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

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Video Transcript:
how much money do you make make $1 million every month and how old are you I'm 17 dude 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 AB Store connect it's showing that in October we made $1.14 million refresh the page and you'll see is not fake dude that is [ __ ] 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 my fitness spell so there's a lot other other apps like this on the App Store so there are a lot of CopyCat apps of Cal but there's really been nothing like this in
the past how did you find this like how did you choose to make this yeah so the whole story with CI 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 grindclock essentially a motivational speaker like David gogins 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 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 R 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 LEL strategies come on as a co-founder with C ey Henry and I would lead the day-to-day operations making the up and growing it and then together we all came to the idea CI to work on and started going I think that's specifically with the idea there's always been yeah um the apps the calorie tracking apps in the App Store have been around for years and they've all been super outdated and antiqu My Fitness Pal 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 chat gbt that came out the same year we just pieced two and two together and new Cal AI it was a great idea to build so is it the one of the first Cal AI calorie tracking apps yeah definitely one of the first that launched and so it's is it tracking Mac protein carb sugar everything like that or yeah yeah everything we really simplified the app concept
where other apps like my fitness pal 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 does do you have to like choose like a specific like outcome you're working towards like I'm trying to lose weight I'm trying to like gain weight is that like 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 they're 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 seven 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 spent 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 ized 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 totally science . so that got it categorized as an educational site nice it thought it was a science website and then you 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 was like a mini clip or something we took some games that were made by mini clip 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 just like all right I'm going to find a way to get around this and then monetize it yeah basically how much money did you make from that that website was making $660,000 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 [ __ ] who' 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 flia flia flippa.com FP a interesting how long it take to sell 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 Tik Tok 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 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 do 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 wait so you saw another guy who had made money as a teenager but then he was just continuing to work on this the same product that was similar to yours you're saying it was a Ming 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 and millions of users but it went nowhere so you just basically saw how did you hear about him I met him actually on the Y co-found uh the Y combinator co-founder matchmaking platform did you watch a lot of Y commentator 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 could make real money
at a young age I was 13 actually 14 making a few hundred do 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 YC combinator and their lessons is there any piece of content that like really stood out to you from even why commentator 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 like Tik Tok yourself yeah I made the videos myself what were the videos so they were primarily just me in the middle of class class recording my computer screen saying with the text to speech I was boarding 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 want to 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 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 that next it was just
a system that kept going and so you were able to 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 eight years and kind of went nowhere and so you're 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 tech crunch 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 what did you do with 100 Grand I've really done nothing with it to be honest a lot of it has went to funding calai 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 CI 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 mhm 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 it 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 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 are you going to stay 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 um 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 could always live in a
college town and just not go to the school you know yeah that's definitely been some advice given I actually really like your answer just value social life like there's really no point to rush building some hundred billion dollar company unless you're like really passionate about the idea like have fun dude I 100% would have totally advis 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 C like get really specific but I always I'm very curious how do you because you're you
have such a like 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 I look at Cal and everything I've done as stepping stones MH 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 mhm and so you're viewing Cali 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 CI I started out I programmed half
of it with Henry and then I shifted more into doing all of the marketing myself and now I've shifted into the CEO role focusing mostly on product delegating tasks and managing the enti 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 MH 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 [ __ ] is looking for software Engineers so if you want to work on some real [ __ ] and you're a real problem solver and leader then apply on wap.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 [ __ ] so again if you're 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 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 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 consciously decide definitely interesting okay so I really want to understand C and how it came to be cuz like over a million dollars a month at 17 is no joke and I'm just so curious because this is like something that we saw a year and a half ago in chat GPT really became popularized with the GPT apis like what was the philosophy behind C ey was
it really just as simple as I tried you tried my fitness pal and it was clunky and you just like all right this makes sense like this is a big market like how did you analyze the opportunity yeah so the idea defin 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 was the solution to these but we had a few different ideas of what we could build part of the reason we chose CI 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 it's making sure that we know how we're going to blow it up if we have a product that we think 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 within their videos how do you like structure this
like do 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 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 Cal so basically to start out
the app it was just me dming a ton of influencers and then when they would reply like one in 100 influencers reply on DMS so then when they finally reply then that influencer probably isn't good one out of 100 you have to DM a lot more after 500 DMS maybe you get two decent influencers that have actually replied applied to you and their good quality so then I would hop on a call with them negotiate a deal and this all comes down to two 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 thousand views needs to be less than the amount of money you will make per thousand views so RPM is how much you'll make per thousand views see PM is how much you spend and you can't just tell an influencer I'll pay you $5 per every th000 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 um 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 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 a 100 bucks for 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 form okay so you basically will choose a $2 CPM you say you'll average 5,000 uh 50,000 views so you just reach out to them saying hey I'll pay you $100 $100 flat like then that's like your do you like start with that like it's your first message and then usually they say absolutely [ __ ] 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 four videos with you we'll pay upfront all 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 will pay them upfront for four videos at a time so you bundle it yeah okay and does that make it cheap like does that make it a cheaper makes it a lot cheaper and also we get them recurring so every month they post four videos for us so you get them on retainer yeah
how much does 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 two months so you have an influencer that you pay $100,000 every two 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 mhm 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 uh 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 CI but they don't even say the name CI once in the video how do people figure out that it's CI 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 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 launched 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 looks maxing
