The high schooler making $20M a year

by the way it's it's it's noon on a Monday where are you right now I actually skipped class to do this podcast let's go sorry Miss bicker staff the boys are [Music] calling okay this kid right here on the screen is making $20 million as a high schooler the high schooler that is making $20 million a year in Revenue that is absurd Zach welcome to the show man uh I think this is actually the make everybody else feel bad when you find out that like a 17 18y old kid is make a $20 million in

high school I think a lot of people's initial reaction is wow and another group is like oh man what how much of that uh per year is profit Zach it's more than 30% all right so it's very good balling um we're going to tell the story figure out how it's going Sam do we need to address your uh your letterman jacket are you just in the high school mood what's going on look I found out that Zach was coming on and I wanted to look the part you know like what's it what's that movie Sean

it's it like uh Never Been Kissed where they pretended that they're in high school yeah or uh 21 Jump Street yeah that's us that look this is actually the second group of high schoolers that we spoke with over the last two weeks I'm Jonah Hill all right Zach dude uh welcome to the show you've you've listened to the podcast before I understand yeah last two years you would you say we maybe inspired you slash we the sole cause of your success yeah I'd say this is the sole reason for any of it all right so

let's explain what uh start with what your app does because it's like what app is making $2 million for a high schooler so let's explain what is your app yes and when did you start it let's start with that so Cal is the app and it lets you take a picture of any meal and get back the calories proteins fats and carbs to track it so think any other calorie tracking app but then heavy AI features involved does it work really well that sounds like a really hard thing like you know uh you were literally

12 years old or maybe 8 years old when Silicon Valley the TV show came out and that was like the the joke was like is this a hot dog or not now the app says a lot more uh you know does that work really well or is it like mostly right so the scanning is about 90% accurate on average which is really good when you look at the data for FDA nutrition labels they can be up to 20% inaccurate so it's actually really good there but we only recommend that you use it well if you're

training for Mr Olympia let's say we don't recommend you use our AI calorie tracker you could use the food database weigh your on a scale well and the and the scale stuff like I you know I'm I'm a weirdo I've actually used my fitness pal for probably 5 years almost every day now and what a lot of people don't realize is when they eyeball their calories they're probably always off by like 30 or 40% have you ever tried tracking your food Sean yeah actually I think I came on this podcast a while back and I

said this exact problem I was like my fitness pal it's so slow and annoying to type in every single thing and estimate the weight of it so okay I'm eating this how many grams of it I don't really know I didn't weigh it out and then you get this calorie thing but also they have like five entries for whatever for for chicken breast even has you don't know which oneck and I I remember even saying I think on this podcast like I wish somebody just had it where you could just take a picture and computer

vision would just know and I can't wait for that to happen and it sounds like it's kind of happened so you started this how long ago 10 months ago 10 months okay so 10 months ago you started this as a 17-year-old and can you just give us a sense of the the growth so in in 10 months you started obviously with zero first month roughly where were you at so the first month was a little bit slow to pick up we probably ended having done $30,000 in Revenue the second month and that's when we were

testing the waters do people actually want a calorie tracking app the hypothesis was that yeah it would make people's lives easier but we are almost hitting this interesting intersection between people are very hardcore with tracking their calories weighing their food on a scale needing the Precision decimal point accuracy and then on the other end of people that don't track their calories at all so our hypothesis was that there was a middle ground and that's where we threw the capital to test and it worked so then the next month which was June we did our first

six figures in a month so okay amazing yeah I mean you're say does he talk like every 16-year-old you you that's you sounded like this right Sean he sounds more mature than us so you you you're saying we is there a uh is there a Wii who's the is it a royal Wii like that's just kind of me and then did you start this with somebody yes I have three co-founders so to give you a breakdown one is also in high school he's our CTO Henry langmack a killer engineer child technology officer yes go keep

Blake Anderson who I think you guys actually did an episode about one of his apps UMX so he had founded previously two other apps that had gotten a few million downloads so we partnered up how' you guys meet each other because you're not in the same High School how'd you find these other young Builders yeah so Henry and I met at a coding Camp when we were both 10 years old he lived in Long Island initially but then he moved to New Jersey so we stayed in touch Blake I actually found on Twitter gotcha so

you guys get together and who has the idea for the app so it was a mix of Blake and myself I was tracking my calories two years before starting C ey on my fitness pal or at least trying to I was really skinny growing up and I wanted to put on weight put on muscle honestly to impress girls in my high school and it was super tedious so I just gave up but I knew there had to be a better solution the coder and me the engineer and me knew that there must be an easier

way and the following 2 years all of these AI models started being released and so after jumping into the app space and talking to Blake who had a very similar path of these AI apps we came to this idea and having a $20 million a year business is a lot cooler I bet than having muscles when when it comes to impressing girls yeah which one works better honestly I thought that once I always had this Vision as a kid that I just need to be successful and all the girls will be on top of me

all the time but nothing really changed it's just dudes like us yeah exactly you honestly dude having big muscles it's also just only dudes and buing you so like we're actually still not sure what gets the women to like you we're still trying to figure that out all right so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want to hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business and really a lot of people who are listening they have a full-time job and they

want to start something on the side a side hustle now a lot of people message Sean and I and they say all right I want to start something on the side is this a good idea is that a good idea and again what they're really just saying is just give me the ideas well my friends you're in luck so my old company the hustle they put together a h hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the side hustle idea database it's a list of 100 pretty good ideas frankly I went through

them they're awesome and it gives you how to start them how to grow them things like that gives you little bit of inspiration so check it out it's called the side hustle idea database it's in the description below you'll see the link click it check it out let me know in the comments what you think can we pull up you posted a video back when you were how old was he in this video that was three years ago I think three years ago so you're like what 14 15 years old the video is titled how

I'm going to make $1 million in high school pull this up because I want to get your reaction to this it starts by the way it just with like great video it's an amazing video how many views does this video have I can't see from like 8,000 okay 7,000 views three years ago you posted this you only have a thousand subscribers on YouTube uh I say only I mean I just mean like this video is criminally underrated at the time that's 20 subscribers when I posted this so you could play you could play this uh

