The high schooler making $20M a year

by the way it's it's it's noon on a monday where are you right now i actually skipped class to do this podcast well let's go oh sorry miss bigger staff could the boys are call i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a role less travel never look okay this kid right here on the screen is making twenty million dollars as a high school the high school that is making twenty million dollars year in revenue that is absurd zach welcome to the show man i think this is actually the make everybody else feel bad when you find out like a seventeen to two year old kids make a twenty million dollars 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 thirty percent like alright so impressive it very good fallen we're gonna tell the story fight i figure out how it's going 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 apart you know i like what's it what's that movie sean it's it like never been kiss where they pretended that they're in high school or twenty one jump street yeah that's us that like this is actually the second group of high schoolers that we spoke with over the last two weeks i'm jonah hill alright zach dude welcome to the show you've you've listened to the podcast before i understand yeah last two years you would you say we maybe inspired you slash worthy sole cause of your success yeah i'd say this is the sole reason for any of alright so let's explain what start with what your app does because it's like what app is making twenty million dollars for a high school so let's explain what is your app yeah and when did you start let's start with that so cal ai is the app and it lets you take a picture of any meal and get back the calories proteins fats and carbs to track it so think any other calorie tracking app but then heavy ai features involved does it work really well that sounds like a really hard thing like you know you were literally twelve years old or maybe eight years old when silicon valley the tv show came out and that was like the the joke was like is this a hotdog or not now the app says a lot more you know does that work really well or is it like mostly right so the scanning is about ninety percent accurate on average which is really good when you look at the data for fda nutrition labels they can be up to twenty percent inaccurate so it's actually really good there but we only recommend that you use it well if you're training for mister olympia let's say we don't recommend you use our ai calorie tracker you could use the food database where you're on the scale well in the and the scale stuff like i you know i'm i'm a weirdo i've actually used my fitness pal for probably five years almost every day now yeah and what a lot of people don't realize is when they eyeball their calories they're probably always off like thirty or forty percent have you tried tracking your food hunt 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 by so okay i'm eating this how many grams of i don't really know i didn't weigh it out and then you get this calorie thing but also they have like five entries for whatever for for chicken breast even chicken breasts you don't know which one picked and i i remember even saying i think on this podcast like i wish somebody just had it where you could just take a picture and computer vision would just know and i can't wait for that to happen and it sounds like it's kind of happened so you started this how long ago ten months ago ten months okay so ten months ago you started this as a seventeen year old and can you just give us a sense of the the growth so in in ten months you started obviously with 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 thirty thousand dollars 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 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 i hypothesis this was that there was a middle ground and that's where we threw the capital to test and it worked so then the next month which was june we did our first six figures in a month so okay amazing yeah i mean you're talk like every sixteen year old you you that's you sounded like this right sean he sounds more mature than us so you you you're saying we is there a is there a we who's the who is it a royal we like s just kinda media and did you start this with somebody yes i have three c cofounder so to give you a breakdown one is also in high school he's our cto henry lang a killer engineer child technology officer yes go blake anderson who i think you guys actually did an episode about one of his apps uma max so he has down obviously two other apps that gotten in a few million downloads so we've partnered up how how'd do you guys need each other because you're not in the same high school how'd do you find these other young builders yeah so henry and i met at a coding camp when we were both ten years old he lived in long island initially but then he moved to new jersey so we stayed in touch blake i actually found on twitter gotcha so you guys get together and who has the idea for the app so it was a mix all of the blake and myself i was tracking my calories two years before starting cal on my fin spell or at least trying to i was really skinny growing up and i wanted to put on weight put on muscle honestly to impress girls in my high school and it was super tedious so i just gave up but i knew there had to be a better solution the code and me engineering 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 twenty million dollar your business is a lot cooler i bet than having muscles like when when it kinda impress girls which one works better honestly i thought that once the i always had this vision as a kid that just need to be successful and all the drills will be on top of me all the time but nothing really changed it's just dudes like us yeah you don't honestly with dude having big muscles it's also just only dudes by you so like we're we're actually still not sure what gets the women to like you