By the way, it's it's it's noon on a Monday. Where are you right now? I actually skipped class to do a spot guest. Let's go Sorry miss bigger staff boys call it Okay, this kid right here on the screen is making 20 million dollars as a high schooler High school is that is making 20 million dollars a year in revenue.
That is absurd zach welcome to the showman I think this is actually the make everybody else feel bad when you find out the like a 17-day tree Nice school. I think a lot of people's initial reaction is wow and another group is like oh man What how much of that per year's profit zach? It's more than 30 percent. All right, so it's very good fallen We're gonna tell the story but figure out how to go and Sam do we need to address your 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 never been kissed where they pretended that they're in high school Or 21 Jump Street. Yeah, that's us. Like 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 listened to the podcast before I understand Yeah, let's do years.
You would you say we maybe inspired you slash were 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 $20 million for a high schooler So let's explain what is your app? Yeah, and when did you start it? Let's start with that So calai 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 calai 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 eight years old when Silky 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 can use the food database wave scale well in the end of scale stuff like I you know, I'm a weirdo I've actually used my fitness pal for probably five years almost every day now Yeah, and a lot of it. I don't realize is when they eyeball their calories. They're probably always off by like 30 or 40 percent Have you 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 chicken breasty And 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 you started this as a 17 year old and can you just give us a sense of the the growth? So in 10 months you started obviously was zero first month roughly where were you at?
So the first month it 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 your say is he's hock like every 16 year old you that's you sounded like this right? He sounds more mature than us.
So you you're saying we is there a is there a we who is a royal we like s kind of me 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 like Mac a killer engineer child technology officer.
Yes. Go. Okay Lake Anderson who I think you guys actually did an episode about one of his apps umax So he has found it's lead to other apps that had gone in a few million downloads. So we partnered up How'd you 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 Got you so you guys get together and who has the idea for the app? So it was a mixed ball of Blake and myself I was tracking my calories two years before starting Cali on my fitness ball or at least trying to I was really skinny growing up And I wanted to put on weight but on muscle honestly I'm pressed 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 two 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 dollar your business is a lot cooler of it than having muscles when pressing girls Which one works better?
Honestly, I thought that once I always had this vision as a kid that I just needed 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, honestly Having big muscles. It's also just only dudes and buying you We're actually still not sure. Yeah, I wanted to like you We were still trying to figure that out.
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 one million dollars in high school pull this up because I want to get to your reaction to this It starts by the way, it just starts with like great video.
It's an amazing video. How many views this video? I can't see from like 8,000 Okay, 7,000 views three years ago. You post this you only have a thousand subscribers on YouTube I say only I mean I just mean like this video is criminally underrated at the time that 20 subscribers when I posted it So you could play you can play this.
I don't know if the audio will come through I'm going to make one million dollars before graduating high school and this youtube channel is going to document the whole process Here goes the best part the mic alignment of the text and then watch the microwave What is one million dollars? It's enough cash to give you a luxury lifestyle. It makes life more enjoyable and stress-free. It's every kid's dream Wow director's cut Making a million dollars 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 or $3,000 a day All I need to do is sell 30 $100 items every single day. All right, you can pause it. I'm really making it more simple than 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 baby is pointing it's in a field 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 you know going back and editing this to try to make it fancy And I love that you're mindset You were like I want to do this and then you sort of broke it down into smaller more digestible chucks You can't just make the million dollars in a second. You're like I need to make you know $20,000 a week I need to make $3,000 a day to do that I got to sell 30 hundred dollar items that seems achievable What was uh, can you just tell us what why'd 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 flashcards and I vividly remember one night where I was sitting there trying to memorize these flashcards about explorers that came to the america's And I was so frustrated. I broke down the problem and realized that I'm studying to get a good grade But why do I want a good grades 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 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 be stressed and then I set out the goal to do so you're not wrong It's the intelligence procrastination. I 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 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 business That's where all this came from but I was entrepreneurial and doing things long before he actually left his company and started Do you like doing tips sometimes? I don't I should offer to angel best in his family It'd be his mentor All right, so you say my thoughts on that video before we move on from the video It's it's the best you know, Sean.
We brought this up Maybe six months ago 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. It's like absolutely amazing that you've been able to grow a lot I think at that time it was like a like million dollar 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 So wow, okay, you're in a 24 million dollar pace and what will 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 month And is it entirely bootstrapped? Have you had any outside financing all bootstrapped? Wow and how many employees? I'm just gonna like I need to ask much questions.