I don't know if the audio will come through I'm going to make $1 million before graduating high school and this YouTube channel is going to document the whole process here comes the best part the mic the alignment of the text and then watch the microwave what is $1 million it's enough cash to give you a luxury lifestyle it makes life more enjoyable and stressfree it's every kid's dream wow director's cut making $1 million can be broken down for example if you're trying to make it in a year it's just $80,000 a month or $20,000 a

week for $3,000 a day all I would need to do is sell $30 $100 items every single day seems easy I'm really making it more simple than it seems but whatever I love this video I love this video on so many levels it's insane I love that you're shooting your shot you're calling your shot I should say right this is Babe Ruth pointing at center field uh so I love that you called your shot I love that you were just having fun with it like you obviously weren't like super polished or like uh you know

going back and editing this to try to make it fancy and I love that your your mindset you were like I want to do this and then you sort of broke it down into smaller more digestible chunks right because you can't just make the million dollars in a second you're like I need to make you know $20,000 in a week I need to make $3,000 in a day to do that I got to sell $300 items that seems achievable what was uh can you just tell us what what why did you decide to make that

video well from such a young age and I'm not entirely sure where I could pinpoint this but I've always wanted to make massive impact on the world and usually that is parallel with having a lot of monetary success and so my goal was always make a million dollars while in high school part of that was because I was really stressed out about school my parents were super strict about my grades and social studies was the one class I hated I hated that I had to memorize flash cards and I vividly remember one night where I

was sitting there trying to memorize these flashcards about explorers that came to the Americas and I was so frustrated I broke down the problem and realized that I'm studying to get a good grade but why why do I want a good grade it's to get into a good college so that I could get a good job and make money and then live a happy life so if I could skip all of those steps it would remove the stress that I'm feeling right now if I can make money right now so I wouldn't need to worry

about a job I wouldn't need to stressed and then I set out the goal to do so you're you're not wrong it's the intelligent man's procrastination it's like ah should I study these 15 flashcards or make a million dollars I think I'll make a million dollars instead are your parents entrepreneurs or are they just uh normal the house was nice that's a nice house so my parents have both been lawyers for their career but then recently two years ago my dad left his job at a company to start a financial consulting firm and I always

worry people are going to think oh because he started a business that's where all of this came from but I was entrepreneurial and doing things long before he actually left his company to start his do do you like give him tips sometimes I don't you should offer to Angel invest in his company and be his mentor all right so you um Sam any thoughts on that video before we move on from the video it's it's the best you know Sean we brought this up um maybe 6 months ago uh on the on a podcast I

don't know if you remember that and it was still like is this kid like is this a joke like does he actually have it and you know how like real is this and we brought that up saying this is amazing if it turns out to be true and it is true times 20 uh it's like absolutely amazing that you've been able to a lot I think at that time it was like a like million dooll ARR app yeah so I think you were probably at something like $80,000 a month yeah now how much revenue are

you doing well last month we just did our first $2 million a month wow a24 million pace and what will the the your first 12 months of full business what will the revenue be full business the revenue would have exceeded $10 million from launching in May to coming this Mon and uh is it entirely bootstrapped have you had any outside financing all bootstrapped wow and how many employees I'm just going to like I I'm going to I need to ask a bunch of questions so I understand all the info uh how many employees totally right

now we have 15 employees fulltime wow okay that's wow that's a lot so what um how did you get it to work okay so you make an app you're a coder you started coding when you were seven years old or something like that so I believe that you could make an app and it seems like uh let's just do a quick summary on making the app so how did you build this like thing are you basically taking a bunch of AI tools and then sort of uh not saying like you're just like a rapper but

like custom uh making custom building them for this use case of tracking calories in an app can you just quickly describe making the app and how long that took you totally so a lot of people do look down on apps like Cal they'll summarize them as just an AI rapper and think that we aren't providing any value and it's true that we started as an AI rapper and I think that that's something all apps should do just like in Ecom it's very common to start as a drop shipper and drop ship a product and then

once you find success actually manufacture it yourself store it yourself create your own brand out of that so it's just the proof of concept is the Drop Shipping for us the proof of concept was using chat gbt and other AI tools kind of as a rapper app frankly but then after finding initial success which so the first app the first version very very Bare Bones very very basic we you were able to take a picture of your food it would tell you the calories it would have the daily breakdown that was it one feature and

then after we saw that people liked it we started adding more features we had how many people did you have using it to determine that they like it we had so is important to know we've grown all through influencer marketing which is how we've achieved our rapid growth and so after working with two influencers having them post on their stories talking about the app that's when we had the initial feedback and saw that people actually so let's go step by step you make the app app exists who are the first 10 people that say it

family and friends is that where you started with or family and friends although we just disregarded anything from them because I always think it's biased okay send it to them they're kind of they say oh it's great you're like all right cool but we don't really know NE next what' you do what' you do next so next we started contacting influencers Fitness influencers on Instagram and Tik Tok did my DM get lost in the mail why did I is this it is this in my other inbox what's going on yeah we'll need to get you

on it but we reached out and most people just don't respond it took me over two weeks to get my first response from an influenc give us a sense of the pitch what's the what's the DM say so basically you always want to start at least from what we've tested We've ran a lot of ab tests on this paid promo putting that first the question mark and then jumping into our app let you track calories just by taking a picture of your food we think it would fit your audience and would love to work for

you with you if you're interested let us know and we can h on a quick call and so this works really well because it optimizes for that preview message the influencer will see in their inbox they only see the first line or two the PID promo is what sticks out and which influencer uh took what was your who who was it and where' you where'd you get the money right so you're saying paid promo but your kids are you like hey Dad can we get five grand to like seed money to to try this like

where' the money come from to start sure so before building Cal I actually built an unblocked Gaming website my freshman year of high school school this website let students play games in class while their teacher was teaching bypassing the website blocking protocols and I grew that to five million users through Tik Tok it was generating money by putting ads on the site and then I sold it so that's where most of the money came in that we put into this by the way Sam that that's now the third or fourth person that's comeing out this