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 uh 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 have 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 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 on the product it's also based on the influencer h 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 cre 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 boted 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 comment 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 comment section has the highlighted story ring around their profile on Instagram then you know it's all influencers it's Creator 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 Tik Tok 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 Tik Tok will just feed me creators to DM just copy paste copy paste so you literally so you literally make a new Tik Tok account and only scroll with
engage with the type of content in the demographic that you're trying to make a business so Fitness to the point where your algorithm 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 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. te 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 it's 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 click 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 back in like sales revenue or how
does this specifically is App Store connect because it's mobile apps I see yeah interesting dude well I want to talk about that at the end but back to C so you basically just had a like had a uh 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 get a th000 views we should make $5 back correct yeah and then so you're trying to pay them A2 $3
CPM so you could be profitable on that corly okay so then what is the pricing model of CI 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 f 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 but will that compound over
time since it's a recurring yeah so we haven't seen our retention because we're less than a year old we launched 6 months ago so we're going to find out soon you launched 6 months ago and you're already at a million a month yeah are you POS 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 there are 12 people right now and three founders we have four co-founders four
so you're one of four yep cool so four co-founders and eight like team members yep 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 the 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
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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 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 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 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 $44,000 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 I know a lot of people do like uh 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 exctly are there I 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 there's some that you could get on pay-per-view MH 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 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 like have like a one page that's like other videos that people have used what you want them to say any like examples you want them to show like anything like that yeah pretty much and it's not it's not that complicated it's just pretty straightforward 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 record in
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 MH Cal 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 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 my fitness pal and the ones that have been around for years number 10 in the fitness category wow would if you stopped doing influencer marketing how important is it to maintain a constant flow
of influencers posting like if you stop would sales plummet like not plummet but like decline pretty rapidly or what 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 see like your turn in acquisition was like even basically yeah when 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 yep and are most of them on a monthly retainer yeah so the most common is a monthly retainer for a set vide how scale that's how you scale and that's what you're basically just okay so you're basically just calculating their average views saying we want four 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 I would love for these to be like so much more like shocking but like it truly is pretty straight forward yeah just being Scrappy a numbers game is there any like viral mechanic
you built within the app to make it spread organ 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 CI the idea already is viral but then for other apps that we're working on there is 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 going to 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 doesn't take paragraphs of story to explain what it does it's just two 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 chat gbt technology and we just moved quickly do you 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 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 thousand 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 theme food scan and prompt people to post out on their stories so by the time this comes out people will probably see if that was successful or not could completely fail as as 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 say listen to a specific artist or their top songs they can 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 cuz 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 CI scans something like how festive is your dinner you like what percentile are you in for how much you ate in this Thanksgiving everyone loves to brag about how much they're eating yeah leaderboard or something have you guys done any like 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 Gams 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 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 does like do people if they 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 we 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 just how
many grams left 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 AB 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 pay wall 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 bucks for a year yeah I mean it's even easier than that it's just a free trial for three 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 rhyming 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 even I think it's talked about enough it doesn't change so literally doesn't change anything about the product 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 going to 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 premium 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 pay wall 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 premium version we had ads and then you could upgrade to premium for
no ads M and after switching that that's when we saw more Revenue coming even though we have 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 C ey 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 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
these people would assume that you could see like the steak under the under the r yeah they would expect you to like understand that or something and then they get mad and they email you 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 chat gbt and it would just return everything and we actually found that that was 80% accurate which was equal to the FDA required um margin of error for food labels on food packages 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's 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 back end we use Firebase Cloud functions to do our back end mhm and then like are you using any tools for influencer marketing other obviously your tools coming out but are you using any tools for are you using slack to talk to your team SL 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 impostor syndrome in the beginning but something that I've been getting better at and always trying to 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 to use heat Maps or anything like that
we don't at the moment to test out our apps we use mix panel to collect data about our users and we also have we we always test out the app extensively before app updates catch bugs so mix panels how you like all your stats all the usage all the analytics basically yeah we use mix panel here and Swift interesting so I'm curious then this is going really well like a million dollars 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 my fitness pal oh okay do you know how big is my 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 my fitness B 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 my fitness pal 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 my fitness fou and then we sell it's glorious exit Okay cool so then I'm curious why start this app studio if you guys are making a million dollars 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 into it there's going to be nominal returns like what 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 CI 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 these same creators yeah you know how much to pay them exactly and theoretically this should help C 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 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 Tik Tok are you looking for uh 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 Tik
Tok 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 Cal it was something that I saw my friends were trying to track their calories I was trying to track my calories C and so it's really just
