Zach Yadegari built small apps that flopped, then studied how successful founders like Blake Anderson and Oliver Broccato actually operate. That clarity led him to co-found Cal AI, which hit $1.5 million in a single month within eight months. He now believes seeing the end goal—$100 million ARR—makes the path there obvious.
Chapters
A year and a half ago, I read an article about how Nikita Beer sold Gas, a teenage polling app, for $30 million. I looked at this app and I thought, there's no way. This is the most basic app I've ever seen. I could have built it in a weekend, quite honestly. But I didn't know at the time was how much work went into all the small features like the onboarding, optimizing that. But putting that aside, that inspired me to get into the app space, the SaaS space. And so a few weeks later, I launched my first app, Grind Clock, which it was a motivational alarm clock app. Someone like David Goggins could wake you up with one of his motivational audios like, "Let's carry the boats, you're gonna, you're gonna be lost in the race if you don't—" whatever, just random yelling. He's very motivational. I really like David Goggins. But that did all right. I launched it, got 20,000 downloads, but that wasn't the $30 million idea. It didn't get there, and I didn't know if it ever would. So I launched another app. This was a social fitness app, and we got some good feedback, but It didn't go to $30 million. And I didn't know if it ever could. I didn't know what it looked like to get there. What was the path? If we worked on it long enough, would it? I didn't know. Launched another app, same thing. I was operating under the mindset this whole time that if I launch enough apps, eventually, inevitably, one would take off, one would become a million-dollar app. I had no idea what I was doing. So I started reaching out to founders on X. Two in particular really had an impact on me. Blake Anderson, who founded Umax and RizGPT, and Oliver Broccato, who founded StudyBuddy and Tabs. I was integrated into Oliver's Slack channel for Tabs, and looking around the channel, poking into everything going on, I saw something tangible. I saw what it actually took to run a million-dollar company, how many developers they had, how many designers, how much time it took day to day working on it and how long it actually took to get to where it was. Also how, like, what agencies they used, everything. Same thing with Blake. He opened up how he marketed his apps and the size of his teams, how long it took him. For the first time ever, I knew what the light at the end of the tunnel looked like. For one of these apps. And while before, when I was building projects, I didn't know what the roadmap would look like to get there. I mean, at that point, I still didn't know what the roadmap looked like, but I didn't even know what the ending looked like. I didn't know what I was working towards. I didn't know at what point it would turn into the million-dollar app. Outside of just revenue, what the team needed to look like, how long we had to spend working on it. I had the light shown. There was a light at the tunnel here. Here I was. And while I didn't know the gap in between, I didn't know what that all looked like. The fact that I saw an ending, it was no longer an unknown distance that I had to travel. It was known. And now it was just about branching the gap, figuring out, how to traverse it. And I became— I was very confident I could do that. Seeing the ending instilled a lot of confidence. I knew it was all doable. A few months later, with Blake, I founded Cal AI. And after 8 months, this month is going to do $1.5— more than $1.5 million in revenue just this month. And that has came from many things. But early on, it was the fact that I knew what the end would look like. So I figured out almost like an algebraic equation, what I needed to put in the middle in order to get to the outcome. And Here we are, a point where Kalei has been more successful than StudyBuddy or than UMax. And I had been unsure of what the next step looked like for a while. Our competitors, MyFitnessPal, they do $100 million a year, but I didn't know what it took to get there until 3 days ago. I met a founder, I'll call him Mr. W because he likes to keep his company financials private, but they are doing well over $100 million a year in revenue. And he broke down on a call their entire strategy for growth. He answered a lot of my questions about what it takes to go from a $10 million a year business to $100 million a year business. And once again, I have this light at the end of the tunnel. I know how many employees he has, how big the team is. I know how long he spent on it. I know what the end looks like. Now I'm here and I'm going to figure out how to get there again. The vision is clear. And CalAI will generate over $100 million a year.