podcast who has that same origin story of I was in school they blocked games on our school I'm guessing you guys had like Chromebooks or something like some Compu you know very very oddly Sean it was Val my friend Val who came on and said his his his was doing that now well they went to the same high school oh really s bulky was said that that was his origin story too was he he wanted to find a way to play games while at school and then because of that learned all these different parts of

coding and technology in order to make that happen and that was the first taste of money um just ma same thing with gaming servers at school so you had this you figured out all right we have these School laptops people want to play games they're blocked how'd you get around the block and uh and what was this thing called the website was called totally science. and that's how it got categorized as educational that was the main thing but we also had all of these features on the website for example if you pressed the Tia key

on the keyboard it would redirect to Google Classroom so if the teacher was coming you could quickly hide it oh nice nice that's crazy hey how can you play this is science not only this is totally science this is only science all right so you you do that that that company uh you sell you were making how much and you sold that for how much it made $60,000 for two years and then I sold it for $100,000 when I was 16 so this is like the first sign you know to have a kid to have

your son from your parents perspective do 60 Grand in Revenue in profit you know something like that when they're 14 that's like asking you know like are you a drug dealer what's going on how are you doing this did that take convincing on your end to let them know what you were doing was totally legal like at at any point your parents are lawyers were they like are you breaking any laws man are you are you sure you're uh on top of all this I definitely got questioned about breaking laws by my dad a bunch

of times he actually made me put up terms of service that said in all caps you cannot use this while in school this is only for breaks or at home and my mom was always shocked every time I actually got a payout from Google I think maybe it was that it didn't sound like a real business unblocked games website how could that make money but I actually had money coming into my bank account that was under her name because I was too young to open one and she was shocked every time did you do anything

cool with it the money well not really honestly I put all of it into CI when we launched it and cool thing the only thing actually that I've spent the money I've made on and this was recent was my 18th birthday party I flew my friends out to Miami for a weekend trip from high school that's awesome all right sweet so you uh you put the money in Cal you got the money you reach out to the influencers you said two influencers start posting and what are they posting is there some science to we just

had you know rob the bank on talking about Tik Tok as a distribution strategy about what makes great Tik Tok Hooks and videos and how that game is being played do you know Rob and and I guess how how have you guys played that game of short form content to grow your apps so totally science and CI were a little different for totally science I was the one making the videos myself I was recording my screening class saying hey if you want to play unblock games go to this website and then I would put a

little thing a caption that says comment what game to add next and that would gather a ton of comments making the video go viral for CI I'm not the one making videos no one on the team is it's all influencers so we still use the knowledge from well what I learned from totally science to help these influencers make videos and make them go viral to give ideas but for the most part we just pay the influencer that fits our Niche and then they're the professionals they know what goes viral as long as we can predict

the RO Y which we have a ton of factors and variables we look at then we let them run with it you pay them on CPM or how do you pay them so CPM would be a blessing and that's the dream for everyone if you could do that because then you guarantee profitability but these influencers they need to be paid usually in advance otherwise they won't do it they'll have another brand that's willing to work with them so you have to predict before they make any video how many views they're going to get yet you

have to look at their previous videos but then you also have to keep in mind not all views are worth the same you have to analyze the comment section and see how strong their Community is and based on that weigh how much you're actually going to pay them that's wild so you um is this thing pretty sticky and and where do you want to take this so great you you you go viral you get people to download I'm assuming they hit some pay wall in the app that says keep track of all your calories blah

blah blah is it kind of one of these churn and Burn games where it's pretty profitable for the first couple months and then you you lose people or is it a sticky product so it's sticky for the power users they definitely stay around and I mean apps like my fitness pal they're doing over $100 million a year so I know we could get there you uh look at the reviews Sean so he has 65,000 reviews and it's a 4.8 out of five so this isn't like an Arbitrage like or like a get-rich quick thing like

people really love the product yeah what's the churn on these uh subscriptions we actually don't know because it hasn't been a year and more than 95% of our subscriptions are annual gotcha okay but they're still using it presumably so that you know if they're using it they'll they'll stick with it wow this is amazing and so you want to take this to be kind of my fitness pal or you're like hey if somebody offered us you know a buttload of cash like I guess what's your mindset because I'm so curious because if I was 18

years old I don't know what the hell I'd be thinking like I have no I even now I'm 36 years old I still don't really know what the hell I'd be thinking in this position what what's the mindset of an 18-year-old cuz you got many hits in you you know this may not be the only one the same way that you kind of did this a similar thing in totally science versus this but this just had a much bigger Market much more Market potential um you know you might be able to do even more things

or is this something you want to do for a decade yeah and does it feel like you're still breaking the law like if you if anyone well like if I don't mean that stop breaking the law what are you talking about no what I mean is like when you go Z to $20 million in Revenue in8 months there's some type of like gness of like I can't believe like this is my life I can't believe that this is allowed I don't know there's something there's some type of like Matrix breaking idea where you're like questioning

you're like how is this possible do you still have that mentality or are you like of course this is possible and this is just step one I definitely have the mentality of it feels surreal I mean it feels nuts I'm 18 years old and I'm making the company's going to generate over $24 million this year that's crazy the fact that I'm on your podcast my first million saying that it's nuts and a year ago I wouldn't believe it so I view this as a stepping stone I want to build a company that touches the lives

of billions of people something as ubiquitous as the iPhone and I think CI if we shifted the idea where maybe it's nutrition tracking in general and we could link the photos of what you're eating to your health that could be something that touches the lives of billions and that could be something I could spend a decade on but I probably don't want to instead I would want this to be something that sets me financially free where I don't need to think about money where I'm not incentivized by generating revenue and so I can start another

company that is purely motivated by impa and scale of impact something that I'm passionate about and can spend a couple decades on Sam I saw a post today from his partner Blake he posted something on on on Twitter today and he said I guess he's working on something called 10x and it sounds like it's an app for for learning like oh you can learn anything you can learn AI skills you can learn a language you can learn whatever sounds like it's a a learning tool which is more in the direction of kind of good for

the world good for Humanity impact style uh thing that he's building and so it sounds like he's kind of look you he started with like umax which was literally like probably the most superficial thing it's like how does my face look and what what can I do to make my face look better then it's C ey and now he's going into like you know a learning tool it sounds like you might want to do the same was there something that triggered that in you like did you watch like a movie or did you have like

