The 17-Year-Old Who Built a $1.12M/Month Ai App | Zach Yadegari

How much money do you make?

Make $1 million every month.

And how old are you?

I'm 17.

This is going to be one of the craziest episodes I've ever done. And just because I know how crazy this sounds and a lot of people aren't going to believe you, can you actually just show us and refresh?

Yeah, here you could refresh. This is App Store Connect. It's showing that in October we made $1.14 million. Refresh the page and you'll see it is not fake, dude.

That is fucking nuts. And you're 17?

17.

Okay, what do you do? What is it?

I build mobile consumer apps. Specifically, this one is Cal AI. Okay. It's an app where you take a picture of your food and it will tell you how many calories it is.

So you literally just take a picture of your meal and it just counts the calories for you?

Yeah, it's much simpler than any other app like MyFitnessPal.

So there's a lot of other apps like this on the App Store?

So there are a lot of copycat apps of Cal AI.

Mm-hmm.

But there's really been nothing like this in the past.

How'd you find this op— like, how'd you choose to make this?

Yeah, so the whole story with Cal AI is that about a year ago, my friend Henry and I, who's also in high school, got started building mobile apps. The first one we built was an app called Grind Clock. Essentially, a motivational speaker like David Goggins would wake you up in the morning by just screaming at you, get out of bed, get to work, let's go, start grinding. And so that app did pretty well. We got 20,000 downloads in the first couple of weeks, but we weren't able to sustain the growth. So we started building a few different apps and down the line as we were building different products, I had been reaching out to different people on X, different founders in mobile apps. And one of these guys that I reached out to was Blake Anderson. I believe you had him on your show. So he had founded two apps previously. Umax and Riz GPT both had totaled a few million downloads. And so I started speaking to him about his growth strategies and we worked out a partnership where he would essentially help with the high-level strategies, come on as a co-founder with Cal AI. Henry and I would lead the day-to-day operations, making the app and growing it. And then together we all came to the idea of Cal AI to work on and started going. I think that specifically with the idea, there's always been, um, the apps, the calorie tracking apps in the App Store have been around for years and they've all been super outdated and antiquated. MyFitnessPal, everyone knows it as a convoluted app that's hard to use. I personally wanted to gain weight in the gym, bulk up, and I had to quit after 3 days. It was super annoying to track my calories. So with this in mind, and then AI technologies from from ChatGPT that came out the same year. We just pieced two and two together and knew Cal.ai, it was a great idea to build.

So was it one of the first calorie— AI calorie tracking apps?

Yeah, definitely one of the first that launched.

And so it's— is it tracking macros, protein, carbs, sugar, everything like that, or?

Yeah, yeah, everything. We really simplified the app concept where other apps like MyFitnessPal have so many features like tracking your sleep, your hydration. We really stick to the main things: calories, carbs, proteins, and fat. But we have everything you need.

Do you have to choose a specific outcome you're working towards? Like, I'm trying to lose weight, I'm trying to gain weight. Is that a segment or is it just solely telling you the data?

Yeah, so we do, we ask them on the onboarding all the questions that, like their desired outcome, and then we give them a calorie plan, protein plan, everything they need. And based on that, as long as they follow it, they should get the desired results.

So you just started like a year ago? Pretty much.

So I started building apps a year ago, but my journey really starts when I was 7 years old taking my first programming class.

Okay, so you've been coding since you were 7?

Yeah, I was obsessed with video games and I wanted to make them myself, so I enrolled in a coding camp and that really just inspired me to continue, taught me how— like, that there is a possibility I can actually build games myself. So then after taking that camp I got really deep into YouTube tutorials, making games. I would spend all day just binge-watching content and I got pretty good. I put my first game on the App Store when I was 12 years old. And then at 13, that's when I started my first gaming website and my first just thing that I programmed that I monetized, I'll say. So what it was, was an unblocked gaming website. That let students play games in school, and the website would bypass the blocking protocols of just in high schools. So generally, if you would look up anything like games.com or any online gaming website, it automatically gets blocked. My website would bypass everything.

Damn. Is that legal?

It was legal. We had a few loopholes we used. So one of them, the website was called totallyscience.co. So that got it categorized as an educational site. It thought it was a science website.

And then you said, like, did you actually make the games on the—

I didn't make the games myself. That's the only thing that it's questionable, the legality, because we took the games elsewhere online.

It was like a Miniclip or something.

We took some games that were made by Miniclip, actually.

Interesting.

Yeah, it was a bunch of these like mini games and ripoffs of Minecraft, a ton of different games.

So you just wanted to play games in high school and you're just like, all right, I'm going to find a way to get around this and then monetized it.

Yeah, basically.

How much money did you make from that?

That website was making $60,000 a year, and then I sold it 2 years after building it for $100,000.

You sold it for $100,000?

Yeah.

How old were you?

I was 16 when I did the sale.

Holy shit, who'd you sell it to?

I sold it to a bigger gaming website.

How'd they find you?

I actually listed it on a public website selling directory.

What website?

Flippa.

Flippa?

Flippa.com.

Interesting. How long did it take to sell it?

So it was actually quick, and that was intentional. 2 years into the website, I started getting deeper into entrepreneurship. So instead of just building it and putting it into the market, I thought, okay, maybe I could scale this up somehow. So initially I grew through TikTok. I made the videos myself. I, you know, we grew to 5 million users, just all myself acquiring users. And I started networking with different founders. There was one specific guy I met. He had told me his story in high school. It was like me. He built an app that had a few million users. It was a messaging app and it was making a few thousand dollars a month. I was like, wow, this guy's story is just like mine. Like, this could be my best friend or something. And then he told me he was 25 years old. And I was shocked. It scared the hell out of me because he didn't go to college to work on this app that had completely stagnated. He launched it in high school and it peaked there. And this guy was 25 years old. He had so much potential in high school, but he never acted on it. And now he's sitting on this product that's completely dead and he, he's really going nowhere. I did not want to be like that guy. So immediately I knew I had to just burn the boats. I had to sell the website and move on to something else. Otherwise I could get stuck at the same place.

We see— you saw another guy who had made money as a teenager, but then he was just continuing to work on the same product that was similar to yours.

Are you saying it was a messaging app? So his product was different, but it was a very similar situation where he built it in high school. It scaled up. He was probably the coolest kid in his high school making thousands of dollars. Had millions of users, but it went nowhere.

Mm. So you just basically saw— how did you hear about him?

I met him actually on the Y Combinator co-founder matchmaking platform.

Did you watch a lot of Y Combinator content when you were younger?

So I actually started getting— I started shifting from the programming side to the business side during the whole process building Totally Science. Initially, I just threw it up, put on paid ads, and then as soon as I realized I can make real money at a young age, I was 13, actually 14, making a few hundred dollars a day. And I realized that I didn't have to wait until after college to make money. So I started getting deeper into best business practices, which included Y Combinator and their lessons.

Is there any piece of content that really stood out to you from even Y Combinator or not?

I think podcasts helped a lot. Podcasts like yours and My First Million, those really helped me at a young age.

That's pretty cool. That's awesome to hear. Okay, so that's so interesting. I did not know this about you. So then you literally got to 5 million users all just through your TikTok yourself?

Yeah, I made the videos myself.

What were the videos?

So they were primarily just me in the middle of class recording my computer screen saying With the text-to-speech, I was bored in class, so I built an unblocked games website. And these videos got millions of views.

Literally just straight up like, I'm in school, if you wanna play video games, get around your ad blocker or whatever it is.

Yeah, I think it was just such an inherently viral idea and stuff that kids in school so badly wanted. And then a trick I used was I would tell them, comment what games you want me to add next. So everyone would flood the comments with game suggestion after game suggestion.

And then you would just basically add those games. Would you like reply to the comment, like make a reply to comment video or what would you do?

Exactly. Yeah, that's— I just did a video series replying to comments. I added your game, comment with game stat next. It was just a system that kept going.

And so you were able to just like embed games to this website basically?

Pretty much. It was a little bit deeper than embedding games. I actually had to scrape the game content off of other sites and put them on. There were also just public game files online, a lot of methods to get them on the site where they would all be unblocked.

This is so interesting. Okay, so then you basically felt the pressure because you saw another guy who like started an app when he was in his teenage years, but then he stuck with it for 8 years and kind of went nowhere. And so you were like, all right, let me just get rid of this. And then you made $100 grand.