So I understand all the info. How many employees? Totally right now we have 15 employees full time. Wow, okay So how did you get it to work?
Okay, so you make an app your coder you started coding when you were seven years old or something like that So I believe that you could make an app. Yeah seems like let's just do a quick summary on making the app So how did you actually build this like thing? Are you basically taking a bunch of AI tools and then sort of I'm not saying like you just like a rapper, but like custom Make it custom building for this use case of tracking calories in an app 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 calai They'll summarize them as just an AI wrapper and think that we aren't providing any value And it's true that we started as an AI wrapper And I think that that's something all apps should do just like in e-comm It's very common to start as a drop shipper and drop ship a product and then once you find success Actually, manufacture 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 chbt and other AI tools Kind of as a wrapper 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 have many people did you have using it to determine that they like it We had so this is important to note 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 like to look at step by step You make the app app exists who are the first 10 people?
Let's see 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, so you get sent to them they're kind of they say oh, it's great. You're like, all right cool But we don't really know next what'd you do? What'd you do next?
So next we started contacting influencers fitness influencers on instagram and tiktok Did my DM get lost in the mail? Why did I is this it is this in my other it backs? What's the thought? And 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 influence Give us a sense of the pitch. 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 A.B. Test on this paid promo putting that first the question mark and then jumping into our app let's 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 hop 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 so the paid promos was six out And which influencer took what was your who was it and we're doing the money right?
So you're saying paid promo but your kids you're like hey guys We got five grand to like see money to try this. Where'd the money come from to start? Sure, so before building Cali I actually built an unblocked gaming website my freshman year of high 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's now the third or fourth person that's coming on this podcast Who has that same origin story of I was in school they blocked games on our school I'm guessing you guys like chrome books or something like it was very very iley shawn It was val my friend val who came on inside his his I was doing that now well they went to the same high school. Oh really?
Yeah, 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 But just my thing with gaming servers at school so you had this you figured out all right We have the school laptop people want to play games they're blocked How'd you get around the block and uh, what was the thing called the website was called totally science? Dot co 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 press the tilde 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 that's crazy I can play this is not always this is totally science. This is the only science All right, so you do that that company uh you sell you were making how much 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 and profit You know something like that when they're 14 that's like asking you know, you're 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 any point your parents are lawyers? Were they like are you breaking the laws man? Are you sure you're 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 a 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 unblock game So I was like how could that make money? But I actually had money coming to my bank account that was under her name because I was too young to open one and she was shocked Did you do anything cool with it the money? Well, not really honestly I put all of it into calai when we launched it and pretty cool thing The only thing actually that I 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 to high school That's awesome. All right, sweet.
So you you put the money in the calai You got the money you you reach out to the influencers You said two influencers start posting and what are they posting is there some science? We just had you know, Rob the bank on talking about TikTok as a distribution strategy About what makes great TikTok hooks and videos and how that game is being played You know rob and I guess how have you guys played that game of short form content to grow your apps So totally science and calai were a little different for totally science I was the one making the videos myself 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 calai, 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 paid the influencer that fits our niche and then they're the professionals They know what goes viral as long as we can predict the ROI 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 You'll have to look at their previous videos, but then you also have to keep in mind not all of you are worth the same You have to analyze the comment section and see how strong their community is and based on that way how much you're actually going to pay them That's wild. So you um is this thing pretty sticky and where do you want to take this? So great you go viral you get people to download I'm assuming they hit some paywall 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 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 bell they're doing over 100 million dollars a year So I know we can get there you look at the reviews Sean So he has 65,000 reviews and it's a 4.8 out of 5 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 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 stick with it Wow, this is amazing And so you want to take this to be kind of my fitness power or you're like hey If somebody offered us a boatload 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 if 36 years old I still don't know really know what the hell I'd be thinking in this position What what's the mindset of an 18 year old because you got many hits in 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 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 like if I don't mean I don't mean I don't know what I mean It's like when you go zero to 20 million dollars in revenue in eight months There's some type of like gettingness 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 a 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 gonna generate over 24 million dollars 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 calai 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 impact 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 twitter today 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 it sounds like it's a learning tool Which is more in the direction of kind of good for the world good for humanity impact style Uh think that he's building and so sounds like he's kind of look you know He started with like you max 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 calai 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 do you have 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 schoolers hyper-focused on just their grades and you know just make it friends or whatever's 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 I think the app calculating it's or taking its growth into account is Close to 100 million dollars in valuation, which means you are presumably worth in the ballpark of 30 million dollars I think the 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 it's like a fair ballpark. It would you agree? I would agree.