about identifying something that you can derive value from or you can see someone around you deriving 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 so if you're only looking within I think that's the best strategy to come up with an an idea yeah it's like they saying from Ford if 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 in the pipeline do you feel like I'm just Cur I 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 Cal we've recently disced 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 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 three 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 cont content ideas and then that helps you get jump started 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 message sent waiting on reply replied like deal so it's more about 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 in 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 got to like track all the accounts on the like a specific back endend 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% 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 they're all just immediately going to Google and searching it interesting what about this whole like uh CPM so you said you've paid people per like a thousand 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 my fitness P level to 10 million a month will you think you will have to scale outside of Tik Tok 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 assistance 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 hypothesises 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 sing 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 of the influencers have made and then like spin up sub accounts and repost them we actually do that and that's part of our strategy we have Instagram CI account where we repost every single video in influencer mix 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 how work 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 be seen by new people 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 interest 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 sh to other people so gotcha so the same account if you did 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 four times a month you have 400 pieces of content a month to then get 10 editors to then edit those 400 and 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 Tik Tok 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 and instead of 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 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 is everybody logged into the in same Instagram account or is it through like a mini chat 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 every one account that everyone has access is it the brand account is it the calii the brand account and everyone just logs into it directly yeah so an interesting 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 basically 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 earning paid ads yeah yeah we've we've started a couple 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 mhm so I think that we have that down better than
most brands just because of the sheer amount of creatives we have we have so much to test that something's down to work and that's helped us a lot we have been scaling pretty quickly so pay 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
is it new for you guys yeah it is new we've only done this the past couple of months like last two 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 two to make their first pieces of content and then turn those two 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 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 influen 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 Tik Tok or Instagram
the paid ads we do mainly meta ads but we do both so Facebook and Instagram yeah and Tik Tok and Tik Tok okay cool is there any other growth tactic that you guys have used other than influencers of 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 um um 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 signed that you are a worse product and that's something we've learned recently so Apple's search ads meaning that when someone's in the App Store if 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 it's a you're better than the competitor basic
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 the competitor's keyword and you are profitable that validates your product yeah this isn't a one for one thing 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 calerie tracker calii on Google no do you rank for Cal track 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 a million a month with influencer marketing you could probably do another million a month with PID ad and you can probably do another million a month with like Google if you master Google ads and that's just like more
team more time more learning scale up 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 three 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 two days and I'm going to edit on Thursday so in between these two 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 has been building out these internal
tools interesting what do you like do you feel a pressure to build a big business like you you had the idea you said that like you felt like imposter syndrome which is very normal but like do you feel the pressure that you need to 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 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 they
actually try and I think that if I want to make it happen I will be able to I do fear that after Cal 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 [ __ ] that Elon Musk gets into like legally and just dayto 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 Marcus 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 and 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 mhm 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 she just get started immediately and it's easier than ever with tools like chat chbt and that is just something everyone should take to heart how do you I mean how do you feel internally
about a million dollars a month 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 my fin about 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're doing 600k a month it's crazy dude I I mean I texed you to do
this podcast and you're at 800k yeah so now you're at 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 going to post it I just woke 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 W
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 beyond my back saying that like it's just a chaty rapper that I got lucky with and like it doesn't work the app is [ __ ] 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 do 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 mhm it kind of says more about them than you do you like a big school it's a public school so yeah like a thousand 2,000 people or it's probably close to a thousand 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 longtime 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 C ey six months but you want to beat my fitness pal is there actually like a 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 um it's always in my mind how much revenue can this generate What's the total Market size MH 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 flash cards 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 make money then I wouldn't have this 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 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 mhm 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 cuz 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 then 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 CI specifically we haven't taken any money out because apple pays you two months after you make money we've continuously had to reinvest the earnings from the month two 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 up front but then you don't get paid two month for two months so I'm assuming once you do get paid after that two 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 two but all that money is recurring either a yearly or monthly subscription so you're at a million a month you would if you stopped today
you would assume that you'd have at least probably around a 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 is are there any books that you've read that have like changed your worldview like drastically nothing that super drastically changed my worldview a man search for meaning is a great book 0o to one helped me got into entrepreneurship but I think movies helped change my world view 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 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 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 movie that inspired me but a lot of illegal and sketchy things though yeah it's a great movie yeah I 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 it do you think it's so Social Network is such a good movie I watch that like this year again yeah it's so good so is there anyone so you said watched why combinator a
few movies a man search for meeting which is a great book did has school ever been like a place where 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 things 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 mhm 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 like social networks correct yeah nothing specific that I've seen pop up recently Tik Tok proba B real was the most recent but be real I personally hated it that fell off fast yeah it did it did fall off fast interesting is 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 s you're such a clear thinker like I don't think you started 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 yagari z a c y a d g a r i so underscore in between and if you're a 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 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 fun
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