So I got rid of it. I made $100 grand. But now that I didn't have cash flow anymore, I was trying to figure out what to do next. So I started to read a lot of TechCrunch articles. And I saw Nikita Beer's sale of Gas and TBH, how it was the same app year after year. And I thought that there was a lot of potential to get into consumer apps. That's when I started to build GrindClock.

Mm. What'd you do with the $100 grand?

I've really done nothing with it, to be honest. A lot of it has went to funding Cal AI at this point, but it just sat in the bank for the year after the sale.

Did your parents know that you did this?

Yeah, they were aware. They didn't really know the full extent of what was going on until the sale. But then I started to fill them in more. Same with Cal AI. I didn't really tell them about it until we hit $100K a month. So I've just been, I guess, shocking them a little bit.

And you're still in high school?

I'm still in high school. I'm a senior. I actually have a very big math test tomorrow that I have to study for.

Sorry. Thanks for coming late. But I'm so curious, why do you stay in high school?

I stay in high school, one, just because I like to be around my friends. It's fun. I was in San Francisco this summer, all of July, and I was thinking about that question too. Like, I could just stay in San Francisco. This could be my life building. But what I realized was that it was kind of lonely. Everyone around me was 23 and older, the years you get out of college. And it was isolating.

Mm-hmm.

Like, I like to be around people my age, to have fun, to do stupid high school stuff. And there's going to be a point where I will need to really fully zone in, especially with the ideas I have in the future and how big of a scale I want to take things to. But at least for this year, I want to kind of save this last moment before I go in. I'm not sure if I'm going to go to college yet. And so I want to hold on to this last year of high school at least.

What makes you unsure to go to college? What appeals to you about college?

So the only thing that appeals to me about college is the social life. Essentially, the test I'm going to run is that this following year after high school, I'm going to— I'm going to take a gap year. And then if I could build a social life, then I probably won't go to college. If I can't, I'm really lonely and depressed, then I'll probably go back to school.

I guess at your parents' house.

No, no. I'm going to move around city to city. I'll probably stay in New York the first few months, New York City, get an apartment. I'll probably stay with a bunch of other app founders that are similar age. And try Miami, maybe go to Thailand for a little bit, LA, just see what's the best place.

Yeah, you can always live in a college town and just not go to the school, you know.

Yeah, it's definitely been some advice given.

I actually really like your answer to just value social life. Like, there's really no point to rush building some $100 billion company unless you're like really passionate about the idea. Like, have fun, dude. I 100% would totally advise that. Don't try to rush anything. You're already doing amazing. So I really am curious before we— I want to go really deep into Call.ai, like get really specific. But I always— I'm very curious, how do you— because you have such a head start, not head start, but like you're very young, very successful, already probably in the top 1% of success, even outside of just your age range. So how— like, what do you want to do in life?

I look at Call.ai and everything I've done as stepping stones. I kind of see my path as I want to set myself financially free and then go for something that will just massively impact the world. And the reason I want to set myself financially free first is because then I won't be incentivized by short-term cash anymore. It will purely be impact driven. That's similar to what Elon Musk did. He built Zip2, X.com, which was PayPal, and then he sold that. He had enough money, one, to fund his next projects. And two, he didn't need to go for a quick $2 million, like, crypto pump and dump cash grab.

Mm-hmm. And so you're seeing Kali Eyes as a stepping stone to find something bigger, but you don't really have any idea what that's going to be.

I'm not sure yet. I think that there's a few possibilities. Like, one, I think that someone's going to create the iPhone for your brain. So something like a Neuralink. And I may go into that direction. May go somewhere else, something at the mass world global scale.

How do you— what role do you see yourself playing in business? Do you like coding? Do you like being CEO? Do you— what, like, what do you specifically think your strong suit is?

Yeah, so over the last few years I've done a lot. For Totally Science, I was the lead engineer and I was running everything, the business side, marketing. For Cal AI, I started out, I programmed half of it with Henry, and then I shifted more into doing all the marketing myself, and now I've shifted into the CEO role, focusing mostly on product, delegating tasks, and managing the entire team, making sure everything is going smoothly. And I think what I really want to go after is the visionary role where I'm leading a team kind of like Steve Jobs in a way, and inspiring people while thinking of what to do next. But early on, I always think it's important and throughout the whole company to really understand deeply the technology and how everything works. So I think even if I'm not in the programming role, it's important that I know how to program myself.

If you are a software engineer and you want to work at a startup that is potentially the next unicorn, Wapp is looking for software engineers. So if you want to work on some real shit and you're a real problem solver and leader, then apply on wapp.com/careers. You will get to work on a product with millions of users and ship real features. Maybe you're not an engineer, but your friend is. You could actually get paid $10,000 just by referring an engineer that gets hired at WAP. So again, if you are a software engineer and you want to work at one of the fastest growing startups in the world right now, go to wap.com/careers to apply. Interesting. How do you see with the evolution of AI the role of programming changing since you're an AI startup founder?

Yeah, I think that it's going to shift where one, programmers will need to be better with product. It's less about just following the designs exactly because you could, in a couple years, you'll be able to present a fully designed website or app to an AI and it will be able to build it. So you need to be the one that knows why or how, which features we should put in an app or on a website. And not necessarily know what you need to type to put a button in a certain place, but why you should put a button on the right side of the screen instead of the left side of the screen.

Hmm. Okay. So you're actually saying like fundamentally understand, not just like it's not necessarily about the functionality of building the app, but like the actual design and the flow and the user experience is like going to be the most important user thing to consciously decide.

Definitely.

Interesting. Okay. So I really want to understand Cal AI and how it came to be because like over $1 million a month. 17 is no joke. And I'm just so curious, 'cause this is like something that we saw a year and a half ago when ChatGPT really became popularized with the GPT APIs. Like, what was the philosophy behind Kaliite? Was it really just as simple as I tried— you tried MyFitnessPal and it was clunky and you're just like, all right, this makes sense. Like, this is a big market. Like, how did you analyze the opportunity?

Yeah, so the idea definitely came a lot from the sense that existing apps were just so out of style and outdated. So Blake and I really concepted that Cal AI was the solution to these, but we had a few different ideas of what we could build. Part of the reason we chose Cal AI was because we knew we could make it go viral on social media. That's a big thing with validating ideas that I go for.

Mm-hmm.

It's making sure that we know how we're going to blow it up. If we have a product that we think the this is a really cool product, but there's nothing to tap into on social media, no niche, no influencer to promote it. It's going to be 10 times harder than if you have an audience and then you could just show the product to the audience instead of trying to find the audience.

So it's basically establishing a marketing strategy before even building the product, like knowing that if you did have the product and if it worked well, that you also had a very good strategy to get eyeballs.

Yeah, exactly. We knew that there are hundreds of health and fitness influencers and that their audiences would love the app. So we just needed to build it and show it to them.

So is the main marketing strategy that you've used in just influencer marketing?

Yeah. So we have hundreds of health and fitness influencers right now that we have showing Cal AI within their videos.

How do you like structure this? Like you just like make a list of like 500 influencers and then start pounding out emails and DMs, like asking them to like add an integration. Do they make a dedicated video? Like what is this? What is this system that you guys have put together?

Yeah, so the system is complex, but we could go deep. And this is the first time that I've publicly shared all of these secrets, or I'm going to share all of these secrets and go really deep into how we do things specifically for Call AI. So basically to start out the app, it was just me DMing a ton of influencers. And then when they would reply, like 1 in 100 influencers reply on DMs. So then when they finally reply, then that influencer probably isn't good. 1 out of 100, you have to DM a lot more. After 500 DMs, maybe you get 2 decent influencers that have actually replied to you and they're good quality. So then I would hop on a call with them, negotiate a deal. And this all comes down to 2 fundamental concepts, RPM and CPM. Essentially what you need to do is figure out a way to pay an influencer to generate enough views where every dollar you pay per 1,000 views needs to be less than the amount of money you will make per 1,000 views. So RPM is how much you'll make per 1,000 views. CPM is how much you spend. And you can't just tell an influencer, I'll pay you $5 per every 1,000 views you get on this video you make about us. Just post it. That won't work. They won't agree to that. You need to predict ahead of time how many views their videos will get. Based on past performance, looking at past videos they've done with brands. And then based off that, tell them, okay, we'll pay you this upfront and you just have to make the video for us. Here's the money, go make it.

