, what would be your first hire? Like if you wanted someone to take care of that part of it and you kind of help them with it?

I'm a believer that you don't want to hire anyone needlessly. Well, not just needlessly, but if I haven't found success before, if I'm just getting started, I would not outsource anything.

You wouldn't even get a dev?

I wouldn't even get a dev because how are you going to manage someone if you don't know how to do it yourself? You would just be trusting someone that unless they're a co-founder with equity, your incentives aren't really aligned. If you charge them project basis, then they're incentivized to get it back to you as quick as possible. Write code that probably isn't scalable and long term that is going to be very bad for adding on new features to the project. If you hire a dev and pay them hourly, then they're incentivized to overreport their hours or spend excessive amounts of time getting the project out, and you won't be able to launch it as quick as you could otherwise.

So how would I know then? Like, do I need to learn some code? Are these softwares good enough for me to get an MVP up? Like, what would I need to learn how to do? How long would that take?

With AI, I'm very confident anyone, even with zero coding experience, If they put in the hours, can launch an MVP within a month. That would be spending hours a day, maybe 4 hours a day. If they aren't willing to put in the hours or fewer hours, they could, it would obviously take longer, but you definitely can with these AI tools super easily now.

Okay, so Closet AI, we have the MVP, uh, we have to get it approved by Apple first, I'm guessing, or would you You might not have learned this yet, or you might disagree with the philosophy. If it were me personally, I would do the ad creatives before doing the product and maybe just make an MVP of it to show in the ad creative, or just do an ad creative that doesn't even have the product in it just to test. Do you ever think about that, or do you think there's a reason you need to make the app before you test it?

I have seen people do that. I don't think it's— I think that strategy could work for some people. Whenever I build something, I'm very confident in the fact that it will be able to go viral on social media. So I go all in, but I have seen people do that. The only argument against it is that you'll, you will move slower if you need to first validate it works, then go build it. If that's the one project you want to work on versus if you're just trying to experiment and find something, then it could be a good idea to do that. Build out these test prototypes for a bunch of different ideas, see which one works best before investing the time to build it. Build it.

Okay, so you said influencer marketing, you would get a couple influencers in the niche. Uh, where would you go from there? Would you think of— would you steal viral TikToks from similar apps, similar niches, and kind of go that route?

Or, you know what, I actually have a friend that did that strategy you were talking about. He designed the app in Figma and then he made TikToks about it. The TikToks got millions of views. People were super excited about the app. Everyone in the comments, they would come back days after, ask when it was going to be released. But then it took him a few months to build the app, which is reasonable. First of all, he outsourced it, so it's going to take long. As I explained, incentives are not aligned. But secondly, it was also his first time building any project, so that also would add to the timeline. He launched the app finally, but when he made TikToks, the TikToks wouldn't break 1,000 views. He had lost the hype that he once had built up. So that is one thing I would be wary of. If I—

you also give away your idea.

You give away your idea. Yeah, he did that, and then a ton of competitors actually released before him. So if you're going to do that, you need to be ready to move extremely quick. As soon as the idea is validated, you need to get on that.

Back to the, uh, once we have the app.

Yeah.

What, what's the TikTok, uh, strategy that you'd go with as an MVP?

I would find an influencer that is one of the top influencers in the niche and not top by followers or views, But one of the most closely related, your ideal dream influencer for this product, basically who it was built for. And if it works with them, then that's great. You could expand outward. If it doesn't work with them, then you could usually scrap the idea or you'll have to refine something about it because if that's your ideal influencer for the product and it doesn't work with them, it's not going to work with of anyone.

And how do you know something works? One download, 10 downloads?

I measure if something is successful, if it's a profitable influencer promotion and has a good ROI too. If I spend $100 to pay the influencer and then that generates $1,000, I'd consider that at least preliminarily successful where it's worth more investment Working with more influencers, seeing how far it can go.

And then after the influencer strategy, uh, is there anything left? Is it like, uh, you just continue working on the app, iterating?

Well, by that point, hopefully whoever gets there will— that's when it's more about scaling than anything else. You'll want to build the app. Build out more features after validating it. You will want to contact and work with more influencers. You will probably want a designer to come on and make everything better. If it keeps going well, you'll want to hire as you're scaling and to break down every step on this podcast would take hours. But I think if you can successfully get past the first steps of validating the idea, and generating a profitable ROI, then you are smart enough to learn how to scale and build a team around it.

Do you think you got lucky with Cal AI as the second idea of the app you launched, or do you think you learned enough from launching, uh, Grind Clock to give you the information necessary to build Cal AI?

Well, Cal AI wasn't the second app. Cal AI was Probably the 5th app.

Okay.

We built the social competitive gym app after Grind Clock, Flex, and then a couple other small projects.

What were the other ones? Really quick.

So the other ones, one was a peer-to-peer payment platform. It was, we briefly worked actually at another startup building it for them. We weren't the founders. Then it was honestly a waste of time.

Was it, uh, Web3 crypto stuff?

It was not. It was mostly for, it was basically Venmo competitor, kind of. Not, well, it actually was competitor to something they were working on, but it was Linktree for payments. So you could send someone a link that would have your Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, and they could choose which one they want to pay you on.

Yeah, that's needed for sure. Hmm. And then what were the other two startups?

The other two were, one was actually a motivational wallpaper app. Where you can choose images, choose some motivational quote, and then generates a wallpaper for your phone. The other app we were working on, we were working on a breathing/meditation app.

Like a Calm competitor. And was it integrated with AI?

It was not. This one was not an AI app. We also played around with many other ideas, like take a picture of your face, get the best haircut for you. See what you would look like with that haircut, for example. So just constantly messing around. Some of these we launched the App Store, some of these we never launched. But in terms of was Call AI luck, what I kept saying to Henry, who's my co-founder on all of these apps, was that if we keep launching apps, inevitably one will succeed. One will take off. The extent that Call AI took off, was there some luck in the space that, that was the app that took off and it's in a space that has a ton of opportunity? That's more debatable. But was it lucky that we had a success as big as we did, or even to a big scale? I don't think so. I think it was inevitable because we were not going to stop until we found success.

What was the most successful of the apps you launched before that one, before Call.ai?

Well, the most successful thing I built would have been Totally Science.

Okay, so the other apps, which of those besides Totally Science got good downloads?

Grind Clock, which got tens of thousands of downloads.

And why was that not enough for you?

Because, well, it should have been. That was the first app we had ever built. We didn't really know what to expect. And so after taking away learning lessons, we were like, okay, let's apply this to other apps. But in retrospect, we should have kept working on Grind Clock, kept updating it. There was clearly a lot of good feedback from users initially.