Yeah, that's amazing man. Congratulations. I'm really I'm really inspired by You and I would say there's like 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 You figured out a growth channel that I think a bunch of old guys like us kind of stuck at because You have what I call the bear on a bicycle phenomenon.
So my first wife and 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 again But you see a bear on a bicycle. Holy shit. 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 tick-tock knowledge and you combined how to make tick-tocks that will get views with how to make apps that work And that is your bear 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 in the hopefully people listening to this You know we trigger another 20 to 100 people just like you who hear the story and are like you're their social network, right?
They're gonna hear this and they're gonna 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 because you have such a good thing going and you can always tell the story a little later You don't need to invite you know the other Zach Yada Garries of the world who are you know they can code they can make TikToks they got cool haircuts like you and they're just gonna do the same thing Right so like why go on and and spill your secrets? 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 burdensome not as hard doesn't require as much sacrifice and I've been coding since I was seven I'm 18 now. That's 11 years of coding I've started totally science and before that I was tutoring kids and 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 this information publicly But it's only a select view 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 Shower 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 a trait that like charin has good buddy jack smith is like the perfect embodiment of this trait But a lot of entrepreneurs are which is you're 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 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 the first year because he was like 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 a good college You get a good job to make good money. What if I just make money now?
Like that's like very that way of thinking 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 and 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 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 I do have imposter 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 the work Dear does your staff general are you guys a well organized company you think or is it a shit show?
I think that we are pretty well organized and that's mainly credited to our co and the third go founder I didn't mention jkestio. 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 you we're 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 dollars 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 him 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, 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 debt a lot easier your system There are no 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 or 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 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 a cal AI 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 your body fat percentage and a ton of other useful information on your composition So that's what draws people in it's an AI tool Which is 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 do you think is uh so you're saying work back Or some of the magic moment where AI does a magic trick and you're like oh shit that's cool And then build a sticky you know for you guys Let's take a picture of the calories and then you have the tracking and the charts and the other stuff that's gonna keep them Maybe the coaching tips or whatever that's gonna keep them around in long term cool got it And your other thing you're saying is take any app that's popular that we've already been doing that's end to say What's the AI version of this is that the brain-storming session you would do is basically like all right Evernote what's the AI version of Evernote or um, yes, you know our buddy and car buddy Uh in septus go me and say buddy see but he had this chemical study suit 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 have the obviously the slackers and you have the kids that 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 don't have to take notes in this class because I'm getting them done for me And you're saying you're basically saying that turbo loan has become an AI version of study suit right where it's like someone records 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 examples? Yeah, so here's an idea I've actually seen something like this or recently on twitter I saw something blow up 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 gotta like 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 take an existing one put your and this is the spin so you can 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, um, I feel like with uh the younger generation I feel like therapy is a lot more normalized therapy school basically whereas 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 so the whole idea of sopranos was a guy who goes Therapy and now his friends are gonna murder him because he's so soft Exactly and now I feel like with the other generation, it's almost like a cool thing to do I don't know maybe I'm speaking out my ass here you tell me if I'm wrong But it's way more normalized. It's 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 little bit of a loaded word and be you know Who's paying a hundred dollars a session for this 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. What do you think of that space? Do you 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 chatbots, 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 jachi pitties voice mode integrating that can actually make it a better session than just typing But that is a good idea that uses the aisp been for sure Gotcha. What are some other ideas? Yeah, you have two more. It looks like you wrote on here 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 calai we built it on swift and that's because swift usually you can 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 this demand for an android app and it was problematic We had to take away from developing 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 Let's you upload the code base to one native project and then it will convert it to the other now right now I think Ai can probably do 90 percent of the work, but there will need to be a tiny bit of human intervention So maybe this would be best on as an agency. It'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 I had an app like years ago a roommate's app roommate finding out and we what was it called where we use something that turned a web app into an iPhone app Made it a lot of tools like that and they were horrible like it was like it was really bad But there are huge companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because there's a problem right like you have to maintain 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 because the android guy focused on android the iOS I focus on iOS and so now you have more headcount and so you always want this thing that's like but you need but still you're right like having it be Native actually results in a better user experience more stickiness more revenue, etc So 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 write that basically Ai coding is getting so good That you could do 70 80 90 percent of the code transfer Just your Ai and then maybe you you do it as an agency or you have one person who's just do that last kind of the last mile to get it to work Well, 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 the best places to find to start up ideas is 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's a very good source for startup ideas Yes, I have heard that a piece of advice to work out a startup to come up with new ideas And it's 100 percent true so while working on calai and then a few other apps before calai while I was learning how the whole consumer app space works Every app if 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 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 paywall and There is no good solution right now to build these everyone has to do it custom in their own codebase But someone could really easily make a system where anyone can swap out the questions Remotely do a detest 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 rates. Yeah, that affects completion rate drop off rate Remotely would be huge.