a conversation with a mentor when you were 12 years old like what made you want to even what made you think differently than the average high schooler who's hyperfocused on just their grades and and you know just making friends or whatever whatever is just in their little pond it's funny you say movie The Social Network totally had a big impact on me however I did also feel this way before that so that Amplified it that showed me it's possible through specifically software which made me super motivated to learn coding even faster but I have I'm

not sure the initial Seed where it was planted what do you think the app is worth right now right now now I think the app calculating its or taking its growth into account is close to $100 million in valuation which means you are presumably worth in the ballpark of $30 million I think liquid and on paper is really different oh I know but like but you're you're totally right but like 17 18 years old worth tens of millions of dollars I think is like a fair ballpark would you agree I would agree yeah that's amazing

man congratulations I I I'm really I'm really inspired by you and I would say there's like a a handful of people I've discovered that are kind of like you who are super young that are basically AI first so you're all the tools You're Building you build with AI because why would you not you like code them with AI the app uses AI the users get an AI type of experience and um you figured out a growth Channel that I think a bunch of old guys like us kind of suck at cuz you have what I

call the bear on a bicycle phenomenon so my friend Chris Williamson said this to me he goes you basically want to stack two skills that usually don't go together and it creates something remarkable so you know you see a bear wow that's a bear okay but I've seen Bears you see your you see a bicycle okay that's a bicycle but you see a bear on a bicycle holy [ __ ] never seen that before that's amazing and for you that's basically like you know how to code but a lot of kids know how to code

and it's this other piece that you also had which was the knowledge of and you even said it in your video video editing and just making fun videos um this kind of the Tik Tok knowledge and you combined how to make Tik toks that will get views with how to make apps that work and that is your be on a bicycle thing and so I'm pretty inspired because there's actually like a group of people who are just like you and I would say right now is like a very golden window for that group of people

to go build things like and you know hopefully people listening to hopefully there's you know we trigger another 20 to 100 people just like you who hear this story and are like you're their social network right they're going to hear this and they're going to start doing it and that set of skills I think is very very valuable for this moment in time I totally agree and that's honestly why I'm super motivated to go on podcasts like these I was super motivated by others before me that I've watched on podcasts and so this is almost

a full circle moment for me to come on here yeah that's interesting Sam would you be going on podcast because like you know while you're here I'm like oh this is great content I'm excited but then there's like the fatherly part of me that's like shut up dude just shut up why are you on the podcast you shouldn't be saying any of this stuff cuz you have such a good thing going and uh you could always tell the story a little later you don't need to invite you know the other uh Zach yagari of the

world who are you know they can code they can make Tik toks they got cool haircuts like you and they're just going to do the same thing right so like why go on and and and spill your secrets um you know why do that so I've heard this before that usually you know what it takes or people usually know what it takes to be successful but then they are looking for an easier way they're looking for something that is not as burden some not as hard doesn't require as much sacrifice and I've been coding since

I was seven I made now that's 11 years of coding I've started totally science and before that I was tutoring kids in coding lessons for almost a decade of my life I was in the entrepreneur game and so I think that yes I can share all of this information publicly but it's only a select few who will actually work towards it and put in the amount of hours required to achieve the result where I want to help those people I think helping those people achieve the same success especially if they were in a situation like

mine where they maybe weren't entirely sure where to go but they knew there was a world out there where they could have massive impact at such a young age even balancing school on the side and so I completely support those people you have um a trait that uh like sha and I's good buddy Jack Smith is like the perfect embodiment of this trait um but a lot of entrepreneurs which is your logical which like a lot of times will be awkward on like day-to-day level like for example my friend Jack is like he's so he'll

he he does things so differently from everyone because his way is actually better but we've all done it in such a way for 100 plus years that we're like well I don't know we just do it this way and so like for example he didn't name his daughter uh the first year because he was like I get to I have to get to know her before I can name her and I was like yeah that makes total sense it's just like strange to think about you have that type of energy you know you said well

I'm worrying about grade so I can get a good job or get into a good college to get a good job and make good money what if I just make money now like that's like very that that way of thinking is is amazing and it's really fun to be around people like you and so I want to hear your perspective on a few things this fresh thinking on a few things the first is you have 15 employees do you have any employees who are in their 30s or 40s and what's it like having to go

from being just you and your buddies in a room messing around to at 15 people you're actually running a real company so yes we do have employees that are in their 40s and it's difficult to be honest with you it's hard at times to to make them call you sir yeah I do not make them call me sir but it is difficult especially when I have to fire someone that has kids and it C I do have impostor syndrome at times which is something I try to not let hold me back ever so even if

I think a certain way I don't I still act how I know I should I'm reading this great book right now called the Great CEO within I also keep it on my desk as a reminder and it helps me lead I try to be an inspiring leader that that helps people that doesn't lead by telling people what to do and just do it now I try to inspire them to want to do work do your does your staff uh gen are you guys a well organized company you think or is it a [ __ ]

show I think that we are pretty well organized and that's mainly credited to our coo and the third co-founder I didn't mention Jake Castillo he's really good at organization so one of the things we talked about was like you know why come and talk about this and part of you was like well I want to inspire other people but we don't want to inspire just a bunch of copycats and so we asked do we like hey what are some other ideas that if you weren't doing this you think somebody could go do right now so

how can the next you how can the next high schooler get to where you're at $20 million a year in Revenue as a 17 18 year old so what ideas do you have for us sure so obviously you know you could teach a man to fish or you could give a man a fish teaching is better so I have a few Frameworks which I think will help even more but I also will give some ideas okay go for so how I usually look at these AI problems or not AI problems but creating something new in

general is that AI has enabled people to basically build on top of and innovate on any tool or company that exists right now so the calendar was innovated on and now there are AI calendar tools like motion which help you organize and structure your day a lot easier your assistant there are note taking tools where people have always taken notes by hand people have also recorded lectures but now there are AI platforms like turbo learn AI where you can record your lecture and then the AI will generate notes for you calorie tracking there have always