Yeah, it just seems like the one, like, I think there's a world that exists where one of those other apps got to $100K MRR and you were okay with it and you decided to work on that, maybe scaled it up to $200K, $300K. It just seems like the fact that Cal AI is such— like you were building, um, an app studio a few months ago. Like it seemed like you were going to focus on a bunch of different niches because you kind of had the marketing strategy, but you ended up just honing in on Cal AI. Um, so I guess that's the only thing that seems a bit lucky to me is that the market was maybe bigger. Than you thought and the interest was bigger than you thought. I guess how big do you think it can go? MyFitnessPal did $100 million in revenue last year.

I believe it was actually $200 million.

$200 million. Okay.

And then Noom is doing also hundreds of millions. Their company is valued at over $1 billion. There are a few other apps that are also doing tens of millions of dollars a year. So I know the space is at least big enough where we could at least get to the $200 million MyFitnessPal is doing. At least. How far past that is the question. I think that may necessitate integrating physical products. Maybe like GLP-1s is how Noom really scaled.

Are those supplements?

Those— that's like Ozempic.

Do you have any ideas for what would be the next thing after Cal AI? Any problems that you want to tackle?

I definitely want to get into the hardware space. I don't know exactly what I want to build yet, but something physical makes you feel like Iron Man. It's so much cooler than software.

Are you thinking you want to build an iPhone competitor?

I don't think if I build something that would become the new iPhone, it wouldn't be a phone. It would maybe be glasses or a brain chip. So I think the form factor would be entirely different. And I expect glasses will be the next big thing, the next iPhone. I expect it. And then after, I expect it will be brain chips. So I don't know if I'm too late to get into the glasses. I may be too late, maybe not. Maybe I'm at the perfect time where I just need to hire the right team and build off existing technology. And if we move fast enough, we could be the best product to go to market. But if I am too late, then Maybe something with brain chips because that is fascinating to me, the brain and connecting technology to it.

Something like a Neuralink.

Yes, that is basically what I've thought about.

Would you build a competitor or would you want to work on that project specifically?

I would never not want to be the founder and CEO, so it would have to be a competitor.

I do want to challenge you on that a bit because you'd kind of mentioned that after you have the cash out from, uh, CalAI, it wouldn't really be about money. It'd be about changing. Do you think you would change more lives in position as a founder, or do you think being a part of someone else's journey?

I want to be the one at the wheel changing the world. I don't want to be enacting somebody else's mission. And part of that is because I also, I am addicted to the idea of having ultimate freedom, freedom to do anything I want when I want, wherever I want, with who I want. Working at another company takes away freedom. The whole point of entrepreneurship is that even if I was only able to make $100,000 a year, and if I can make $100,000 a year at a normal job, but put in half the time because it's 9 to 5, clock in, clock out, don't have to think about it versus the startup where I'm constantly working 24/7 as most founders are, I would take the startup every time just for the freedom of choosing what I can and cannot do.

It's really interesting on freedom that you value that the most. I think most people should. I wanted to say this about the iPhone. Just in general, you might have had this realization. I came to this recently. I was kind of getting into the high-ticket space, like thinking, how could I charge someone like $1 million for a product, right? And a lot of, that's honestly my big recommendation. That's something Hormozy talks about is like, go white glove, go enterprise, and then kind of scale it down from there. Like Uber, for instance, started as like you had a personal driver a chauffeur and it was only for rich people. Uh, personal chefs kind of started that way. And then you have Uber Eats and Uber, uh, the kind of commoditized version of that. Uh, and what's interesting, the richest billionaire in the world was, uh, the guy who founded the Louis Vuitton last year. And it's because they do like high-ticket products, uh, that you like buy on repeat. And what's interesting about Apple is the iPhone is a high-ticket product for everyone. So it's like a commodity. It's like a chocolate bar, but you're paying $1,000 for a chocolate bar and you're getting a new one every 2 years. So they have the repeat built in. And then also all the stuff with the App Store of them taking a percentage. That's just why the iPhone is such a good product. And I think if someone can make another $1,000 thing that is purchased by everyone every 2 years, that's the thing about a brain chip though. You don't want to get it in and out. How would you monetize that?

Well, people don't want to get it in until they know it's completely safe, and they won't do it until they are forced into it because the ones who don't have the AI chip, the brain chip, will not be able to keep up with people who do. They will fall behind because intelligently and everything within the body they will not be able to keep up with.

But how could you monetize that? It's like, do you make better versions of it for some people? Do you implant it in and then it stops— your brain stops working and then you have to get a new one every 2 years? Like, have you thought about this?

That's a good question. I would have to— that's something where with my limited knowledge of the technology, it would be hard to say, but it could be a subscription where you have to pay to keep it to keep it active. And if it turns off, nothing will happen. But if you want to keep the benefits, you have to pay the subscription.

Hmm. Subscription model, brain shit. That's interesting.

It could also be a one-time payment. Yeah.

But a lot of people couldn't afford like the $80K you go for it because that's the only way the business could be profitable. But I think a subscription could definitely work kind of like an Oura Ring. You pay for that and then the subscription costs a lot of money actually. Let me just ask you this. What's the hardest part of being a millionaire at 18 years old?

It's hard to relate to people my age, and so it makes some social situations difficult. Becoming friends with new people, that's something I'm a little worried about going into college, and it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. But there are very few people I can deeply connect with.

Have there been any other unexpected consequences of you being so successful so young?

I'd say there's a lot of good that comes with it. More good than bad. I would take— there are bad things. The worst thing is making it hard to, harder to relate, but it's a trade-off I would take every time. I think that there are obviously these stories where people are asking, for money from someone that became successful. And so far that really hasn't happened to me, at least not much. But I do expect I will eventually see there is a bad side to all of this.

I, uh, we spoke about this off camera briefly that whenever I interview a guest or research a guest, I get kind of hyperfixated on, uh, the topic at hand. And I was thinking, what AI app could I build? That would do a lot in revenue. And I just want you to tear it apart so if anyone else builds an app, they kind of get what you think about first. So if I built an app, let's call it Roast AI or RoastGPT.

That's an app.

Or RoastGPT is an app. I did see that. So what does that one do to your knowledge?

You take a screenshot of text messages. And then it will generate you a reply that roasts the other person based on the context of what they could see in the messages.

Got it. Okay. So I think my roast AI would be different that it would kind of be like the Mog AI where you upload a photo of yourself or someone and then it just sends a chat roasting the shit out of you. That's the MVP version of it. And then it kind of gets deeper that you have like the AI voice do it. So like maybe there's an avatar and it like has a video where it just roasts you, just roasts the photo. And then that video is maybe like a viral piece of creative you can use for TikTok. And then going past that, you have like the paid version of it, which is celebrities roasting you. So it's like celebrity-generated AI with AI voice and that kind of roasts you. And then even past that, my idea for something viral was like fake FaceTime video where you show, like say I flipped the screen to you and it was who, like Kevin Hart, like a comedian. And you're like, oh, what's up, bro? And then it's just AI responses and it starts like roasting you and interacting with you in real time. And it's like, why are you laughing?