Are you the type of person that even though you have a full-time gig? You are experimenting on new ideas that are unrelated to Kali I 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 Play the same marketing and blow them up really fast But at the scale Kali I is and the rate it's growing We realized pretty quickly that it made more sense to stay full-time on Kali I 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 Kali I just because Everything boots each other increasing retention will increase ltv and as we increase retention we get an increase a funnel So one plus one can equal three instead of two. I think that is toward the right move Is there anything Zach you know Sean and my parents and there's a lot of people who listen to us who are parents is there anything that you You seem traditionally obviously you're traditionally successful, but you also seem like Uh, you're very thoughtful. I think that's like you're smoking.
Yeah, like you seem like you'd be a good son regardless Uh Regardless if you who cares about this app, you know, like you you you have your shit 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 I do you think 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 was Very wired to want freedom and I think it because 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 myself that's what made me start teaching coding lessons as 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 that independence to just cook myself breakfast at 10 Could burn 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 up 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 always feel almost trapped in situations where the outcome is Determinate 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 rescind 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 You're gonna go. What's your GPA right now? My GPA is a 4.0 and you want to go What did you get the SATs?
Yeah, yeah, so I took the ACT and I got a 44 Okay, that's like a two points away for it's like a 90. It's a 99 percentile 98 percentile Okay, so you're you have it like neglected school. You got a 4.0 and you're doing this with school I'm working hard in school. I'm not by the way.
It's it's noon on a Monday. Where where are you right now? I actually skipped class to do this podcast. Let's go Sorry, miss bigger staff boys are calling Are you at school right now?
Are you home? No, I love school. I'm home right now And you told your parents this because there's this podcast I don't want to go on and get their business Yeah, how many other people do you know they're like you like is there a community of like 100 of you guys who are like high schoolers Who actually built you and want to do cool things? There's not that many high schoolers, but there are people who are slightly older 1920 He's already got the mastermind hand pose.
He already has the visionary hand hand position naturally dude straight out the box I have a handful of people that I'm friends with but not many definitely have a club. You have a name. You have a name Yeah, like the grubs. Yeah, it's the cool kids club It's you guys are pretty cool.
I wanted to be in Yeah, I'm always wanted to be one of them. I've always wanted to be part of that if you're the other member Let me know Have you considered just like moving to Palo Alto and like hanging out like you know in the movie the social network Sean Parker gets to Act like a college kid without going to college or you dead set on going to going that route well over the summer when things started taking off in june For cali hanery 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. Oh, we made it difficult to relate to them Yeah, that makes sense. We had a I have a friend that 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 shit and It was weird.
I started fooling around with one girl and I actually had a break it with her that I was filler in that i'm like 16 And so like I imagine like it's weird big in these situations where you're like in these you're just as mature You're more mature than a lot of 21 year olds or a lot 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 seperate ses Go 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.
You know we have to put it all in the marketing to keep growing faster Investor I think in a few months we may start adding a surplus where we can't spend it on growth even if we want it too Yeah, that's great. Um, dude. This is awesome man. Congratulations and uh, I'm excited to see what happens 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 you want to Jeff Bezos? That's what I that's what I care about or are there other people that you're more interested in personally like you said You 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 where they are but they're not progressing anymore. So I see exactly where they ended up But I go love it.
Yeah, I get it. You sick fuck They're not my competition anymore. I already finished them People like They can just threaten those low key Okay, so you like learning from dead people. What does that mean books?
I like audio books, but I don't actually like reading physical books I also like learning about them from podcasts which dead people also like founders like David centers podcast founders One of my favorites. I do listen to that. There's one I've listened to recently how to take over the world which Yeah, 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 normal for us.
Yeah By the way is wearing raffle or in raffle or in polo sweaters. Is that a new trend that young people are doing? I think you've influenced Sam. Yeah, great sweater.
Yeah, sorry. Go ahead with 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 octobody It's octopilot 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 your 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 It's not you're 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 Alyssa's history stylistic accessory status thing that actually function Keep going tell me what yeah, this is 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 because the party 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 drink is common very common very very You also mentioned this uh, this like turbo learn thing. That sounds pretty awesome What else is like a what other uh who else is like you out there?