been calorie trackers but now with AI you can just take a picture of your food and it will tell you the calories so I try to look at everything that doesn't already use Ai and think can AI make this more efficient make this a better better process and my perspective on coming up with new ideas is generally that I want to find something looking at it from marketing first principles is how I always think so almost going backwards and I look for an aha moment that I could capture within some sort of experience and then

wrap a whole app around that so for Cal aha moment is take a picture of your food get the calories and that's great for marketing material they come on they do that but then there's a whole app around that that gets them to stay there's another app on the app store right now called Fitness Ai and their ads recently have been around their AI body scanner where you just take a picture of your body and then it will tell you your body fat percentage and a ton of other use information on your composition so that's

what draws people in it's that AI tool which is the aha moment and then there's a whole fitness app around that you stay to track your workouts on that app so that's the framework I generally like to use and so what what do you think is H so you're saying work backwards from the the magic moment where AI does a magic trick and you're like holy [ __ ] that's cool and then build a sticky you know for you guys just take a picture get the calories and then you have the tracking and the charts

and the other stuff that's going to keep them maybe the coaching tips or whatever that's going to keep them around in the long term cool got it and you're the other thing you're saying is take any app that's popular that we've already been doing that and to say what's the AI version of this is that the is that the brainstorming session you would do is basically like all right Evernote what's the AI ver version of Evernote or um yes you know our buddy in our buddy um in San Francisco me and in Sam's ca he

had this company called study soup and study soup was literally for college kids they would have paid note takers who would take great notes in a lecture and then you had you basically the Slackers and you had the kids that were were on top of things kids on top of things were the supply side of the marketplace they would give their notes and the Slackers would buy their notes and so oh cool I I don't have to take notes in this class because I'm getting them done for me and you're saying you you're basically saying

that turone has become an AI version of study soup right where it's like someone records it and now you have uh you have you have well well taken AI notes for your for that class yeah exactly so what are some examp yeah so here's an idea I've actually seen something like this or recently on Twitter I saw something blow maybe it was a couple months ago not so recent where someone put a bunch of their journal entries into chat gbt and then asked what are some insights you could give me to make my life better

you and I both do that yeah well that's great so I think there is the possibility and I think this would be a great idea to build a journal app and these Journal apps already exist so so take an existing one put your and this is the spin so you could make it voice notes you can make it typing whatever doesn't matter but the key feature the aha moment AI feature you implement is that periodically you will have these insights generated from the AI on how you can improve your life like hey on Monday and

Tuesday you hung out with Sally and you had a bad day maybe Sally is the cause of your bad days gotcha okay I like that uh so AI Journal uh I feel like with uh the kind of younger generation I feel like therapy is a lot more normalized therapy's cool basically whereas in my my generation and my parent my parents generation was like therapy equals you're broken you're you have a problem and it was like you know more taboo the whole s the whole idea of Sopranos was a guy who goes to therapy and now

his friends are going to murder him because he's so soft yeah exactly and now I feel like with the younger generation it's almost like uh a cool thing to do I don't maybe I'm speaking out my ass here you tell me if I'm wrong uh but it's way more normalized it's not not a taboo thing and in fact probably being anti- therapy would be a little bit low status now at this point um and I feel like what the problem with therapy of course is that um it's a a little bit of a loaded word

and B you know who's paying $100 a session for this stu stuff when you could have the AI therapist in your pocket whether they're using your journal entries as the starting point the magic moment or or not uh what do you think of that space you think think there's something interesting there I think AI therapists are something that a lot of people have spoken about and I haven't seen anyone do it great there are definitely apps already where you could talk to people chat Bots but I think they're all missing the feeling that you are

actually being heard that the feeling you would get talking to a real therapist so maybe it's the verbal aspect that's missing and something like chat gbt's voice mode integrating that can now actually make it a better session than just typing but that is a good idea that uses the AI spin for sure gotcha and what what are some other ideas you have you have two more it looked like you wrote on here yeah so the first one is some kind of system or pipeline to convert an Android app or an IOS app to the other

and this is something that would greatly help startups when we started C we built it on Swift and that's because Swift usually you could make a much smoother user experience on iPhones using something like react native which can build to both IOS and Android it's more difficult because it's not actually using the native components to make something that feels super polished on an iPhone after building it we had all of this demand for an Android app and it was problematic we had to take away from development time on the IOS app to build out the

Android app and we had to release it a few months after it was it costed us thousands of dollars tens of thousands of dollars and every time you build a feature you have to build it twice you have to build it on one and then on the other yes every single time so it's annoying I think with all these AI tools there is definitely the possibility to build something that lets you upload the codebase to one native project and then it will convert it to the other now right now I think AI can probably do

90% of the work but there will need to be a tiny bit of human intervention so maybe this would be best done as an agency that's very AI powered at the moment but very soon it's going to be something where an AI agent can do it all for you yeah that's a really good idea we used to use something uh I I had an app like years ago a roommates app uh roommate finding app and we what was it called where we use something that turned a web app into an iPhone app I mean there's

been a lot of tools like that and they were horrible like it was like it was really bad but they were huge companies yeah yeah yeah because this is a problem right like you you have to maintain two different two different two every feature you have to build twice every every platform has its own bugs and you basically have to hire double the number of people cuz the Android guy focused on Android the iOS guy focused on iOS and so now you have more headcount and so you always want this thing that's like but but

you need but still you're you're right like having it be native actually results in a better user experience more stickiness more Revenue Etc so if you try to do the web app thing and you just put a web app and you try to wrap it it doesn't work as well as doing a native app and so you're right that basically AI coding is getting so good that you could do 70 80 90% of the code transfer just through Ai and then maybe you you have you you do it as an agency or you have one

person who's who's doing that last kind of The Last Mile to get it to work work well um that's cool what about this remotely configurable onboarding flows this sounds like to use a framework you know it's a paper cut you have right so one of some of the best places to find startup ideas is you're you're trying to do a startup and in the process of trying to do it you run into something that's like God I wish somebody had just built this and maybe you build it in house or you just keep dealing with

the pain and that that's a very good source for startup ideas yes I have heard that a piece of advice to work at a startup to come up with new ideas and it's 100% true so while working on Cal and then a few other apps before CI while I was learning how the whole consumer app space works every app you have to build out the onboarding flow every popular app on the app store has one It generally will ask the questions that are either required to set up your account or simply to Prime you for