This isn't funny.

You know what I'm saying? And I think the technology is somewhat there for that, but like what would be your, uh, like critiques and good parts of an idea like that?

Totally. So would that all be in one app or are these separate apps?

Like ideally I would be testing it and then adding the features as it goes.

Okay.

And then probably remove the like chat roast feature. Like, okay.

Yeah. All of these apps, all of these separate ideas, these features, they are inherently viral. If you made TikToks about them, they would get views. However, the roast someone based off a picture likely isn't something people would pay for. The FaceTime idea, that is very interesting. There's an app that came out recently called Parallel Live. It is a fake livestream where it looks like you are on TikTok live and you have thousands of followers, thousands of viewers right now commenting, reacting, sending hearts. So you could go up to people— this is what they do in the ads— and this guy will go up to girls, be like, hey, I'm live, and then the girls will be all over him because he's some influencer or fake influencer. This is what the idea reminds me of. The FaceTime, that is the thing that people are likely most likely to pay for. It's still not something that everyone would convert for. I think you keep this, you keep the FaceTime, you keep honestly the part where you upload a picture and you get roasted. I don't know if we need that, but the FaceTime, I like that idea as a viral hook. But then the app is built around an experience where You could generate celebrity videos, you could fake a FaceTime with a celebrity, and there are different modes. You could have it roast you and then show it to your friend. You could have a real conversation with the influencer, and you could also generate AI voices of the influencer or videos. And that is something where I think people would find use cases and actually pay for. The FaceTime has the hook, and then you could add on other features that are paywalled.

That's interesting. So what I'm kind of getting, maybe you're not implying this, but it's something that is viral, but maybe not something that people will use every single day.

Not that they won't. First of all, yeah, they probably won't use it every single day.

It's kind of gimmicky to have like a FaceTime prank. Like, sure, that's a viral video, like Kevin Hart roasting your mom or something. But it's like, how many times can you really do that to people? Like you might, buy the subscription for a week, let's say, because you just want to test it out. But I guess the real interest would be talking to someone on FaceTime that is an AI celebrity, because that's probably what people would end up using. That's my guess because of just the popularity of chatbots, like chat with your favorite influencer in general.

Yeah, I think you could basically build character AI, but for talking to celebrities and not these anime characters.

Why do you think those are so popular?

I believe loneliness. There was a recent graph I saw that showed how the amount of people, the amount of time you'll spend with your friends as you get older, there's a very, very steep drop-off after the age of 18, 19, 20, all the way to 23. Very steep. And it goes from maybe 60% of your time is with your friends very high number to less than 10%. And I think at this age, people become very lonely, very fast because of how fast the drop-off was. And they want some kind of friend to talk to, so they will resort to AI. Not everyone, but enough people. And if you can make a friend in the AI, if the experience is convincing enough, which I think Many of these chatbots lack many things that really make them convincing and addictive. The types of things that friends would actually do for each other, like start the conversation, not just wait for a message. I think it is something that's going to develop into something almost anyone can use and not just these lonely people.

On virality, uh, you've made millions through going viral. On TikTok, uh, or just getting videos that, uh, you pay for sponsorships with influencers, uh, what's your secret to going viral on TikTok?

So with influencers, there's no secret to going viral. If the influencer averages 100K views, I'm going to expect the video that they include us in will also get 100K views unless it's a super obvious ad where they're literally saying, hey guys, video sponsored by Cal AI, everyone go download That's gonna get 2 views. But if they're making their regular content, it's gonna get the same amount of views. So that's the influencer side. It's not so much about figuring out a viral formula, more about not breaking what's working for making actual TikToks. It's really about trends, finding trends, finding hooks when something works after a ton of experimentation, because any, so many different types of videos can go Viral. There's not one formula of how to go viral. You could figure out different ways. You could scroll the For You page for a few hours and then see here are all kinds of different hooks that are going viral right now. And then after you find something that works and replicate it, keep making the same video slightly changed until it stops working. And then it's about going to find the next viral hook to try out.

You put a lot of emphasis on the hook. Um, is that just what you say in the video, or is that the visual hook of the video? How do you think about it?

So imagine the user scrolling through TikTok and then bam, something catches their attention. They stop scrolling to watch your video. That's whatever you do in the first 3 seconds. One of the most important, well, the most important piece of a short-form video is the hook.

The, uh, Call AI success stories, uh, has anyone lost a significant amount of weight using the app?

Yeah, people have messaged us that have lost over 50 pounds.

Are there any other tools you're working on? I don't know if you can talk about these, but what would you be thinking about in terms of like improving the app?

We are always working on improving the accuracy. So training the model on even more foods. We are always— this is actually recent. So early on in the company, everything was intuition. Myself being a user, someone who wanted this app Cal AI after trying MyFitnessPal, I implemented all of these features that I would personally find helpful. But now since we've scaled a lot, we've built out a good team, we are starting to go about things in a more structured professional way where now we actually will A/B test different features. And so we are constantly just throwing out a hypothesis. Will this be something of value to the user? And then assessing after a week, do people that have this version of the app stay for longer than without the feature? Based on that, we'll decide to implement it. So that's really how we've evolved over time and where we are now, trying out a ton of different features.

Let me give you a big challenge to Kali AI. Uh, So I'm someone who's fairly good, just maybe above average at prompting on ChatGPT. If I made a really good prompt, I took a photo of a piece of pizza and then used Kali AI, like how much of a difference would there be in Kali AI's like technology prompting and getting the calories accurate?

With a slice of pizza, it's very straightforward. I don't think there would be a big difference. When it comes to more complex foods, there will start to be significant differences. We do use existing LLMs and chatbots like ChatGPT from multiple companies all in a pipeline, and we fine-tuned our model, also brought in a food database, RAG model. So we don't just have one simple prompt. We have a bunch of different pathways and routes that the image can go down to have the best estimate of calories. Each different type of food will go down a different pathway to figure out the best estimate possible. I've actually heard that a lot, people saying, oh, let me just use ChatGPT, it's free, I don't need to download Cal AI. But do you want to manually add up how many calories ChatGPT said for everything? We give you the dashboard, so it's a lot easier than typing in the prompt, putting in images and tracking all of the total calories, total protein, etc.

And what does your moat look like? Why can't MyFitnessPal just copy Cali?