So basically you'll look at their account, you'll look at their like last 10 videos and let's say they average like 50,000 views. And so you're just going to say, hey, based off of a $2 CPM, let's say 50,000 views, you're going to pay them $100 for a video. Is that correct?

Yeah.

Okay. And so I'm assuming you're doing this all through short form.

We do all of it through short.

Okay. So you basically will choose a $2 CPM. You say you'll average 5,000, 50,000 views. So you just reach out to them saying, hey, I'll pay you $100, $100 flat. And that's like your— do you like start with that? Like it's your first message?

And then usually they say, absolutely fucking not. I want $1,000 for this single video when they average 50,000 views, which is crazy. But these small influencers want a ton of cash. So then we usually go and say, okay, we'll do 4 videos with you. We'll pay upfront all of the money for them. And that's usually one of the main tactics we do to actually get the price down a lot.

Wait, you do what? Sorry.

That we'll pay them upfront for 4 videos at a time.

So you bundle it?

Yeah.

Okay. And does that make it cheaper? Like, does that make it a cheaper—

It makes it a lot cheaper. And also we get them recurring. So every month they post 4 videos for us.

Hmm, it's a good amount. Tanner.

Yeah.

How much is that typically?

So that's typically going to— well, it actually varies a lot. Varies a lot because first of all, it's based on a few things. One, it's based on how many views an influencer gets, but not all views are worth the same. So it's also based on their engagement. We are paying influencers from $100 a month to $100,000 a month. This specific case is every 2 months.

So you have an influencer that you pay $100,000 every 2 months for.

Yeah.

What do they have to do for that? Just make dedicated videos on the product, or is it like very subtly like ingrained, or how does it work?

So we try to make it very seamless, the integrations. We don't want them to do any hard sales. A lot of brands get this wrong. They will have an influencer talk to the camera and directly say, hey guys, this video is sponsored by X. We want, like, you should get this because XYZ reasons. They're clearly reading off a script. Everyone can see right through them. We make the integration super, super seamless where people don't even know it's an ad. The influencers will typically do a what I eat in a day in the life video, and they'll show that they use Call AI, but they don't even say the name Call AI once in the video.

How do people figure out that it's Call AI then?

It's such a novel concept. Taking a picture of food and getting the results, that people see the name in the app, which it was purposefully designed. We place the name on the top of the screen where it's most clearly visible on the promos, and they'll jump in the comments and look at, oh, what app is this? They'll comment it.

Will you ever plant comments in there?

We do, we do plant our own comments. Yeah, 100%. And that's a big part of the strategy, controlling the comment section. We reply to everyone. We have a comment already in every video pinned. We make sure that everyone knows it's our app.

Do the creators have to pin the comment? Is that you're saying?

Yeah.

Okay. So they have to pin the comment and then you guys will go in and reply to people like referencing what app they're using if someone comments about it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Very interesting. So how did you— how do you calculate that RPM, especially when you're starting out? Like if you like have a brand new app when you first launch, like how did you know how much to pay?

It's a very good question. So you have to estimate it. It really depends on your niche. So a very competitive niche, Well, okay, a niche that hasn't really been tapped into, you could probably get lower CPMs if there aren't brands that are reaching out to creators in your niche because it's something very, very specific, like looksmaxing, for example. Then you could get a very low CPM and you could experiment, and your RPM at that point is probably going to be so much higher that it doesn't matter. You'll eventually refine it, but it's Even at the higher scale, it's mostly about watching early on in the first few videos. I safely like to start at a $5 CPM when testing out influencer marketing or a $5 RPM, and then I'll just look at the trends.

So you said you're just going to guess a $5 RPM is how much you guys will make for 1,000 views. And then are you just going to pay like, will you pay over $5 ever?

If our RPM— it depends on the influencer and it really depends on their engagement level. If we see him. So basically, if an influencer has really bad engagement, we'll pay them a much lower RPM than if someone has really good engagement. So the RPM is not just based on the product, it's also based on the influencer.

Hmm.

And so looking at that and assessing individual influencers is how we calculate what to pay them.

So how are you like actually seeing through the lines of engagement? So it's kind of a subjective thing. Are you like, actually, is it just like, okay, they have— it's like a comment-to-view ratio. Is it a like, shares?

Yeah, there are a few telltale signs. The biggest thing is the comment section. One, are people replying to each other, engaging with each other, showing that there's a community? Are people texting like, hey creator, you inspired me so much because of you, I'm now doing this, this, and this. And then people are liking their comment. Like when a top comment usually has over 100 likes, that's a very strong community. Unless that specific comment was bought, which a lot of creators do.

How do you see through that?

Yeah, so that's something where you have to look at all of their videos. And if you see the same account that's commenting on every video, if you see something we see often actually is that in the comments section, every single creator that comments is an influencer too. And so they're probably in some community where it's like comment for comment. You support my videos, I support yours. And you could tell that just looking at if they have the story ring and if every influencer or if every person in the comments section has the highlighted story ring around their profile on Instagram, then, you know, it's all influencers. It's crazy not to work with.

Yeah, I know. There are many groups on Twitter like that that I've seen people in, like retweet for retweet and stuff, and they kind of farm engagement. So I'm curious how if you were to like need to— if you were deciding to make an app in the fitness niche, how did you go about finding the list of all these influencers?

Yeah. So usually what I start with is I create a new TikTok account. And then I'll scroll through the For You page and only interact with videos that were in the health and fitness niche. That curates my For You page so that every video I see going forward is just in the health and fitness. And then TikTok will just feed me creators to DM, just copy paste, copy paste.

Hmm. So you literally— so you literally make a new TikTok account and only scroll with, engage with the type of content in the demographic that you're trying to make a business. So fitness. Yeah. To the point where your algorithm's super trained. To be what a fitness-interested person would see.

Exactly.

And you start taking notes.

Yep.

And you're just scrolling.

That's just the work, just scrolling. And then early on, you don't want to keep scrolling forever, but this does scale up. Early on, I did it myself. Now we have virtual assistants that do it.

And then just put the account in like a Google Sheet and then like write down like average views, following, everything like that.

So the specific way we track and manage our influencers has evolved over time. Early on it was just a Google Sheet, but now we've built out a ton of internal tools which we're actually going to bring publicly very soon on a platform called Viral.tech. So we'll be launching this probably early December and it will help people use the internal tools that we've had for influencer marketing to help them calculate profitable deals, track attribution, and really scale up their entire system.

So you're making like an influencer marketing software, like to help people find influencers and manage it.

Yeah, find, manage, track attribution, and scale it.

How are you going to track attribution?

That's the hardest thing with influencer marketing because you can't— you can't have the influencer have the people watching click a link and then track how many link clicks it got. Because even if you put something in the bio, users that watch the video will just go directly to Google or to the App Store after hearing about it in the video. So what you do is very early on in the product, you have to look at the trends. How many downloads did you get and when was a video posted? And then you have to assess that. That's how you figure out the RPM. You have to basically correlate the graphs of when an influencer posted, how many views it got, and how much revenue you generated in the same time period that that video was getting views. And that's something that our platform helps you do. It overlaps everything, shows you when influencers posted to help you really Does it connect to Stripe to get your backend like sales revenue or how does this specifically is App Store Connect?

Because mobile apps. I see.

Yeah.

Interesting, dude. Well, I want to talk about that at the end, but back to Call.ai. So you basically just had a— like had a— sorry, you basically just had VAs just make Google Sheets, training their algorithms, writing down all of the different influencers, reaching out to them, starting with a baseline of a $5 RPM, meaning if any of these people make it, get 1,000 views, we should make $5 back. Correct.

Yeah.

And then so you're trying to pay them a $2, $3 CPM so you can be profitable on that.

Exactly.

Okay. So then what is the pricing model of Call.ai?

It's $30 a year.

A year.

A year.

That's the only plan.

Also $10 a month.

So $10 a month or $30 a year.

Yeah. Most people go for the yearly.

Okay. And so if you're paying a— so if you're saying a $5 RPM, is that assuming an LTV or is that just immediate first month?

It's like immediately after the video is posted, we correlate that we'll get $5 back.

Okay. But then per thousand. But will that compound over time since it's recurring?