what's coming to to explain something that's going on in the app or to ask you questions that set your mind in the right direction to maybe help you convert when they actually hit you hit you with a pay wall and there is no good solution right now to build these everyone has to do it custom in their own code base but someone could really easily make a system where anyone can swap out the questions remotely do ab tests on these which another problem here is that anytime you want to test out something new within your

onboarding flow or within your app in general you have to submit an update to the app store which could take a few days so building out a system where you can build out the whole onboarding survey questions and then also change what the screens are see how that affects conversion rate see how that affects completion rate drop off rate remotely would be huge are you uh the type of person that even though you have a full-time gig you are experimenting on new ideas that are unrelated to CI so for the last few months I kind

of was we were orienting ourselves as an app Studio very briefly and the idea behind that was that our real sauce was in our marketing not in our app development and so we could build a bunch of these other AI apps spin them up apply the same marketing and blow them up really fast but at the scale CI is and the rate it's growing we realized pretty quickly that it made more sense to stay full-time on CI because the same time it would take to build another app and scale it to six figures Revenue we

could have added an additional seven figures in Revenue to CI just because everything boosts each other increasing retention will increase LTV and as we increase retention we could increase a funnel so one plus one can equal three instead of two I think that is totally the right move is there anything Zach you know Sean and I are parents and there's a lot of people who listen to this who who are parents is there anything that you you you seem traditionally obviously you're traditionally successful but you also seem like uh you're very thoughtful I think spoken

thoughtful like you seem like you'd be a good son regardless of uh regardless of if you who cares about this app you know like you you you you you're you have your [ __ ] together at a very young age emotionally what do you think that your parents did that set you up to have this success or do you think that and this sounds like a douchy thing to say were you just born you know interested into this stuff at a young age you know like there's a lot of like self-directed people I have four

siblings I am the second oldest and from a young age I I was very wired to want freedom and I think it be I think it comes from my siblings if I wanted to buy something my parents would have to buy something for all my siblings so they wouldn't do it I would have to find the way to pay for it myself that's what made me start teaching coding lessons at such a young age to earn money and related to that I actually have a story that when I was 10 years old I wanted to

cook scrambled eggs by myself I don't know what it was but I really wanted Independence and freedom so the independence to just cook myself breakfast at 10:00 could have burned the house down so my mom didn't let me and I got so mad about this that she didn't trust me to cook eggs on my own because she was taking care of my other siblings getting them ready for school that I actually ran away from my house and I ran probably 15 minutes from my house to a local soccer field and the police were called I

actually got picked up by them and brought back home I was going to come home eventually but you know I did run away and it's really been the freedom that has been the driving force behind everything the Yearning For Freedom well but you have that now somewhat I still feel confined Honestly by being in high school I haven't dropped out and I want to go to college just for the social life not obviously to get a job so I feel I I always feel almost trapped in situations where the outcome is determinant on what someone

else decides for me not something that I can control for myself and someone has to accept me into the college if I let my grades drop in high school then they could resend me even if I get into the school and I hate that but right now for the next year at least I think I have to make that sacrifice and then when I'm in college I want to make a good group of friends then drop out be free You're Gonna Go what's your GPA right now my GPA is a 4.0 and I do want

to go did you get the yeah yeah so I took the ACT and I got a 34 okay that's I think right yeah it's like a that's two points away from per that's like a 90 that's a 99 percentile 98 percentile okay so you're you're you haven't like neglected school you got a 4.0 and you AC doing this with school I'm working hard in school I'm not by the way it's it's it's noon on a Monday where where where are you right now I actually skipped class to do this podcast let's go sorry Miss bicker

staff the boys are calling are you at school right now or are you home no I left school I'm home right now and you told your parents it's because there's this podcast that I want to go on and it's going to be good for business yeah yeah how many other people do you know that are like you like is there a community of like a hundred of you guys who are like high schoolers who actually build [ __ ] and want to do cool things there's not that many high schoolers but there are people who

are slightly older 1920 I probably look at how he's already got the Mastermind hand pose he already has divisionary hand hand position naturally dude straight out the box I have a handful of people that I'm friends with but not many definitely not you guys have a club can you have a name you like the grubs yeah yeah it's the cool kids club that's it it's you guys are pretty cool uh so it's a good always wanted to be in yeah I've always wanted to be one of the I've always wanted to be part of that

uh if you need another member let me know um have you considered just like moving to palto and like hanging out like you know in the movie uh The Social Network Shan Parker gets to act like a college kid without go to college or are you dead set on going the uh going that route well over the summer when things started taking off in June for CI Henry and I decided let's go all in we moved to San Francisco for the whole month of July we lived in a hacker house we worked out of a

co-working office with people years older than us so we lived the San Francisco startup life it was very productive but at the same time pretty lonely although we could talk to some people yeah we made friends we would get lunch with people first of all San Francisco is not the most fun city but also just the fact that people were years older than us always made it difficult to relate to that yeah that makes sense we had a I have a friend that uh like he got accepted into some program where he went to college

at the age of 14 or 15 and he was telling me he was like man like I wanted to like date girls and like you know do that normal [ __ ] and it was weird I started fooling around with one girl and I eventually had to break it with her that I was fill her in that I'm like I'm I'm 16 uh and so like I imagine like it's weird being in these situations where you're like in these you're just as mature as you're more mature than a lot of 21y olds or a lot

of like grown adults but you're in this situation where I do understand why you feel trapped you're in these weird spots at such a young age that like you literally couldn't go and do some of the stuff in San Francisco that everyone else is doing because of your age but it's pretty amazing like I hope you enjoy like the time like I mean I think being 18 and experiencing what you're doing it's like this is like you know one out of a billion this is like a really special thing how much are you paying yourself

so we haven't paid ourselves anything we are reinvesting it all and that's not to say that we won't we are we do have profit every month it is a difficult situation with the app store because we get paid out two months after we earn the money so our growth is so quick that the revenue we generated two months ago we have to put it all in the marketing to keep growing faster and faster I think in a months we may start having a surplus where we can't spend it on growth even if we wanted to