I, right now I believe our biggest moat is our influencer network because we have exclusivity deals with all of our influencers. So very hard to break into. I think our technology can be replicated, but it would take an entire UI rehaul of the MyFitnessPal app to get it to a place where it's user-friendly. It would require removing a ton of features. Their app is extremely bloated where they have sleep trackers, heart monitors, anything related to health. And you could respect what they're doing. They're trying to be the one app for anything health-related. I think the beauty of Cal AI is that it's so easy to pick up and use because it's only for this one problem. We don't try to convolute it and include anything.

Why should you just focus on the one thing?

There are better apps for each other problem. There are better sleep trackers out there. There are better heart monitor apps and focusing on this one thing. This is actually something from a guest you had on previously, Oliver Brocato, from many conversations with him. He used to always talk about how he never wanted to build something that was the one shop for all mediocre products. He wanted to be the stop for one great product. And I agree with him on that front where Cali, I, we want to be the best calorie tracker. We don't want to be just mediocre at everything.

That's really interesting how like watching all the social medias, it just seems so simple for there to be one social media that has all the features of the others. But it's really about the culture that is developed on each one. Do you think there's room for social apps to be disrupted? Do you think there's room for another social media platform to be built?

I think there definitely is. I believe BeReal was the most recent that came out and tried to disrupt everything. And I think more apps will be coming out soon that either replace or are used on the side of these other apps for sure.

Do you think it would just take some primary feature that's a differentiator or?

So social apps are interesting. Because there are hybrid models where you build an app that is useful to an individual and then you build social features around it. So for example, taking Cal AI and then building a community where people have a feed, they could see what meals other people ate in the day, text other people like, good luck on your weight loss journey, congrats on losing 5 pounds. And then there are also social media sites where You only derive value from the other people on the site, and it wouldn't be worthwhile to use if no one else used it. There are many of these hybrid models, so many. Saturn is one of these apps created by a friend of mine, and it is a calendar app for high school or college students where they can see who's in their class and what their schedule looks like for school. So by itself, it's useful because you have your calendar, but then it also has these social features where you could see friends in your classes, chat with them, and see upcoming events for the whole school. There are many of these hybrids. There are fewer where it is solely a social media platform. That is something that is much more difficult to break into. Dylan is the founder of Saturn. He's a cool guy.

What's the next industry AI is going to disrupt?

I think AI is disrupting and has already disrupted a bunch of industries. Every day new companies are being launched that are innovations on prior companies with heavy AI integrations. For example, the calendar, simple calendar, the calendar app. How can you incorporate AI. This company Motion has done it where an AI will help you schedule all of your meetings and tasks for the day. And so it's happening so rapidly. I don't think there's necessarily one industry where it's going to revolutionize because it's, it's happening as we speak. There's probably a new product in a whole new industry being launched.

Why should you execute ideas over just brainstorming. Uh, you mentioned a story of Thomas Edison, I think, that I found really interesting. Yeah.

I love Thomas Edison and his approach to creation. I'm a big believer in just getting started on something, not to sit there theorizing and reading so many research papers, but just to get into it. Thomas Edison was someone who would basically do that. He didn't have a traditional education, so he didn't know the scientific method, and it was very clear in the way he invented things. In the early, early days of the telephone, it was Thomas Edison versus Alexander Graham Bell. Basically, Alexander Graham Bell created the first prototype for a phone. But it wasn't able to transmit the signal over long distances at all. It was very hard to understand what the person was saying. And so there was a race between these two guys to create a better material to actually record voices and send it over long distances. Thomas Edison, not knowing the scientific method, just got started. He tried all kinds of different materials, any kind of metal, and then crazy things. He tried pig frog guts as different materials to pick up sound. Alexander Graham Bell, on the other hand, he took the more scientific approach. He took what was hypothesized, the materials that could work, probably read some research papers, and by the end, they both had their versions. Thomas Edison's was 100 times better than Alexander Graham Bell's, and his approach is just brute forcing things. And I love that Elon Musk is now doing the same thing with the Boring Company. He wanted to fix traffic. So he didn't start routing different highway maps, figuring out more efficient ways to route traffic. Said he just started digging tunnels, and as they've dug more tunnels, they've built out better technology and figured out better ways to do it. I love this approach and think it's a great lesson to not let yourself feel analysis paralysis. To instead take action.

Yeah, I love that piece of advice. I think people often overthink things way too much. And when you actually get into it, there are so many problems that you would've never expected arose. What's been on your mind the past few weeks? It's getting close to the end of your senior year. You've made $20 million with your company. You're set to make $24 million by the end of the year. Or is that the end of the 12 months?

12 months from now, by the end from launching the company to a year to the year anniversary, we will have made maybe $15 million.

Okay, so $15 million in 12 months. Yeah. What's been on your mind the past few weeks, few months in terms of graduating high school? Issues with the company scaling, that kind of thing.

I'm pretty sick of being in school, to be honest. Sick of taking tests, having to even show up, wake up early. I'm actually— I'm going to skip a few days next week, fly out to San Francisco. I might start skipping a lot more school now. Also, next steps for the company. Things have really changed where early on and for the last, maybe for the first 8 months of the company, maybe even first 10, I was very heavily involved in everything with the day-to-day. I was initially coding, then the main marketing guy, then the main product guy, and then spending all day recruiting and Now I'm in a position where I'm focused more on working on the business, not in the business. So talking to other founders, still doing recruiting, so that's very high leverage and figuring out ways to 10x the company, not boost 10% within the company. The company is going to grow regardless whether I keep working on it or not. The team is there. We have almost a 20-person team at this point. And everyone— there's a ton of momentum. Everyone knows their role. Everyone is pushing hard. So I'm focused on the bigger picture thinking and strategy for what comes next.

Do you think it'll come down to marketing, sales, or the product?

All of it.

And if you had to give it— is it disproportionately one over the other?

I don't think so. As we boost each of them, it will boost the company as a whole. They are all multipliers. As we increase the marketing funnel to get more users in, simultaneously we are increasing retention on the product and the LTV of each customer. So they will multiply each other and 1 1 will not equal 2, it will equal 3. Same with all of it. I mean, the main levers in the company that I see to work on are distribution, the onboarding flow, and the initial conversion. On the paywall, and then retention/LTV. Those are the 3 pillars.

Is it a worry of yours that over the next few months you'll find that people do not resubscribe to the app and it kills the MRR?

So we can see the usage and we have people using the app since day 1. So we know that there will be a significant proportion of users that do renew.

Can you say like, what is the negative usage? Like how many people are inactive?

I can't say it here publicly.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Let's assume that number was high. What would you be thinking about to reengage those users?