Yeah. So we haven't seen our retention because we're less than a year old. We launched 6 months ago. Mm. So we're going to find out soon.

You launched 6 months ago and you already had a million a month.

Yeah.

Are you like, are you cash flow positive?

Like, yeah, yeah, we're very profitable.

What is the profit margin?

It's 50% profit margins and we are completely bootstrapped.

Oh my God. How many people are on the team?

For Cal AI, there are 12 people right now and 3 founders. We have 4 co-founders.

4. So you're one of 4?

Yeah.

Cool. So 4 co-founders and 8, like, team members.

Yeah.

Nice. Are all the founders, like, young?

So Henry and I are both 17 years old in high school. Blake is 23. And Jake is 28.

Dang, that is wild. Okay, so now that you guys are at this point, this is— it's also straightforward. Like, do you think that— I guess, like, do you think that other people just don't reach out to influencers, or do you think that you guys have an edge in, like, the type of content you have them produce? Like, when you think about businesses growing their sales beyond forecasts, like Mattel, sure, you think about a product with demand, a focused brand, and influence-driven marketing. But an often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business making selling, and for shoppers buying, simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet, and with the not-so-secret secret Shop Pay boosting conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling, or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Mattel uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/wgmi, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/wgmi to upgrade your selling today. shopify.com/wgmi. Thank you for sponsoring today's episode.

Yeah, it's a few things. One, we're just extremely scrappy. People give up after DMing 100 influencers. You have to DM thousands. Mm-hmm. That's one thing. Two, people are not able to negotiate profitable deals. People think that they'll never be able— I have so many people that ask me for advice. I tell them exactly what they do, what we do, and then they just give up at the point where they're not able to negotiate anything in the RPM, CPM that they want. And It's really a problem that they're not being creative enough with the negotiation strategy. These creators, first of all, they're a dime a dozen. For every creator you find, you could find 12 more that do the exact same thing, exact same views, exact same engagement. And secondly, a lot of them just want money upfront. They don't care about how many videos they have to post. If they say, I want $4,000 for one video, What they really mean is I want $4,000. I don't care how many videos I have to post. And so working with that framework, you could make them happy by giving them the amount of money they're asking for, but then just extend either how many videos they have to create, or we do something sometimes called the minimum view clause where we say, okay, we'll pay you what you want, but you have to guarantee us this amount of views, or you have to keep posting. So all of these tactics, and it's honestly just creativity to figure out some way to work together.

Yeah, I know a lot of people do. Like, if you, if you have like a specific rate for a sponsor, if you don't hit that view minimum, you have to just like do one more, like a make-good episode or something.

Yeah, yeah.

Are there any— I'd be very interested just to like hear those in a listed form. Like, what is like a view guarantee minimum, a monthly retainer? What do you have?

A lot. There's some that you could get on pay-per-view. These are the smaller creators. The big ones will never agree to this. Something that a lot of people also mess up with is that they email creators instead of DM them. And both, both can be effective. However, when emailing creators, you're usually going to get in contact with their manager. And speaking to their manager, the rates are going to be a lot higher. It's going to be tougher to negotiate with them. So DMs are always better in my opinion. Earlier on.

Is the content being varied? Are you specifically showing them examples of content that you want them to make? How are you like communicating the actual creative videos they're shooting? So I'm sure that matters a lot.

And so they're the professionals. We let them take the video in whatever direction they want. We just have to make sure the product looks good.

Do you have like a content guideline, like sheet that you send them, like a content requirement? What's included in that?

Yeah, so that's like examples of past videos that have done well, some ideas they could do.

So you just have like a one-pager. It's like other videos that people have used, what you want them to say, any examples you want them to show, like anything like that.

Yeah, pretty much.

And it's not that complicated. It's just pretty straightforward.

It's very straightforward.

This is what our app does. Here's things you can say. Here's some other ideas.

Yeah, they usually know what to do as long as it's not their first brand deal. And we're much more flexible than other brands because we don't want it to look like an ad. We just tell them, like, integrate it. We always tell them in the first 15 seconds, just show the product and that's it.

Just the first 15 seconds they have to show the product.

Yeah.

And it's typically just someone literally taking a picture of their food.

Exactly.

And then getting the output.

Yep.

So it's just super simple.

Yeah. And this is something where it only really works with apps that are inherently viral. So this is also why Totally Science, I simply just recorded my computer screen and the videos all went viral because the idea, it was so inherently viral that people saw it, they loved it, they want it, they shared it to their friends like, hey, let's use this in class. Cali is another app where no one has ever seen something as novel as you take a picture of your food and you get your calories. So the influencer doesn't even need to mention it. Just showing it in the video, everyone's like, whoa, I want that.

It's pretty simple at the end of the day. Have you had competitors pop up?

We have so many competitors pop up. Every tweet I make talking about the success, it causes 10 more competitors to come out.

Are you still like the leader in the industry? Like, are you Ranking the highest for it?

Yeah, so we're usually ranking around number 10 in the App Store and the only apps ahead of us are like MyFitnessPal and the ones that have been around for years.

Number 10 in the fitness category, wow. Would you, if you stopped doing influencer marketing, how important is it to maintain a constant flow of influencers posting? Like if you stopped, would sales plummet, like not plummet, but like decline pretty rapidly or would it like stagnate or how would you predict?

Yeah, so that's an interesting question. And with GrindClock, we actually did that. So we had 20,000 downloads in the first couple weeks and then we just completely stopped working on that, stopped marketing it to work on other apps. And we saw that surprisingly the revenue and new customers coming in, they kept coming. It stayed at the same monthly revenue, but even without marketing it for a year, It was basically the same revenue, flatlined.

So like your churn and acquisition was like even, basically?

Yeah.

For everyone you lost, you got a new one. Huh. So I'm curious, how many influencers you guys have right now?

Right now we have close to 150 influencers posting on a regular basis. Yeah.

And are most of them on a monthly retainer?

Yeah.

So the most common is a monthly retainer for a set amount of videos. That's how you scale.

Yeah.

And that's what you're basically just— okay, so you're basically just Calculating their average views, saying we want 4 videos per month. Here's a monthly rate. Yeah, simple as that. Here. And then here's what you need to talk about. And then just check in with them. How do you pay them?

It's really usually PayPal or just a bank transfer, whatever is easier.

Just whatever they want, basically.

Yeah.

You're just wheeling. So you're basically wheeling and dealing in the Wild West with people.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. I would love for these to be like so much more like shocking, but like it truly is pretty straightforward. Yeah.

It's just being scrappy and numbers game.

Is there any like viral mechanic you've built within the app to make it spread organically?

Definitely. So like the fact that you take a picture of your food and then it shows you your calories, that's viral. The picture, the fact that we show the name within the app, that's how people discover it. So for Cali AI, the idea already is viral, but then for other apps that we're working on, there's definitely a lot that we have to engineer specifically to make sure it goes viral. So that's something that you always should think about when building an app is what specifically do I want the influencer to showcase and how, how are people going to react when seeing it? If it's something where they'll just brush it off like, oh, it's just an app, then it's not gonna go anywhere.

So you're saying that it's just so easy. I think the coolest thing about your app is it's so easy to explain the value, like when I see a hair curler on Amazon or something, like, you pretty much get what it does. Like, it curls your hair.

Yeah.

And same thing for your app. Like, it takes a picture and then you see your calories and your macros. Like, yeah, it doesn't take paragraphs of story to explain what it does. It's just exactly 2 seconds, you see it.

I don't think the idea is genius. I just think that we came in the market at the right time, as soon as the technology was made possible by all the ChatGPT technology, and we just move quickly.

Do you have— has there been an opportunity that you've seen, like, currently that you're, like, maybe sitting on, but it's just, like, not something you're pursuing because you're busy? Or, like, because I know there's, like, always new— like, even then, the AI APIs have, like, kind of evolved and there's been new stuff that's came out. Like, have you seen other opportunities that you would pursue if you weren't busy that other people could maybe try?

One opportunity is You know, I probably shouldn't share anything publicly here because we are turning into an app studio where we're making a few other apps. So in the next few months, we're going to be launching some of these other ideas. But I will say the AI technology has enabled hundreds of thou— like, I don't know about number, but so many apps, thousands that are already existing apps that can just be amplified and made more viral using AI. So even if it's something that you don't add that much more value, the fact that you could attach AI to do something a little bit cooler can help it go more viral on social media, which enables you to turn it into a real business.