yeah that's great um dude this is awesome man congratulations and uh I'm excited to see what happens who who are like who do you admire who are you who are you learning from and looking up to like who's who's inspiring you are you just like oh Elon and Jeff Bezos that's what I that's what I care about or are there other people that you're more interested in uh personally like you said you used to listen to podcast as inspiration who are some of those people that you like to listen to totally so I love your

guys's podcast it's I'm more inspired by people who are dead than people who are alive and maybe that's because I feel like there's they're not my competition anymore or they are but they're not progressing anymore so I see exactly where they ended up but psycho love it yeah I get it you sick [ __ ] makes sense they're not my competition anymore I've already finished them yeah people like think kill us Sam think he just threatened us lowy okay so you like learning from dead people what does that mean books what what how you learn

from dead people I like audio books but I don't actually like reading physical books I also like learning about them from podcasts which dead people oh so like Founders you like the David CRA podcast Founders it's one of my favorites I do listen to that there's one I've listened to to recently how to take over the world which boy Ben let's go so let me ask you a question what what's a thing that people your age are doing that seems weird to us but it's totally normal so like what's a phenomenon that you're like yeah

kids love doing this they spend all this time doing this or they spend their money on this or this is a new trend that seems to be weird to others but we get it it's it's normal for us yeah is by the way is wearing uh Ralph Lauren Ralph Lauren polo sweaters is that a new trend that young people I think you've influenced Sam yeah it's a great sweater yeah sorry go ahead with uh what cool young people are doing so there's something really interesting a really interesting phenomenon I've seen recently and it's not a

new software it's not a new social media platform what it is is these little things you put on the back of your phone it's called an octob buddy octob buddy and it has suction cups on it so you could stick your phone to a wall you could prop it up on your table and watch videos is the purpose I don't think people actually I've never seen someone actually use the suction cups how they're designed to but it's a trend among all girls in my high school I've over the last few months I've Just Seen more

and more people have it now everyone does and it's it's fascinating something it's like a TV mount you mount your you can mount your phone to any any surface basically and what it's not used how it's supposed to be isn't that what it's supposed to be well I think it's more of something where now girls look at it like the color of their nails or having long nails on where girls get different colors and oh it access stylistic accessory status thing than actually function keep going tell me what young people like like whenever I meet

a young guy I'm like tell me everything well that's the main thing that you wouldn't typically notice are your friends drinking yes definitely it's big you like the party do you do you guys like to smoke weed I'm someone who doesn't do any drugs I'm pretty against them and I don't drink either but it's I mean everyone around me is so drinking is common very common very very common you also mentioned this uh this like turbo learn thing that sounds pretty awesome what else is like uh what other uh who else is like you out

there who's who's basically scaling up to millions in Revenue just off of this kind of like AI Tik Tock type of model so there are a bunch of consumer apps that are coming out or have come out and honestly I think a lot of it is attributed to Blake and I speaking publicly about this showing that it's really possible in the app space so new apps like quitter which is an app designed to help men quit porn with all of these little social or like by having streaks essentially to gamify the whole experience so that's

a new one that just came out you inspired these guys I'm friends with the founder and he was inspired to get into the app Space by seeing c i really take off he was with me in the early days that's cool it's got 5,000 5,000 reviews on on iPhone that's pretty good yeah so they're on track to make over a million dollars this year I think consumer apps right now are like the new Drop Shipping you know uh Sean had said this once where he was like you know Sean was like I'm a content creator

you know he's got newsletters and Twitter and podcasts but these Tik Tok guys it's as if you know I am really good at riding horses but Along Comes Henry Ford and it just it's just the cars are no comparison you know I can't there's no way my horse and I are going to outrun uh even the the crappiest car this is one of those moments that I'm having right now talking to you uh so like for a long time Sean and I are friends will do Drop Shipping you know when we were 25 that was

the thing is like create Like A Drop Shipping site and people still do things like that seeing what you're doing with tech and influencers is so much better than like you even look Mr you even make Mr Beast look old you know what I mean like chocolate like what that's crazy make you know what I mean but but dude people used to look at me and Sam when we were like so we met when we were I was probably 24 25 years old we were the prodigies and it was like that's very generous but what

I mean is like it'd be like if there was something on the On The Fringe or the edge about either growth hacking or a clever way to make money usually it was us who knew it and people would ask us about it like I remember having like the Atlantic the publisher come to my office and they're like newsletters and I'm like yeah like it's a thing that's old news now these guys are so much better and we are that person now I'm going to go to his office and be like just tell me everything it's

something that always happens it's going to happen to me too I know that every year I age I am becoming exponentially less impressive and there's someone that's going to come and be the next big thing the growth hacker that is in the front of everything I think it's just about building momentum and I'm pretty obsessed with this idea of making sure that everything I work on will 10x the previous thing so that I'm always moving forward towards a bigger goal you actually mention Mr Beast he's actually someone who greatly inspires me I love the podcast

that you guys had with him by the way I've heard this now a couple times from people who are like 18 and they're like fearful that when they're 22 suddenly their accomplishments are no longer cool and I just want to say I get it makes total sense it's also total nonsense and what I mean by that is not only is it still super impressive but the real game is when you stop trying to impress people and so what actually happens is you graduate out of the I need to impress people phase and the person who's