We've already done a few of these things. So recently we brought on someone who has helped us grow the LTV. By doing things like figuring out if a user is using the app, but they're currently unsubscribed, which can happen for many reasons. Many people don't want their subscription automatically renewing at the end of the year, so they'll pay for it, but then they'll turn off the auto renew. For those users, we now show a banner saying that they're set to lose their subscription after a certain number of days, so we prompt them to actually renew. which should boost the amount of people. It should remind them to turn it back on.

And then how, I, I guess I have to ask, how are you combating copycats? Do you think you just have such a moat around the brand itself? You talked about some of the other, uh, things like have, are copycats really taking up that much of your market share?

Well, it's funny, there are a few things at play here. I think that first of all, because we have had the first mover advantage, That has played into something I'm about to explain. So we've had first mover advantage and we've also moved extremely, extremely quickly getting so many fitness influencers in such a short amount of time promoting Cali Eye that now these copycat clone apps that make apps that look identical to our app, but they'll just change the name, they will. Have influencers make videos about them, people will comment, what app is that? And others will reply, it's Cal AI. So their marketing is actually helping us.

When you say others, who are the others commenting? It's Cal AI.

Well, these are random people in the audience that have seen it all over social media and just assume that that—

oh, I thought you were saying it was something where you guys had rigged it to where you just went in and commented, oh, it's Cal AI.

No, this is natural consumer psychology.

That's crazy. And it's just because their branding looks so similar or just, I, I guess the brand has just really gotten out there.

Um, yeah, it's the branding. It's the fact that every other influencer is promoting Cal AI, so they see this, maybe they don't take a close enough look and they just assume, oh, take a picture, get calories. That's Cal AI. Hmm.

And then can you copyright or patent any of the technology?

Patenting technology and software is always very difficult, especially in the consumer app space. So we could, but then there's always workarounds. It wouldn't do much. The best thing we can do is trademark it, which we're in the process of.

And in terms of 10xing, I just wanted to give my ideas or thoughts. Have you considered any kind of merchandising, any kind of events for people to go to, or any kind of rewards like this person lost 100 pounds with Kali AI? I'm sure you've thought of doing that for long-form YouTube videos or like TikToks. But, uh, like, has there been anything like that? Do you think that would be big?

It's interesting you say that. I've had a similar idea where after users lose their first 10 pounds, we send them a shirt, for example. I think that there are definitely ways that we can upsell these users. So whether it's a physical product, like selling them a scale to weigh themselves, because that's integral for losing weight or something within the app, maybe a higher tier plan for other features. These are all things that we are thinking about and things that we are going to test in the next few months. We have an experiment that should go live in the next 2 weeks that is an upsell.

It's a scale.

No, it's, it's not. I can't say publicly here because of—

is it a physical product?

It's, it's software.

It's software. Okay.

Hmm.

Have you considered something like you lose this much weight and the app becomes free?

That's an interesting marketing hook. It would be a logistical nightmare to pull off and validate, but a very interesting marketing hook.

Not if you had a scale. Yeah, that would be an interesting marketing stunt. Cali AI is paying out $100,000 to anyone who loses 100 pounds with their app. Um, or anyone that loses 50 pounds. Um, have you done any press or things like that? I know you personally have done press because your story is interesting, but has Kali and I done a lot of press like that? Like, this person lost this amount of weight with—

We have not done much of that. That is interesting. Where do you think something like that would be posted to besides our own social profiles?

Likely articles. Um, you can, uh, reach out to reporters, say you have this story. Ideally, you just have this, uh, I mean, the hook is, "I lost 100 pounds with AI. Here's how I did it." And it's— Cal AI is one of the things, if not the main thing. And then there are maybe some other things they did with AI. I think that's a good YouTube video in general. So maybe you plan that YouTube video and then some press pick it up because it's just catchy. It'll get them clicks and then it kind of gets pushed out there. And then have you done theme page marketing already?

Yes.

What has been your strategy there?

So the theme pages we've done have mostly been meme pages.

Mm-hmm.

So not super on brand doing fitness pages. And we've done things like for Thanksgiving, it was someone, uh, we created a meme where someone combined all of their Thanksgiving foods into a blender to make a smoothie out of like disgusting, a terrible mix that should never be mixed. The turkey, the cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes into a smoothie. And then we scanned the calories with Kalei Eye. That was created into a carousel meme and did pretty good. We had different variations of similar Thanksgiving-themed things.

Have you done just this marketing ad creative of like Starbucks is lying about calories or McDonald's is lying about calories and then they take a photo of it and it's like this AI does it and it's 700 calories versus 1,500 calories, what they advertised. Have you tried that one?

We don't usually make the videos ourselves, so we don't experiment too much with different hooks.

That's not even a focus for you.

It's mostly about letting the influencer do what they want. But that specific thing wouldn't work out well with Call AI because it doesn't work as well with drinks. It doesn't know if you took a picture of a pink Starbucks drink, it wouldn't know every chemical and ingredient that was used, every syrup, because it's all blended. For all it knows, it's water with just pink dye in it. And that's something we've tried to do a better job of, is educating users. A lot of people expect that Call AI will be 100% accurate. That it will have X-ray vision. But it's important to know that if you take a picture of a sandwich, you need to open up the bread to make sure it can see the tomato inside.

What happens if I take a photo of like a phone or like a—

It will tell you that no food was detected.

Okay. Okay. Gotcha. I was curious about that. Like, what if you take a photo of like a dog or like a chicken?

We've had influencers make videos about that as a joke, but it will still say no food detected. It's a good marketing hook though.

It's interesting. And it's just photo scan, it goes in, there's no like live detection.

There's no live detection. It's you take the picture and put it in your pocket.

And is that better for any reason as opposed to say I had a meal and I go this and then it says 800 calories, this 300 calories, you know what I'm saying?

I think it's a lot easier to simply take a picture and then it will analyze everything in the background. Rather than waiting, holding up your phone to scan a meal for 30 seconds, clicking confirm for every single ingredient.

I asked you what you were thinking about at the moment. It seemed a lot of the company and a lot of you wanted to get out of school. Given that you've made $20 million at 18, has high school been useful?

I'm grateful with what I've learned in high school. I think it's important to know certain mathematical principles. Derivatives, integrals. So at least knowing the basics of calculus. I am grateful for the knowledge I learned of physics, taking physics classes, the fundamentals of how the world works. Not enough where I can necessarily start a company where I'm building some, a rocket ship company, but enough where I know the direction I will have to go toward to learn more about the topic and learn specifically catered towards what I'm trying to do. I'm also grateful for high school for the social life.

Have you made any, like, uh, has high school helped you make any money?

Well, my unblocked gaming website, it was all around using it in school. So I would say yes, I wouldn't have had that idea if I wasn't in school.