Who's basically scaling up to millions in revenue just off of this kind of like AI tiktok 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 callee i really take off he was with me in the early days That's cool. It's got five thousand five thousand reviews on on i5.
That's pretty good Yeah, so they're on track to make over a million dollars this year I think consumer app right now or 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 podcast But these tiktok guys it's as if you know I am really good at running horses, but along comes Henry forward And it just it's just the cars are no comparison, you know I can't there's no way my horse i can outrun even 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 shawn and i our 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 don't want to be like chocolate like what that's crazy But dude people used to look at me and say i'm when we were like so we met when we were i was probably 24 25 We were the prodigies and it was like, uh, probably that's very generous But what i mean is 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 never have it like about it 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 all news now these guys are so much better and we are that person now i'm going to go to his office and just tell me everything It's something that always happens. It's gonna happen to me too.
I know that every year i age i'm 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 mentioned 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 they're still getting that high of of being the impressive person Oh, everybody's kind of patting on the back and actually 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 Active 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 feeling of i'm running on quick sand You know because it's i'm getting older. Oh no or like i have to 10x my growth even though i'm already at you know 24 million a r It's like sure that's all fine.
I'm not against growth, but 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 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 is the answer i'm not gonna 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 But 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 else where maybe i have one of the tenons of happiness Which is i'm financially taken care of but then i want to prioritize relationships and Happiness in other aspects so you're always gonna be making stuff i'll predict the future maybe maybe you'll take a photo of the gas and Relationships and 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 guys a little bit build relationships And then i want to drop out after a semester to 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 from college So actually the the scarce thing is the is the friendships in that college experience because there's a window of time that expires And so do that because you still have 50 years to make money After that what's will you want to go to If i got in then stanford is likely the top i surely we have listeners This is going to reach a lot of people surely there are some people Dean i know you're listening yada gari yad You can find him on twitter dm him If i'm at a college right now i'm DMing this kid an acceptance letter that's how the college needs to hustle It's so good like sup you're good DM from Who's your favorite who your most inspirational follows on twitter i want to basically i find you so fascinated i want to be inspired by the people You're inspired yeah i want your info diet who 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 can start i that's interesting what's your like main social network 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 tiktok for you page I only like 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 like anderson who's a few years ahead of me in life and knowledge too So definitely learn a lot from him Cliff wightsman. She's a recent friend of mine. I think one of you know him.
Yeah, we know cliff Yeah, so he's super inspiring to myself as well. That's dope Okay, amazing. Same anything else That's don't ask me is there anything else that you want to inspire me by like you're you're amazing like 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 cut a lot of debate over the personal brand Then I wouldn't have so many opportunities that I have had i uh shan my one of my best buddies vow I think zach asked him out to lunch or something the other day Like the other day and like i was just asking for advice on maybe coming up this podcast But also business advice is val's a great guy. I'm really successful And uh, I thought it was funny because actually you remind me of al a lot zach 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 It 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 low-key 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 the naivete the beginner's mind Is that you want to keep that on the other side? You have this giant problem, which is that there's always kind of like this I forgot what they call it, but there's 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 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 you don't even know you don't know where to look But it's by talking to other smart people that gets revealed to you And so you have this paradox where you want to keep what you got as your big asset You're naivete your beginner's mind your your useful ignorance, but at the same time Talk to some well-meaning people who are a little bit wiser to try to get figure out like you know A little a little bit of a push in one direction or the other They'll kind of nudge you and that little nudge can totally change your trajectory Right because like I mean just imagine hitting a golf ball and even just changing by two millimeters 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 two millimeter 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 someone 10 steps ahead of you than 100 steps ahead of you 100 steps So much is missing but 10 you can piece together they can lift you up this extra steps and help you get from zero to 10 Yeah, and one other thing you're gonna figure out is that um All successful people do not have equally valuable advice So if you will meet a lot of people who are successful or it's not interesting um Their advice is not great and the hard part is figuring out how to parse it and diss, like Dissociate it slightly from the results because their result might be totally dependent on the context Love there's a whole bunch of different variables that believe 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 make sure that the people you take advice from that they're actually happy And they're people you admire or who's themselves that are 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 today I think you got to go back to school now Lunch is over. Hey, thank you, Zach.
You're the man anytime you want to come on. Please let us know Progressive. Thank you for adding and I'm gonna use the app. So I'm gonna draw my house.
I try Thank you and uh, that's it. That's a pot. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to Put my all in it like a day zone.
So let's travel never looking back