Are there any like viral loops within the app that are like actually like if someone takes a picture, do you like have them share it to their story? It's like a branded like—

Yeah. So something interesting we're about to do is a couple things. One, for Thanksgiving in a few days, we're going to try out making the app completely free for the day. Give some Thanksgiving-themed food scan and prompt people to post that on their stories. So by the time this comes out, people will probably see if that was successful or not. Could completely fail.

That is interesting. So just like kind of like the Spotify Wrapped, like if people like have something they want to show, like how much music they— how much they listen to a specific artist or their top songs, they're going to share it to their story because it's kind of like an interesting thing to share about yourself. Yeah. So this could just be like kind of similar, like take a picture of your Thanksgiving meal, see how many calories you ate. Yeah, because that's kind of a thing that people do in America, just like try to eat as much as possible, then pass out.

Exactly, exactly.

Is that the angle, like how much you could—

like, so we're probably going to try a few different things and just let the user upload whatever they want. But just simple, how many calories, like the classic Cali Eye scans, something like how festive is your dinner, like what percentile are you in for how much you ate. Yeah, this Thanksgiving everyone loves to brag about how much they're eating.

Yeah, leaderboard or something. Yeah. Have you guys done any like are like marketing challenges like that, like for people that are like trying to hit like fitness goals? Like, is there any sort of like gamification or like challenge for like accountability built into the app, or is it just super simple? Just—

it's a single-player experience, so nothing too social, nothing where there's too heavy competition besides just with yourself.

Do you recommend like diets? Do you recommend things for people to eat? Like, if they're like— could they input like, I need 30 grams of protein, what should I eat?

Or Currently, no, there's no way to do that in the app.

Is it just like a super simple interface? Like, is it—

yeah, we pride ourselves with how simple we are. We really saw that the other apps were so convoluted, you would pick it up and for beginners it would be super intimidating. You wouldn't understand how to get started. You would need someone to guide you through the process.

So what does the onboarding flow feel like? Like, what are the steps?

So it's really easy. You just tell us your weight, what weight you want to be, your height, a few general questions about your goals and why you're trying to achieve what you're trying to achieve. And then we just throw you right into the app to start scanning your food.

And then once— does like— is every meal you scan saved? Yeah, in the app. And then you can just like track over time how much you've done. Exactly. Like, do people— if they want to gain muscle, they need to hit like 180 grams of protein.

Does it like track like 80 out of 180 grams or Yeah, it will show you how many grams you've eaten and how many you need to eat that day. Yeah.

And will it give you recommendations on what you need to eat or how much you need to eat or no?

How much, but not what you should eat.

Okay. Just how many grams left? Yeah, basically. Huh. Why are you asking these people the question for their goals and everything at the beginning?

That's how we calculate what your diet plan should be.

So you will set them the plan.

It's also something interesting we found out recently through an A/B test. Some of the questions we ask, they don't actually help the goal at all. They're just questions. They have no purpose. But we tested out that asking those extra questions, they caused a higher conversion rate. And I think part of that is just every question we ask is like, why are you doing this? How is this going to help your life? And so I think subconsciously it's making people realize deeper why they actually need the product. So that when they show them the paywall— and by the way, we are a premium-only app, so you can't use the app without paying, but we do have a free trial. So by the point they see the trial option, they are more likely to get it.

So they're kind of putting this work in answering these questions with like from a psychology lens, like showing more intent. Yeah, like kind of like actually putting work into this thing. And by the time they get to the end of that, they've already made the mental commitment that they're going to start doing this. They want to better their life and simultaneously they've put all this work into it. They might as well just pay $30 for a year.

Yeah, I mean, it's even easier than that. It's just a free trial for 3 days. If you don't like it, you could stop, but you may as well take the first step to your journey.

It's very interesting. It's like very interesting priming. I think that's something— is that talked about a lot in the app world? Like the psychology of like onboarding questions, like having people like type stuff out their goals.

I don't think it's talked about enough.

It doesn't change. So it literally doesn't change anything about the product, right? It doesn't change anything about their experience. They're not getting some custom thing. But they might feel like they're getting a custom thing, but really they're just like actually like saying to themselves that they're gonna commit to this.

Yeah. And another lesson to take away here is that a lot of people make free apps. They think they'll monetize them through ads or a freemium option where they could upgrade to premium. But I think that if you're building a utility app, if your goal is really to provide value while making cash. People shouldn't be scared to just hard paywall and not let anyone use the app without paying upfront. That was a mistake we made earlier on with GrindClock. When we got that surge of 20,000 downloads, it was a freemium version. We had ads and then you could upgrade to premium for no ads.

Mm.

And after switching that, that's when we saw more revenue come in, even though we had fewer downloads.

So once people are used to something being free, they're used to it being free.

Yeah.

And they don't want to pay. That's so very interesting. So it really does seem pretty straightforward. Is there any, like, what are like things you're so young and you've tried so many different things, like you are really experienced, you've been doing this for a long time. What are like with Callie, what were some like surprising, like learned lessons that you were like, just like even you were kind of surprised by?

Yeah.

It could be like little details, like little optimizations. Like the psychology of the onboarding flow? Like was there, or like a maybe something you felt like you should have known way earlier?

Yeah. So something surprising was that people expected the AI scanning to be much more accurate than it was. They expected it to have almost x-ray vision, which obviously anyone that's slightly technical will understand is not the case. The iPhone camera is not capable of that.

Mm-hmm.

But regular consumers, I guess you have to adjust what you think is the baseline for intelligence and lower it a lot when you're creating these apps for people to make it a lot simpler of a user experience and almost to the point where it's foolproof. So we had to really work on educating users to understand how to use the technology. Now we have a whole guide when you do your first scan to show you like how to successfully scan your food to get highest accuracy results.

So you're saying that if someone had like a Chipotle bowl and they like mixed it all around, yeah, these people would assume that you could see like the steak under, like, if you hit the steak under the rice. Yeah, they would expect you to like understand that or something, and then they get mad when it doesn't. That is actually really funny. So does the prompt literally just be like, like, take this image of this food, see what's on it, get like, and then choose an average portion size and then output the protein estimate for this standardized meal? Or like, how are you actually quantifying it?

Very early on, that's all it was. It was one single prompt to ChatGPT and would just return everything. And we actually found that that was 80% accurate, which was equal to the FDA required margin of error for food labels on food packages.

Hmm.

So that was already pretty good. But then we've built out a pipeline since then that will make a series of prompts that will get more and more specific based on the type of food it is, where it will finally be able to get a result that's about 90% accurate on average.

Interesting. What's your guys' tech stack? Like, what are all the different software tools you're using to run the business?

Yeah, so we built the entire app in Swift. In the past, we've built apps in Flutter and React Native, but they always feel a little janky and less smooth than building in Swift natively. And then on the backend, we use Firebase Cloud Functions to do our backend.

Mm-hmm. And then like, are you using any tools for influencer marketing? Obviously your tool's coming out, but are you using any tools for— are you using Slack to talk to your team?

Slack to talk to the team. And that's been really interesting to scale this company up. This is the biggest team that I have led ever, and it's a little intimidating to have team members that have kids on the team. And, you know, I'm leading these meetings, a little bit of imposter syndrome in the beginning. But something that I've been getting better at and always trying to lead more effectively.

Are there tools that you use to like test the performance of your app, or is that all in Apple's like backend? Like, are you like— do you use heat maps or anything like that?

We don't at the moment. To test out our apps, we use Mixpanel to collect data about our users, and we also have— we always test out the app extensively before app updates to catch bugs.

So Mixpanel is how you like all your stats, all the usage? All the analytics basically. Yeah, we use Mixpanel here and Swift. Interesting. So I'm curious then, this is going really well, like $1 million a month. Do you guys have a plan to sell this? Do you guys— it's just like a cash cow for you guys to fund this like app studio vision that you guys have? What's the actual like end goal if there is one?

I want to beat MyFitnessPal.

Oh, okay. You know, how big is MyFitnessPal?

They're generating $100 million a year and they've completely stagnated. They haven't innovated on the product. Their marketing efforts are the same as a year ago.

Did Under Armour buy them?

They did. And then they sold MyFitnessPal at a loss.

So they got rid of it.