So how about college? You and I actually chatted briefly about this. You, have you gotten the letter back from Stanford yet or?

I'm not, I'm still waiting for Stanford.

I've, just to give everyone a brief, Zach Yadegari also has really great grades, which is fairly rare in like young entrepreneurs. He's like a 34 ACT, 4.0 GPA, 34 ACT is like standardized test, 98th percentile, 99th percentile. So what schools are the top ones right now for you?

Stanford, Harvard, and Duke.

Got it. And you haven't heard back from them?

I've not heard back from any of those. I've heard back from a few schools so far. So I have gotten into U Miami, UT Austin, and Georgia Tech. I have been rejected from WashU.

You got rejected from WashU?

Rejected from WashU, rejected from UVA, and rejected from MIT. It was actually a waitlist for WashU and then a rejection from UVA, rejection from MIT.

That's wild, man. Like, as someone with so much success, do you have Any idea why that could be? I know you might have to give a fairly political answer to this, but, uh, I think there's a lot of inefficiency in the school system.

I think they figured it out for athletes. They have scouts that find the best athletes and they'll give offers to them. They don't need to apply. They'll get the offers. I think they should have that for anyone that sticks out. It shouldn't just be star athletes. It should be Star entrepreneurs, star— I guess there are very few things I was going to say, star dancers, but I suppose you could still get a D1 offer for dancing. If you win awards from a research project, I think you should get offers for something like that. I don't think it should just be limited to athletics.

Yeah, I guess schools are really just trying to build like who is going to give us the best chance at being an alumni? I mean, that's what I would think of it at least. Like we can say that this person went to this college. Maybe that's not what they're thinking about.

Yeah, I would assume that too. That's the logical thing. However, the people that are reviewing applications, they're just getting paid a salary. They don't have equity in the college. They don't care about the legacy of a school. And so I don't think they have that on their mind, that this person will look great to have went to this school that I just work at for $50 an hour.

I'd ask you what they do care about, but maybe I'll answer since you're still in the college process. I would assume that maybe there are some slight motivations for people to have, if they don't have any incentive to get good college students, it's likely whose essay did they like the best, or feel that they felt the most bad for the person or most emotionally resonated with, which kind of doesn't create the best base of students, in my opinion. Would you say there's any truth to that?

Totally, completely. I mean, this whole affirmative action thing, I don't think it has stopped even though the policy has went away. And I also think it is a competition of who has the worst sob story.

From people like myself, let's just assume I'm an above average successful person, young age. And I know, you know, a lot of these guys, like, are most of people like me or like your co-founder? Are they telling you, Zach, what the hell are you talking about going to college? Is that most of what you're getting?

It's not. They're extremely supportive of whatever I want to do. I'm balancing this with high school, college. Everyone says you have more free time, so I should be more productive than I am right now, if anything. But it clearly has not slowed anything down. Well, maybe it's slowed stuff down, but we're moving. We are one of the fastest growing startups of any company started in 2024 of any AI startup.

So, but would you say most people are telling you not to go to college or?

So many people are telling me not to go. So many people are also telling me to go.

What would you say the split is? Would you say it's like 80% are telling you not to go? Because it's interesting how culture's changed. When I was going to go to college, everyone was like, you have to go to college. And it was like the contrarian thing to not go to college. But your age, it's like everyone's probably telling you not to go to college and you're like, well, maybe I should go, you know?

The entrepreneurs that haven't found success yet that I've spoken to tell me not to go to college. Hmm. Most of them. And then most of the entrepreneurs who have been pretty successful will still tell me no. Maybe that's more split. The entrepreneurs who have been really, really successful, they tell me to go to college. And people who aren't entrepreneurs at all, they also usually tell me go to college. But everyone's reason I kind of have problems with. The people that aren't entrepreneurs, they say go to college for the network. I met you on X. I'm meeting so many people on X. Well, actually it was Instagram, but social media in general. I've met so many entrepreneurs, so many of the best connections I'll have in my life, and I will continue to make some of the best connections I'll have for the rest of my life. My co-founder Blake on Cal AI, social media. Jay Castillo, another co-founder on Cal AI, met him through Oliver Broccato, who I met on social media. So I put network aside and then others say go for the academics. I put that aside. I'm confident I could learn anything on my own from YouTube or anything else, maybe AI tools. I only want to go for the social life.

And why is college such a big lever for social life in your opinion?

It is the most concentrated place of people my age. And if I pick right, then also attractive girls my age.

So you want to meet your wife in college?

Yeah, that would be cool. That would make it worth going for sure.

Yeah. So is— would you say UT's your top option right now?

Out of the schools I've gotten into, yes. I toured Georgia Tech, but I did not like it. Academically, it's great, but socially, it was not there. UT is the best.

Yeah, guys, I think I've talked about this briefly. I went to UT, so I thought it was funny when Zach said. That was the school he wants to go to. I dropped out after 6 months or so. Was going to do a, or did a startup in Santa Monica. And it was supposed to be a gap semester. And that just turned into whatever this is now. I don't think I'm going back to college, but yeah, UT is pretty cool, man. What is this emphasis on friends and connections? Is it just when you think back to, or when you think forward to 80-year-old Zach Yadegari and you kind of have this assumption that money will be taken care of, education will be taken care of, the only thing that you don't feel is that friends have been taken care of yet?

Correct. I also am haunted by the story of Notch, the creator of Minecraft. He became incredibly rich and successful, but in the process of focusing solely on creating the best video game, he lost all his friends. He became extremely depressed where he would throw parties in his mansion, but after the parties, people would leave. He wouldn't have people that stayed and talked to him. It's a very vapid, terrible lifestyle void of real connections. That is something I never want to happen.

Why do you put this emphasis on connections? I, I do wanna challenge this a bit because, uh, Well, I don't think connections in terms of— or like connecting to other people on a deeper level.

Connecting to other people.

Why do you think that's important?

Well, some of the most influential people in the world had very few connections.

Who?

Sir Isaac Newton, inventor of calculus and a ton of other things.

He died a virgin, I think.

He did. Yeah, he did. And so I've also been thinking a lot about what I should optimize for in my life. What is my purpose? Do I have a purpose? Does it matter what my legacy is? If a legacy is important, then theoretically I should optimize for having the best legacy possible, which social connections would be something that's irrelevant. I could be like Sir Isaac Newton, lock myself away and fully work on something without talking to anyone. If legacy isn't what's most important and happiness is, then some balance. I'm not convinced happiness is the most important thing in the world. Maybe it's to be religious. I'm not too sure, but I do want to have the most enjoyable experience while also establishing a legacy for myself that may be ambitious. Because there are very few billionaires who have happy relationships with their family. But that is what I'm going to try to do.

