In this candid update, Zach Yadegari explains why his previous venture, Flow, is being abandoned and introduces his new long‑term project, Persona. He details how extensive A/B testing of offers and tiered subscriptions revealed that Flow could only generate a few hundred thousand dollars a month profitably, which, given typical 20% e‑commerce margins, made further investment unattractive. Additionally, Flow was widely copied, prompting Zach to stop producing videos about it. He announces a strategic pivot to Persona—a decade‑long vision aimed at building a billion‑dollar company. Zach shares that the team has raised capital, begun advertising, and is recruiting a full‑time CTO (the current CTO is a part‑time high‑school student) and a UGC lead. He commits to documenting the building of Persona on the channel, plans longer, more instructional videos, and intends to hire someone to film him so he can focus on the demanding 15‑hour workdays required to launch the new venture.
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Hey, what's up guys? I'm just making this quick video to address a lot of your questions and comments like, oh, what happened to Flow? And what is Persona? Why am I working on this now? So essentially what happened is with Flow, we were scaling it up, trying all these different offers, tier subscriptions, no subscription, whatever, all kinds of A/B tests. And what we concluded is that this idea will likely not scale more than a few hundred thousand dollars a month profitably. And so with like the average 20% profit margins in e-com, it just wouldn't be worthwhile to spend so much time on this business. And so we decided to pivot to something else, which I'm not going to say yet. Because like Flow just got like ripped and copied. And this is kind of why I've stopped making videos is because on that specifically is because it's just like a space where it's easy to copy stuff like Flow. So many of you guys honestly just like took it and ran with it yourself. But I guess joke's on you because now we've pivoted away. But yeah, so we have something going on in the background. Essentially, I spoke to the team and I was just starting to obsess over this idea for Persona for the last few months. And so I told them at one point like, hey, I'm gonna give you guys some of my equity to incentivize you guys and like make up for the fact that I'm not going to be as involved going forward. And so now I'm very, very focused on Persona. Which is what this YouTube channel is going to focus more on the documentation of, and I'm going to start making videos about that and less so on the Flow side, the Flow team. So yeah, that should answer a lot of your questions. In terms of persona, I'll have a bigger story on this later, but essentially Persona is a grand, grand vision, something that I can imagine myself working 10+ years on. And this How I'm Gonna Make a Company Worth a Billion Dollars series, it wasn't just how I'm gonna make Flow, it's how I'm gonna make any company. And so Persona is currently the vehicle in which I'm aiming to do this through primarily. And so We've raised money. We are starting to now run ads for the product, and we are recruiting a dream team. My current priorities are recruiting a CTO because we have one, but he's in high school, which has made things difficult. And so he's part-time. He's a killer, but he's going to be like temporarily. He just can't work on the team as much as— like someone full-time would, obviously. So he's still going to be involved, but we're going to find someone that can be the full-time CTO. And we're also finding someone right now who will come on and run our UGC. And so I'm gonna start documenting this. Way tougher of a company to build than Cali ever was. So there will be a lot of lessons for you guys to take away, which I'm super excited for. What I'm mainly waiting for is just getting an in-person office, and then someone's full-time job will be kind of Helping me make these videos because I'm just working harder than I've ever worked in my life on this company. I'm working probably 15-hour days every single day of the week right now, and I am— yeah, I just don't really want to spend the time picking up a camera, working, because there's always some recordings. There's always something else I can do, but I'm gonna hire someone to follow me around. And so we're gonna get more of these videos out to you guys. So stay tuned. This should answer your questions. And yeah, longer videos to come. Peace.