Yeah.

So it does like $8 to $10 million a month. So that's your goal.

Does about $10. Yeah.

Would you sell this?

Once we get to that point or when we're approaching, I think it would be smart for MyFitnessPal to buy us or to make an offer at least. But the end goal would be to be the optimal scenario. Best case, we beat MyFitnessPal and then we sell some glorious exit.

Okay, cool. So then I'm curious, why start this App Studio if you guys are making $1 million a month? You're only 6 months in. You're also 17. Is it like a situation where you have more opportunity? Is it a situation where the app itself is pretty much where you want it to be. Every improvement here is like minimal. You have a team that's doing it. And so you can't even— even if you try to like put more effort into it, there's going to be nominal returns. Like, what is the reason to like diversify your attention?

So the main reason is that we have a huge network of health and fitness influencers. So while I won't announce publicly yet what the next apps will be, they're going to fall under the category of health and fitness. So we can easily plug them in and blow them up to similar numbers as Cali AI extremely fast.

Okay, so you already have the marketing engine, basically. You have the system, you have the network, you have all the deal structure. It's just now just plug in new apps to the same creators. Yeah, you know how much to pay them.

Exactly. And theoretically, this should help Cali AI because even if the other apps that we launch break even, combining the two apps into a single deal with an influencer, paying them more is just more leverage to lower the CPM.

Hmm. What do you look for? So is that like your full focus is like you only are going to build apps that have like innate virality, inherent virality, inherent virality. Interesting. And how do you like— what would you be looking for? Like, are you looking for like just like a trend on TikTok? Are you looking for a category with a ton of influencers? Like, fitness is very obvious.

Yeah.

Is there like different types of virality? Like, how do you differentiate this in your mind?

Sometimes it's trends on TikTok. How I came to the idea for Totally Science was that right after COVID, schools gave out Chromebooks in schools to reduce contamination and spread of germs. So kids would obviously just play games in class, but all of these games were fragmented across hundreds of different games websites. So I saw the opportunity just around my classmates to combine everything in one website. And I launched that, it worked great. Cali, it was something that I saw my friends were trying to track their calories. I was trying to track my calories, Cali. And so it's really just about identifying something that you can derive value from or you can see someone around you driving value from. I think that's the best way to come up with an idea and build it out, because if you are your ideal user, you'll know exactly what to build. If you try to build something for someone else, it's very easy to fall off course or that they'll tell you something. Steve Jobs said that people don't actually know what they want. Like when he launched the iPhone, no one knew they wanted an iPhone, but now everyone uses one every day.

Hmm.

So if you are only looking within, I think that's the best strategy to come up with an, an idea.

Yeah, it's like the saying from Ford. If he asked what— if he built what people would want, it'd be like a faster horse or something. Yeah, that's very funny. Okay, so then you're building multiple different apps, but you're also building this influencer marketing tool. Yeah, it seems like you have a lot in the pipeline. Do you feel like— I'm just curious, I always toil with like, I've always had the problem of running too many businesses. Like, my attention gets Yeah, it has been a thought recently.

And Call AI, we've recently discovered that we think it has much more potential than we initially anticipated, just seeing how the market has been reacting to it. And so it is a question of maybe we should really double down and leave all the other projects to the side. I'm not really spending that much time and they're kind of side projects. Our main developers are not focusing any time. I'm barely focusing any of my time to these other apps. They're kind of being worked on by other developers and then we will plug them into the influencer network without spending much of our conscious effort on them. The influencer marketing platform, my theory there is that influencer marketing will become ubiquitous soon. Everyone will know the strategies and people are already reverse engineering what we are doing. They're figuring it, it out for themselves. And so very soon everyone will understand the strategies. It will become more public knowledge. So if we're the ones to bring it to the world and we're the ones that build a platform everyone uses, then we'll be able to capture more of the upside than if we just sit idly and hope that for these next couple of years no one taps in and tries to compete with our strategies.

What is the main value proposition of this influencer app? I'm a marketer, so I'm very interested in—

Yeah, the main value proposition comes down to 3 things. One, we generate a go-to-market strategy. So you tell us exactly what your app is and we'll tell you who to look for in terms of influencers, what niche. We tell you how inherently viral your app is, which we spoke about how important that is. We tell you a bunch of content ideas and then that helps you get jumpstarted into the space. Next, you start reaching out to influencers, everything there. We'll have a CRM where you could plug in everything about your influencers, manage all of them, scale the operations there.

Like message sent, waiting on reply, replied. —like deal—

so it's more about like your leads, your active influencers, and then a schedule for all of them and the posting days for them. Another big thing, maybe one of the biggest things in the platform, is tracking influencer posts. So seeing just how many views they're getting over time and when they go live. Also in the analytics, correlating the views over time to downloads over time and isolating the views to specific videos so you could see especially at a large scale when you have multiple videos going out a day, which video correlated most closely to the downloads you got. And that's really the best way you can attribute influencer marketing. Gotcha.

It's like tracking all the accounts on the like a specific backend. Yeah. Showing your sales at the same time automatically. That's very interesting. It's very simple, but very, very important. It's very hard to track. 100%. Yeah. I've had that problem here. Like we just have all these videos going out, but No one's going on their link, their link in the bio to convert anymore. Yeah, they're all just immediately going to Google and searching it. Interesting. What about this whole like CPM? So you said you've paid people per like 1,000 views before, right? But that only works with the smallest creators. Yeah.

Yeah. Even those, like, it's kind of crazy. The small creators either will agree to a pay-per-view deal or they ask for an absurd amount that you'll only pay influencers with a million followers.

So do you think that you have to, to get to the MyFitnessPal level to $10 million a month? Well, you think you will have to scale outside of TikTok influencers, Instagram influencers? What would be like the next logical step in your mind?

Yeah, so scaling is a good question. A lot of people with consumer apps are able to get to $50K a month, $100K a month, but they're really held back from the million dollars a month just because they don't scale what's going on internally, which is preventing them from scaling externally, like the profits. For Cal AI, at every stage along the way, we've thought about what needs to be done now to scale up to the next milestone. So after we hit $100K a month, we brought on some developers. We brought on a full-time designer instead of just designing project basis. We brought on more people to help with marketing, more virtual assistants to reach out so we get more leads coming in. And so to scale to the next point, That's going to be interesting. And what will it take? I'm not sure yet, but we have a few hypotheses. Hypotheses. One is that we want to try TV ads. And another thing is that we have started running paid ads. A great thing about influencer marketing is that you have so many creatives to test on the paid ads. And so I think scaling that is really how we'll grow into the future. Influencer marketing was a great way to get off the ground. But if we're looking at years into the future, I think that paid ads will help us scale further and farther, even if it's a lot slower to get started. And with the systems combined, so the creatives coming in from the influencers and then using that with paid ads.

Do you not think that you could take all of the content that the influencers have made and then like spin up subaccounts and repost them?

We actually do that, and that's part of our strategy. We have an Instagram Kali account where we repost every single video an influencer makes, and we're getting like tens of millions of views a month in addition to everything we're getting.

So anytime an influencer makes a video, you get to keep that, like you own that. Yeah. And then you can just repost it. Are you re-editing them? Are you using them multiple times, or is it just if they post it once, you post it once the same video?

That's what we do right now. Although after a few months we probably could post it again and it would go to a similar amount of virality. You seen by new—

but you think it has to have a few months in between?

Yeah, yeah, if it's posted too closely, then it will probably be seen by the same people that saw the first one.

So you think that the algorithms are that efficient, that if you get a million views, it's going to be the same million people that are just interested in fitness, pretty much? Not necessarily.

If it gets a million views— well, first of all, I think how the algorithms work is that the video is shown to your followers initially and some other people that aren't your followers, but generally majority will be your followers. And then based on how many of those like the video, then it will be shown to other people. So gotcha.

So the same account if you posted the same video.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So do you think that's a scalable system though? Like if you say you have 100 influencers, they're all posting 4 times a month, you have 400 pieces of content a month to then get 10 editors to then edit those 400 in 10 different versions. Now you have 4,000 pieces and post those on different accounts every month. Like at scale, do you think that would work or do you think that's like too much content?