Zach, you spent the majority of your high school career working on a $100 million startup. Have you ever had a girlfriend? I have. Gotcha. Was that pretty tough building companies or—

It actually was balancing time. It, it I definitely didn't. I actually, I think I gave enough attention or probably enough, but she was always complaining and eventually I ended things. She definitely wasn't the right girl right now. So the last 6 months or so since the start of the company, I was really focused and I was not looking for a girlfriend. Now that I'm more freed up and I'm working on the company and not in I actually am placing more of an emphasis on normal things like finding a girl and not just working all day.

What's the number one reason most people aren't successful?

Giving up too early, I think, or not trying at all, which is another form of giving up early. I think anyone can do what I'm doing, I think anyone can do and find success in almost any business model if they dedicated enough time toward it, if they put in enough hours. I've almost been in the entrepreneurship game for a decade. I started tutoring kids with coding lessons when I was 10 years old, actually, is when I got started for $30 an hour. And so Cal AI is nowhere near my first business. There was Totally Science, but before Totally Science, I built many different apps and games. None of them took off. After Totally Science, as we discussed, many apps that didn't take off. It's just about putting more shots up. And if you learn from each attempt, if you reflect on it and you can learn one thing and then apply it to the next thing you create, you will inevitably be successful with enough time. There's no way you could fail.

Have you been close to giving up on Callie?

I never know.

Why do you think that is? Just because you've seen success with it?

Well, very early on, we did not see success. The first few weeks after launching Call AI, we didn't have a single influencer respond to our DMs trying to get them to post about the app. Once we had things starting to take off, we built more and more momentum and really started rolling. But for the first few weeks, I would send maybe 100 DMs a day. Nothing back. It was pretty difficult because it felt like everything I was doing was for nothing. Spend all of those hours, not get a single message back. But I didn't stop. Finally, I got my first message and then two and then three and then four, and then more kept coming and the work started paying off.

That reminds me of another strategy that I've been thinking about is paying to use influencers' accounts. Maybe if you guys have an influencer fitness person with 5 million followers on Instagram, just paying them on retainer to utilize their account for outreach. But is that something you've utilized?

It's something we've done.

Really? Okay. Would you say you get most of the responses from email or Instagram?

It's a mix. DMs are usually better because you can get better rates from the influencer. If they respond on a DM, it's likely not their manager, but there is a much lower response rate on DMs. For emails, there's a much greater chance that a manager will be the one that replies to you, so it raises the rates significantly so that they get their cut. However, you have a higher response rate on emails. So there are pros and cons to both.

What are other ways teenagers are becoming millionaires that you've seen?

Well, dropshipping used to be the big thing, and now I think the new dropshipping is consumer apps. Many people are running marketing agencies, copywriting agencies, There are so many SaaS platforms, websites, not just apps. Crayo AI, Daniel's platform.

Seems like TikTok Shop is where I've seen the most amount of young people making money.

That's a good one too. TikTok Shop.

Essentially dropshipping. But why have you not gone that route? Just a natural interest in computers programming.

My advantage definitely lies in building actual products because that's what I'm good at. I could go all in into TikTok shop, and I'm sure with enough time, with enough reps, with enough failures, I will be successful. But it would be starting over instead of leaning into what I'm already good at.

If I had $1 million to give you, uh, for, let's say, a couple hours of your time, and I had a consumer app and you were like, ah, I really need to make this worth it. Like Jack gave me $1 million for these 3 hours. What things would you likely be looking at? Like, would you be like, let me get in on his, uh, marketing strategy and advise him on that? Would it be, let me fix the product itself? Like what would likely be the highest lever? Let's assume they're all equally good or all equally bad.

Well, if they're all equally good or all equally bad, I always believe the marketing funnel. Is the most important. And logically you can deduce that because you could have a shitty product, but the best marketing in the world, and you will get sales or at least downloads. But with enough people coming in, you will at least get a sale. You could have the best product in the world, but if you have zero marketing, you will never get a sale. So that's what I would focus on.

Interesting. I find it curious that you frame yourself as really good at product, but you said marketing. Which one would you say is your strong suit? Is it the coding or is it the marketing? Would you say they're about equally?

I consider programming and product as different things. Anyone can code designs that were already made, but to intuitively design something knowing I want to put this button here because it's closer to the user's thumb. That's something that requires a level of intuition, experience, and thinking from first principles. I think I'm very good at product. It's hard to compare the two, product and marketing, because they're very different. The skill that's most in demand is definitely marketing. So that is probably the more valuable one out of the two. But there are very few people who can get product right. It really comes down to understanding the user, putting yourself in the shoes of them, and consumer psychology.

And then on the question of, uh, we talked about selling earlier, but I was curious, what is your goal for legacy? Maybe what is your net worth goal?

My goal isn't to have a— hit a certain net worth. I do want to become one of the wealthiest people in the world, but that's not because I want the money.

One of the wealthiest or the wealthiest?

I haven't thought about that too much. I don't think I need to be the wealthiest person in the world.

World. But you want to be at least top 10.

But that's not because I want to be— I don't want to be the top 10 wealthiest person or in the list in the top 10 wealthiest people to be one of the top 10 wealthiest people. I want to be there because I think that's a side effect of having massive impact on the world. You can't have one without the other. And so that's just a measurement of the scale of whatever I do. And if I can't hit that, then my company likely is not as impactful as it could be or as I want it to be. I want it to be the company that changes everyone's way of living.

So imagine there was a person who had become the richest human in history, uh, 10,000 times. Do you think that person would tell you to go to college?

Probably not, because that person is likely optimizing for purely financial success or, or success of impact and building the best company, which that's clearly what matters the most to them. And so they likely sacrificed everything to do that and would do it over and over again.

And you don't think that's the case with you? Because it seems as though you're kind of torn between, do I want this ultra extreme legacy or do I want this connection with people, decent net worth, decent impact, that kind of thing?

My vision, my ultimate vision is that the connections, the relationships will help me build the most impactful company, being around more people, helping me understand more of the human experience and be able to build something that everyone in the world loves. So I want to have both, as ambitious as that may be.

It seems like you believe that one of those things is required to get the other thing in a way that you need the right network of people around you to kind of get you to that point, which is really interesting.

Somewhat. I don't think it's necessary. It depends what I'm building, but I don't believe part of the freedom that I always strive for. I don't like to put myself— I despise putting myself in a situation where someone else determines my outcome. For example, college. Someone has to say, yeah, this kid, should go here. He deserves to go here for getting a job. They have to determine that I should be hired, that I'm worthy of the position. And in this case, it could be that I need these people to help me get some insight in order to build a company. The reason I am an entrepreneur and have gotten into it so young is so that I don't need people like that. That are, that can act as a wall and there's no way around it. If everyone in the world hated me, I could still become an anonymous founder and build something that's extremely successful and no one would know it's me. I think being an entrepreneur is one of the only fields where you can do truly whatever you want. You can just build and nothing can stop you except yourself.