17 18 there're still getting that high of of being the impressive person oh everybody's kind of patting on the back and actually the the the the only way to win the game is not to continuously be the youngest best looking richest person because you'll never win that game of comparison the only real way to win the game is to realize like oh I just need to be doing the things that are fun for me and like the the act of doing them is rewarding and not look for the rewards of impressing people which is obviously

easier said than done but that's the real thing to focus on and not like this feel of I'm I'm running on quicksand you know because it's I'm getting older oh no or like uh I have to 10x my growth even though I'm already at you know 24 million AR it's like sure that's all fine I don't I'm not against growth but um somebody said this to us actually they said this while we were hanging out with Mr Beast they go be very careful because growth for growth sake is the ideology of a cancer cell and

um so you know growth for growth sake is not not not where it's at and there's there's more to the game than that and he's like I'll leave you with that to kind of figure out what what what is the answer I'm not going to sort of try to tell you what I think is right but I'll point that out because I think for me when I was young and I know for a lot of ambitious people it just seems like grow grow grow grow grow it's the only thing and it comes from a little

bit of a uh I don't know like a little bit of a place of anxiety I think right yes and I've had this a similar thought to this where I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing I thought okay once I find my success and let's say I'm quote unquote financially Free Will I even want to start something new or will I not care anymore and just want to find happiness elsewhere maybe I have one of the tenants of Happiness which is I'm financially taken care of but then I want to

prioritize relationships and happiness and other aspects so you're always going to be making stuff I I I'll predict the future maybe maybe you'll take the foot off the gas and want relationships and a family and all that stuff you are going to be creating stuff for a very very long time well that is why I'm going to college it's almost to take my foot off the gas a little bit build relationships and then I want to drop out after a semester or two I mean I think that's really smart because you have your whole life

to make money but you really only have this four years to make lifelong friends uh from college so actually the the scarce thing is the f is the friendships and that college experience because that there's a window of time that expires and so do that because you still have 50 years to make money um after that what school do you want to go to if I got in then Stanford is likely the top surely we have listeners this is going to reach a lot of people surely there are some some people I know you're listening

yagari y a d h yeah you can find him on Twitter DM him uh actually that's that's what they should do a real if I'm if I'm at a right now I'm dming this kid an acceptance letter that's how a college needs to hustle I'm tired of these colle someone's going to be like sup you're just going to get a DM from uh the Su who who's your favorite uh who are your most inspirational follows on Twitter uh I want to I want to basically I find you so fascinated I want to be inspired by

the people your yeah yeah yeah I want your info diet who uh who do you inspired by and try to make it people who you think I won't know okay who do I follow I actually don't usually use Twitter for people I'm inspired by that's interesting what what's your like main social network what what do you use when you're bored what do you open up it is Twitter it is Twitter that is my main social network when I'm looking to be inspired there are definitely a few people David Goggins for example he just pumps me

up so I have people like him that you know inspired by his mindset completely I used to actually be in this phase where I was addicted to motivational content I curated my Tik Tok for you page I only liked motivational videos and anytime I lost motivation I would just scroll for five minutes then get back into it so definitely those kinds of people but it's mainly those like Mr Beast Elon Musk I follow both of those on Twitter my own co-founder Blake Anderson who's a few years ahead of me in life and knowledge too so

definitely learn a lot from him Cliff whitesman he's a recent friend of mine I think one of you know him yeah yeah we know Cliff yeah so he's super inspiring to myself as well that's dope uh okay amazing Sam anything else is there that's don't ask me Zach is there anything else that you want to inspire me by like you're you're you're amazing like uh anything else that you want to tell us yeah did we miss anything I appreciate that I mean it's always hard going on these podcasts like it's it's a whole full circle

moment and also it feels almost bad speaking about all this I try to stay humble but then at the same time I know you have to speak your way into the world if I wasn't posting anything publicly I've had a lot of debate over the personal brand then I wouldn't have so many opportunities that I have had I uh Sean my one of my best buddies Val uh I think Zach asked him out to lunch or something the other day uh like the other day and like was this asking him for advice on maybe coming

on this podcast but also business advice because Val's uh a great guy and really successful and uh I thought it was funny because actually you remind me of Val a lot Zack but it was funny apparently Val's kids were like were you hanging out with our friend Zach uh like at lunch the other day and he was like yeah but it was like a very you know oddly a business context uh but anyway Val called me and was like this guy Zach is one of the most impressive people I've ever met and Val is a

very hard person to impress he's pretty lowkey and so well one of the funny things is like you have this Paradox because you you want to keep your asset your asset is you're young and ignorance is bliss you don't know how hard some things are you don't know what's possible you don't have a ceiling on anything because you don't know any better right and that ignorance is a is a real tool that navity The Beginner's mind and so you want to keep that and on the other side you have this giant problem which is that

there's always kind of like this um I forgot what they call it but there's this three three known thing right it's like there's the things you know you know there's the things you know you don't know but then the the real one that matters is the things you don't know that you don't know and and so talking to whatever smarter people people who have played the game for 15 20 years they will help you surface that last one and that that last area of things you don't you don't currently even know that you don't know

that's the thing you should be worried about but how do you worry about it you don't even know you don't know where to look um but it's by talking to other smart people that that gets revealed to you and so you have this Paradox where you want to keep what you got as your big asset your naive your beginner's mind your your your your useful ignorance but at the same time um talk to some well-meaning people who are a little bit wiser to try to get figure out like you know um little little a little

bit of a a push in One Direction or the other they'll kind of nudge you and that little nudge can totally change your trajectory right cuz like I mean just imagine hitting a golf ball and even just changing by 2 mm the angle that you hit that ball it ends up in a totally different spot so you want to find those people who are your your 2mm people the people that would just give you that slight angle adjustment in order to make it happen I don't know how you do that exactly the keep both of

those but that's what I would do if I was you I try to find a way to keep both I totally agree I have heard that that it's much easier to learn from from someone 10 steps ahead of you then 100 steps ahead of you 100 steps so much is missing but 10 you can piece together they can lift you up this the extra steps and help you get from zero to 10 yeah and one other thing you're got to figure out is that um all successful people do not have equally valuable advice so you

will meet a lot of people who are successful or sound interesting um but their advice is not great and you the hard part is figureing out how to parse it and dis like dissociate it slightly from the result because their result might be totally dependent on the context Lu there's a whole bunch of different variables uh that will lead to that or maybe just their understanding of your situation and so trying to figure out how to parse advice is like an underrated skill and and make sure that the people you take advice from that they're

actually happy and they're people and they're they're people you admire or happy for themselves and they're happy for you you know yeah like you'd want their life it's a very good point all right well on that point let's call it a let's call it a day I think you got to go back to cool now yeah lunch is over hey thank you Zach uh you're the man uh anytime you want to come on please let us know congrats dude thank you for adding me and I'm gonna I'm gonna use the app so I'm gonna download

your app right now start track yeah thank you and uh that's it that's the [Music] pod for