That could possibly work. It depends what the editors do to the pieces of content, but generally you can't repost on TikTok. They flag duplicate videos and don't let them get any views immediately. So only on Instagram do we see that it works. And posting on two different accounts, like reposting accounts, that may be more effective than doing one. Although I don't think the time spent on that is more valuable than just spending more time in Insider. Instead of hiring 10 more editors or 10 editors, we could hire 10 more virtual assistants to find more influencers for us to be posting.

Hmm. And then so the virtual assistants are doing all this deal closing, all of the outreach.

But we actually do have a social media manager that will get on the calls and close deals. So you also could bring another one of those on. So as we're scaling up and have more influencers, we're also bringing on more people too.

Is everybody logged into the same Instagram account or is it through like a ManyChat backend? Like, how are you managing all these DMs? Are they all coming from one? Account that you're doing the outreach from? Yeah. Who's doing the outreach?

It's generally through one account that everyone has access to.

Is it the brand account?

Is it the Kali Eye? The brand account.

And everyone just logs into it directly? Yeah.

So an interesting thing about that is early on when you have zero followers, you have a much lower response rate. Now that we have tens of thousands of followers on the account, maybe 40,000, when we DM an influencer, they'll be more likely to respond. But early on, I think it's better to reach out through a personal account that's verified. Gotcha.

So at least just look legitimate. Yeah.

And anyone can pay $10 a month to get verified on Instagram right now. Interesting. Interesting.

Do you think that there's any other— have you tried running paid ads? Yeah.

Yeah, we've, we've started a couple of months ago. The CPMs are much higher than— Yeah, exactly. It's a lot harder.

Has it been challenging to crack paid ads?

So I've heard that 90% of paid ads is really about the creatives right now. So I think that we have that down better than most brands just because of the sheer amount of creatives that we have. We have so much to test that something's bound to work, and that's helped us a lot. We have been scaling pretty quickly.

So paid ads have been working for you? Yeah. How much are you spending a day, do you know?

Right now we're spending $7,000 a day. And you're—

are you profitable day over day, or is it more of a month? We're profitable every day. Yeah. Wow. And it's a recurring revenue business model. That's incredible. That is pretty cool. Is paid ads more— is it new for you guys?

Yeah, it is new. We've only done this the past couple of months, like last 2 months.

Is it— is influencer marketing still more profitable in the short term?

It definitely is. Influencer marketing has higher profitability and it's much easier to get off the ground and get started.

So the sequence of events is just like make the product, get it in the App Store, reach out to like 100 creators, get like 2 to make their first pieces of content, then turn those 2 into like 20 influencers where most of the time, most of the cost is your time spent reaching out to them. Obviously you have to pay them, but it's kind of a little more laborious to get them to actually post. And then once you have a good archive of like 100 pieces of content and like 30 influencers posting for you, then cycle into paid ads. With the money you've generated. Is that how you think about it? Pretty much. Yeah.

So the paid ads is pretty new, but if someone were to follow how we did things, that would be—

is it TikTok or Instagram? The paid ads?

We do mainly Meta ads, but we do both.

So Facebook and Instagram?

Yeah. And TikTok. And TikTok. Okay, cool.

Is there any other growth tactic that you guys have used other than influencers, paid ads?

No, but something interesting is Apple Search Ads, which are another form of paid ads. I did not anticipate how good they would be. I think this mostly— I think this is a good way to validate how good your product is. Whereas if you run Apple paid search ads in the App Store, if your product is better than a competitor's, and then if you run the ad on their search terms and, and it's profitable, that's generally a sign that you have a better product than the competitor. If it's not profitable, it's generally a sign that you are a worse product. And that's something we've learned recently.

So Apple search ads, meaning that when someone's in the App Store, they search like calorie tracker. Yeah. You would pop up at the top. It's like sponsored. Yeah. And you're saying that if you are profitable, That is, you're better than the competitor.

So it's more for specific competitors. So one of our competitors, if you look up their name on the App Store and then our app comes up as sponsored and then they download ours and we have their, their keyword profitable for our app, that's usually a sign that we're a better product.

Gotcha. That's really interesting data point. So basically, if you are running paid ads for like straight up against a competitor's keyword, and you are profitable, that validates your product.

Yeah. This isn't a one for one thing. It makes sense, though. The more profitable you are, generally, the better of a product. Yeah. Okay.

And then do you do Google PPC? Like if people search calorie tracker, CaliEye on Google? No.

Do you rank for CalTrack? Yeah, we have a website that comes up, but actually we're really bad with search engine optimization right now.

Is that a priority to you guys?

Not exactly. We have only been around for 6 months, so there's really not been enough time to do everything, but we definitely want to try a bunch of different things now and really scale up.

Is this where the, the conversation of doing too many things comes in play? A little bit, yeah.

I think just honing in really well on influencer ads, that's how we've been so successful.

The only difference between scaling from 10 million to 100 million to like a month is like how many distribution channels you can like competently master. Yeah. And so it's like if you're doing $1 million a month with influencer marketing, you could probably do another $1 million a month with paid ads and you can probably do another $1 million a month with like Google if you master Google Ads. And that's just like more team, more time, more learning. Yeah. And so it's just— Yeah. And then if— but if you're like, this is a big problem I had early on when I was like in my early 20s was trying to do 3 businesses at once thinking that I had time in between. Like thinking that like, okay, I'm going to— I got this marketing client, I shot their ad, I have 2 days and I'm going to edit it on Thursday. So in between these 2 days, I'm going to work on this other thing that makes me like another $2,000 over here with a different client or a different business or like start— I was basically starting my first software company. And so it's like in my mind I was like, okay, everything's timed out. But really there always is something to work on that one thing. So that's just a problem I faced. And so I've kind of— took me a while to learn that, but yeah, makes sense. You guys, it does seem to make sense to make your own influencer tracking software though, because that would help you scale.

Yeah, part of our scaling process has been building out these internal tools.

Interesting. What do you like— do you feel a pressure to build a big business? Like, you all— you had the idea, you said that like you felt like imposter syndrome, which is very normal, but like, do you feel the pressure like you need be the next Steve Jobs or something because you're so successful at a young age? Or do you just not even think about that?

I think that people think that that's something where it's extremely hard to achieve, that it's almost unattainable, that even people looking at me and seeing how successful I am right now, they still can't imagine that I would turn into someone like, um, Steve Jobs just based on what I've seen. And I have very strong belief in myself. I always have. And I think that's been a key factor in everything I've done. I've just so strongly believed in myself. And I've also been a believer that anyone can also achieve it, that anyone, if they just look in the right places or if they look long enough, they'll find the right places and then they will start moving in the right direction, eventually achieve what they want if they actually try. And I think that if I want to make it happen, I will be able to. I do fear that after Kali Ai or after attaining financial freedom, whatever the stepping stone is, that I get complacent and that I no longer have the burning desire. Right now it's a massive fire under me that wants me to keep going and keep growing. Going bigger and bigger to achieve the global impact. But it is something I've seen in other people that they've had a ton of potential and then they've settled down because they are now living an amazing life. Like, why worry about— why get into all the shit that Elon Musk gets into, like legally and just day to day, all the fires he has to put out and all the hate that he gets being such a public figure, like when you could just live a nice life, go travel a lot, always be on vacation, not really worry.

But you worry about that happening, or you actually question the path?

Honestly, I don't think that would happen to myself. Yeah, just how I've been my entire life, I don't see it happening. Where do you get that self-belief from, do you know? I don't know, to be honest.

I'm not sure. Is your mom supportive?

I've watched a lot of movies. My mom is supportive. I don't know if there's one place. I think actually maybe something is that I love to prove people wrong. I love it when I do something that someone says I wasn't capable of doing. That's one of the best feelings I get. And at a young age, I kind of expressed my desire to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, to build the next social platform, social network. And people would tell me how it's a dream that's unattainable. I couldn't do it. I think maybe it's still something subconscious that I want to prove these people wrong that told me this when I was like 6 years old. Mm-hmm. What I want to really say and leave with the viewers on this podcast is that I think that your age should really not hold you back. I'm 17. I've done a lot. Everyone's told me when I got started, like, you're too young to be getting into entrepreneurship. You should wait until taking business courses in school. And I didn't listen to them, and I'm very grateful I didn't. On the flip side, I know 40 and 50-year-old entrepreneurs that jumped right into things, even when people would traditionally think they're too old to get started, and they're very successful as well. So I think that there's no age that's too early or too late to get started. You should just get started immediately, and it's easier than ever with tools like ChatGPT. And That is just something everyone should take to heart.