This is a bit off topic, but, uh, what's the scrappiest marketing method you've used to grow your product?

This was for GrindClock, but we also did something similar for Cal AI. For GrindClock, how we actually got the idea was that on motivational videos from guys like David Goggins, there would be hundreds of comments of people asking, how could I set this as my alarm clock? So we replied to every single one. I replied personally to thousands of these comments saying, oh, just download Grind Clock. Just copied and pasted that to thousands of people. And it, it worked to an extent. We got downloads. Definitely wasn't scalable, but it, it was the scrappiness and grit I think required.

Who's the most impressive person you've ever met?

That's a difficult question. It's hard to measure because I've met CEOs and founders of public companies. And if you just look at the numbers, they are extraordinarily successful. They were not necessarily all that impressive. I'm sure that there is a lot that's special about them, which is how they got into their position. The person who probably impresses me the most that I've met has to be my co-founder Blake Anderson.

Why is he so impressive to you?

He's young, not as young as me. He's only 24, but he is extremely intelligent and he has amazing intuition. And I think intuition is That's a pattern I've seen from reading about some of the greats like Alexander Hamilton, is that their intuition is always— it's almost always on point and accurate.

Where do you think that comes from?

One, experience. But then secondly, mental frameworks and heuristics to help you go through decision-making processes and take somewhat unrelated information to come to a conclusion of something else that's unrelated.

What's the most common framework you use to make decisions?

So if I'm testing out a feature and for a split second I'm confused, I'm trying to understand this, and then I'm like, oh, okay, that makes sense. I will multiply the time and effort it took me by about 5 or 10. And I've found that that helps me capture how the general public will actually, and the average consumers will react and interact with different things in the world. That's not necessarily because I'm 5 or 10 times smarter than everyone. It's just because I've built a lot of products. So I know if, if I don't understand something right away, that's usually bad design, bad product, because this is what I do full-time. But then even going through the world, I remember seeing once a sign in a store and it was asking someone, well, it was asking everyone in the store to leave a rating, but it had an icon on it. It looked like it could only be scanned by Android phones, not iPhones, because it only had the Android icon. And so for a second I didn't understand it. And then I was like, oh, I'm stupid. If I read closer, it, it shows that it's an iPhone. But I would bet that the average consumer would never make the realization that it would work for iPhones too. And so I try to exaggerate whatever feeling I had and apply that to how I assume the general public will feel about something.

Why don't you just buy your competitors?

Even if we wanted to, it would make more sense from a cash flow perspective to put the money towards scaling rather than buying a competitor. Assuming we had unlimited cash or a bigger surplus and couldn't spend it all on marketing efficiently, we could acquire competitors. There are so many that we wouldn't want to do it with all of them. But it feels wrong. I don't think I would want to give a payday to someone who just ripped off an app that I created with my team.

And they're doing free marketing for you as well. I think if you did buy anyone, it would be someone who has a feature that you want to implement. Just acquihire that person. Um, but that's interesting. Um, last question, Zach, uh, what's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

These are good questions. They make me think. I'll give two. So one is advice I received, and then one is something I've realized. The one I received is that if you want to make the wrong decision, ask everyone their opinion. That was said by Naval. He posted that. On Twitter, X, and I received that advice when trying to make the college decision. I asked almost everyone I knew about their opinion, but it's very true. These people are not in my shoes. They're not in my position. They have different incentives for me. For example, my parents definitely want me to be less risky. They want me to go the safe route. Of, you know, security, having a degree just in case things fall through, have a plan B. The second one, and this is something I try to live by now, I've made this realization recently, the only rule is that there are no rules with everything in life. I mean, who would think that an 18-year-old kid, a high schooler, could be running a company that's on track to make over $20 million in a year. That's not something people think is possible. Almost everything in life, especially with— because we're humans, we are complex creatures. There is so much we are capable of. And also the way we interact, there's no right way to go about things. Necessarily. We have vague principles of morality. But even if something is logical, even if the reason you do something is logical, if it makes someone feel bad, it's going to play out poorly on your behalf. I've always thought that if I was accused of something by someone, even if I proved I didn't do it, I bet that they would still— and even if they completely agreed, okay, he clearly didn't do it, the fact that they accused me of it saved something in their mind where maybe subliminally they now like me a little bit less. And given these complex relationships, you can— I think that the way you interact with the world manipulating your environment and also interacting with other humans. There is no correct way to do anything. You have to constantly adapt and figure out on a case-by-case basis the best way to live your life. All of these self-help frameworks and all of these prescriptive pieces of advice people say online The only rule is there are no rules. These are just things people are saying, but there are plenty of cases where it can be proved false. I'm actually learning in my economics class right now about Keynesian economics and how many of the principles or relationships that are said in Keynesian economics are incorrect. They are just not things that actually happen in the economy. I'll give one example. This is actually not in Keynesian economics, but it's also in economics. The Phillips curve. The Phillips curve essentially says that when unemployment goes down, inflation will go up, and when unemployment goes up, inflation will go down. And this is something that economists use to make their decisions. This is something people in government use to make their decisions. But it's been proven that that's not the case. There are more variables at play. It's a more complex system than simply those two variables in isolation. There's no clear, direct relationship between them that you can derive. I think the whole world is that way where anything, you should take almost anything with a grain of salt. Even this podcast, everything I'm saying, I'm sure that many of the principles that I go by for Cal AI would be completely wrong in another field, in another industry, that it would be counterintuitive. So you have to brute force it like Thomas Edison, and you have to always, you have to always think twice about doing things and question why we do things.

It's a really great response. I think a lot of people don't realize how dissimilar they are to other people, like even you and I being similar age. Living in similar states. I like— there's so many things that are pretty much the exact same about us, but we still couldn't give each other the exact answers to the things we're working on because of all the variables you're speaking about. So I do think that when people watch podcasts, they should really only apply the information that is directly specific to them. And there's not as much of it as you think. I think it's a good framework for opening up your mind, really breaking down to first principles some of the things you talked about. It's like you commenting on those TikTok videos. It's like, okay, do I need to comment on TikTok videos for my brand or do I need to think about user interaction in a different way? Do I need to think about solving questions that people ask in a different way? It's just so much— people extract the wrong information information out of things. You know, they're going to take what you said and some people will be like, oh, there are no rules. So like nothing matters. It's like, I don't really think that's what he was saying. But, um, well, everyone, this has been your guest, uh, Zach Yadegari. This is the Jack Neal Podcast. Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me.