How do you— I mean, how do you feel internally about $1 million a month?

Like, it feels crazy because everything just changed so fast in the past few years. Right now it feels like not enough. We have to get to this next checkpoint, the next checkpoint. We have to beat MyFitnessPal. I'm so zoned in on the mission. But when I look back, when we launched in, in May, The goal was to get to $50K a month by the end of the summer. By the end of the summer, we were doing $600K a month. Crazy, dude.

I mean, I texted you to do this podcast, you're at $800K. Yeah, it's not your 1.1. It's insane. Do people in your school know?

Yeah, they do. Recently a Forbes article came out which got sent around.

Is that awesome?

Yeah, it was pretty cool. I didn't even know they were gonna post it. I just woke up, my mom called me, she was like, Zach, why didn't you tell me you're on Forbes? I checked my phone and it was surreal.

Do people at school treat you differently now?

A little bit. What I've noticed is that people that I would— people that I was close friends with, they're very supportive. People that I was friendly with and not super close with, they're haters now. Like, I've heard about them talking behind my back, saying that like, it's just a ChatGPT rapper that I got lucky with and like, it doesn't work. The app is shit. And then the people that are like far away, I don't think that they've really batted an eye.

That's so interesting. So people always try to find a way to discredit people. Yeah. Has it like— has that affected you in school at all? Like, was it like negative? Does it make you sad? Does it make you not want to go? Or you just like bounce off you?

Yeah, I don't let it affect me. I really try not to. And the people that say that, like, they're not really in my life that much anyway.

It kind of says more about them than you. Do you go to like a big school?

It's a public school, so yeah, like 1,000, 2,000 people, or it's probably close to 1,000. And you're in New York? New York. I live on Long Island.

Okay, gotcha. It's so hard for me to like wrap my head around what it— like, I'm 27, so that was like 10 years ago for me, but I feel like it'd be going straight to my head and I'd be like the cockiest guy in high school if I know myself back then. Do you like, do you actually like— when you said you want to make impact on the world and you've been referencing like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, like those are both people who pick industries that they're passionate about and solve big problems in those industries over like long time horizons where your gaming thing was pretty quick. I guess it was a few years, but still pretty quick, just kind of a problem you were facing in high school. Call AI 6 months, but you want to beat MyFitnessPal. Is there actually like an industry specifically or a problem like that that you'd want to solve? Like Steve Jobs is obviously computers. Are you like actually like an AI optimist? I know you said Neuralink. Like, would you actually want to like be the developer of the brain chips and like make a company like that? Would you raise money? Like, do you have like, do you have the foresight at all to think about a big vision like that, or are you just focused on what's in front of you right now?

Right now I am extremely focused on what's in front of me. And part of the reason I haven't— I've intentionally not let myself think too far ahead and what I want to build next because of a few things. One, because I still have that in my head where I want to go after some short-term cash flow. So I'm not entirely driven right now by impact. And if I think about companies I want to build, it's always in my mind, how much revenue can this generate? What's the total market size? And so I right now am just driven by trying to achieve financial freedom before I get into that. And what's interesting actually is that— and the reason I got into entrepreneurship, first of all, before anything, I was— it was the night before a social studies test. I was extremely stressed out. And I was memorizing flashcards. I was just thinking, why am I doing this? Why am I memorizing flashcards for the social studies test? I broke it down and it was because I needed to get a good grade so that I could get into a good college so that I could get a good job so that I could make money. And I realized if I could skip all of those steps to just making money, then I wouldn't have the stress. And so from that day on, I decided to really dive deep into entrepreneurship and actually making money. That was a little bit before I started the gaming website and monetized it. And I thought that as soon as I achieved financial freedom in high school, all my problems would go away. I would just never be stressed out again. I would be able to— I don't know what I expected would happen. Maybe I thought it was so far away that I wouldn't need to worry about it, but I kind of just thought like my life would just end there and I would be happy. But now I am here. And I always question, was this luck, a coincidence? Was it purely driven by my actions and to what extent? And now that I'm here and thinking about what's next, because my, for so long it was just about financial freedom. So what's next? It's really about just right now my plan is kind of scaling up, selling, and than working on something bigger. Before I do that, maybe I'll take some spiritual journey. Maybe I'll go to college and go really deep into a subject. But to be honest, I can't really tell you.

Yeah, I don't think you have to have it all figured out. Do you, uh, what's the craziest thing you spent money on?

So far, I really haven't spent my money on anything. Like, I've saved all of it up to this point. And part of that's because for Kali specifically, we haven't taken any money out because Apple pays you 2 months after you make money. We've continuously had to reinvest the earnings from the month, 2 months ago, which we're getting paid for now into the marketing of the current month. So what is the timeline on that?

So you make— you make— come up with an app idea, you make it, you get it listed on the Apple App Store. You have to pay some influencers upfront. But then you don't get paid 2 months— for 2 months. So I'm assuming once you do get paid after that 2 months, you just take all of that initial cash and put it back into influencers.

At the rate we're scaling, that's what we have to do. We do expect to start paying ourselves out in the next month or 2.

But all that money is recurring, either a yearly or monthly subscription. So you're at $1 million a month. You would— if you stopped today, you would assume that you have at least probably around $1 million a month coming in next month without any expenses going out to marketing.

Yeah, and we would expect it to last a couple years at least.

Are there any books that you've read that have like changed your worldview like drastically?

Nothing that's super drastically changed my worldview. A Man's Search for Meaning is a great book. Zero to One helped me get into entrepreneurship, but I think movies helped change my worldview, worldview a lot. Like The Social Network, that movie specifically at a very young age helped me— helped me figure out the path I needed to take, essentially, where I was teaching coding lessons when I was 13 years old, 10 years old, 10 to 13. I was teaching coding lessons for $30 an hour, and I thought I was rich as a kid. I had a few hundred dollars in my wallet. For like a 10-year-old, that was crazy. And after watching the movie The Social Network, I realized that it wasn't scalable to trade my time for money. So I had to build something where I provided immense value without just spending time.

Any other movies?

The Wolf of Wall Street.

I knew that you were about to say that. It's great.

It's such a good movie. It definitely inspired me. Yeah, but a lot of illegal and sketchy things done.

Yeah, it's a great movie. Yeah, I knew. That's so funny. That's exactly what I was thinking. Anything else? Any others?

Probably nothing else. Those were two big ones. Social Network primarily. Do you think—

Social Network is such a good movie. I watched that like this year again. Yeah, it's so good. So is there anyone— so you said watch Y Combinator, a few movies, A Man's Search for Meaning, which is a great book. Has school ever been like a place where you've like learned impactful information?

School has helped me understand the psychology of high schoolers and young people, which definitely helps.

It's like product testing.

Yeah. Like if I want to build a social app now, I have a pretty good mental framework of how the high schooler thinks.

Do you think there's an opportunity to build a social app?

I think that there are almost always opportunities to build social apps. Like a new one comes out every few years that becomes really popular and that just sticks as old ones go out of fashion. So I think that new ones will come out soon. What's—

is there like a new one in your high school? It's like really popular that people might not know. Like we're talking like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram.

Social networks, correct? Yeah. Nothing specific that I've seen pop up recently. TikTok was the most recent. Yeah. BeReal. I personally hated it. That fell off fast. Yeah, it did. It did fall off fast.

Interesting. Are you into crypto at all or anything?

I'm not really into crypto. I just see it as gambling.

I think that's actually 100% the correct take. Well, dude, I know you have a math test. This all made sense to me. You're an absolute— you're such a clear thinker. I don't think you stuttered once. You speak very calmly.

Thank you.

It all seems to make sense. And I think anyone can do this.

I mean, anyone can. It's true. It's crazy. All right.

Where can they find you if they want to? I know you tweet a lot. I love your tweets.

So, yeah, you could find me on X.com or Twitter. Zach Yadegari, Z-A-C-H-Y-A-D-E-G-A-R-I, underscore in between. And if you're an aspiring builder, you think you have what it takes and you want an opportunity placed in front of you, then DM me. If you are someone that wants to learn more about influencer marketing, I would also suggest you follow the tweets. And when Viral.Tech gets released, you should be on it.

You should be the first ones. Brother, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

You're the man.