we're still to figure that out can we pull up you posted a video back when you were how old will he in this video that was three years ago i think three years ago so you're like what fourteen fifteen years old the video is titled how i'm gonna make one million dollars in high school pull this up because i wanna get your reaction to this it starts by the way it just starts with like great video it's an amazing video how many views does this video have i can't see from like eight thousand okay seven thousand views three years ago you posted this you only have a thousand subscribers on youtube i say only i mean i just mean like this video is criminal underrated at the time it's twenty subscribers when i posted this so you could play you could 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 going to document the whole process here it goes the best part the mic the 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 skype making one million dollars can be broken down for example if you're trying to make it in a year it's just eighty thousand dollars a month or twenty thousand dollars a week or three thousand dollars a day all i would need to do is sell thirty one hundred dollar items every single day alright you could pause it you i'm really making it more simple i love this video i love this video on so many levels it's insane i love that you're shooting your shot you're calling your shot i should say right this is babe pointing it's in 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 your your mindset you were like i wanna do this and then you sort of broke it down into smaller more digestible chunks right because you can't just make the million dollars in a second you're like i need to make you know twenty thousand dollars in a week i mean need make three thousand dollars in a day to do that i gotta sell thirty hundred dollar items that seems achievable what was can he just tell us what what why'd did you decide to make that video well from such a young age and i'm not entirely sure where i could pinpoint this but i've always wanted to make massive impact on the world and usually that is parallel with having a lot of monetary success and so my goal was always make a million dollars while in high school part of that was because i was really stressed out about school my parents were super strict about my grades and social studies was the one class i hated i hated that i had to memorize flashcards and i vividly remember one night where i was sitting there trying to memorize these flashcards about explorers that came to the americas and i was so frustrated i broke down the problem and realize that i'm studying to get a good grade but why why do i want a good grades to get into a good college 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 need be stressed and then i set out the goal to do so you're you're you're not wrong it's the intelligent man's procrastination like should i study these fifteen flashcards or make a million dollars i think i'll make a million dollars it's 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 a business that's where all of this came from but i was entrepreneurial and doing things long before he actually left his company started his do you do you like give them tips sometimes i don't i should offer to angel invest in his kind he'd be his mentor alright so you sam maybe any thoughts of 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 the on a podcast i don't know if you remember that and it was still like is this kid like is this a joke like does he actually have it and you know how like reels is this and we brought that up saying this is amazing if it turns out to be true and it is true times twenty it's like absolutely amazing that you've been able to grown 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 eighty thousand dollars a month yeah now how much revenue are you doing well last month we just did our first two million dollars both wow you're twenty four million dollar pace and what will the the your first twelve months of full business what will the revenue be full business the revenue would have exceeded ten million dollars from launching in may to coming this and is it entirely bootstrap have you had any outside financing all bootstrap wow and how many employees i'm just gonna like i gonna i need to ask so much questions so i understand all the info how many employees totally right now we have fifteen employees full time wow okay that's amazing wow that's a lot so what how did you get it to work okay so you make an app your code 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 not i'm not saying like you're just like a wrapper but like custom making a custom building for this use case of tracking calories in an app can you just quickly describe making the app and how long that took you totally so a lot of people do look down on apps like cal they'll summarize them as just an ai 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 com 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 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 how 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 let's go step by step you make the app app exists who are the first ten people that's say it family and friends is that where you started with or family and friends although we just disregard anything from them because i always think it's biased okay mark you get send it to them they're kind of they say oh it's great you're like alright cool but we don't really know next what did you do what did 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 back what's item and will need to get you on it but oh 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 what's the dm so basically you always want to start at least from what we've tested we've ran a lot of ab b tests on this paid promo putting that first the question mark and then jumping into our app lets you track calories just by taking a picture of your food we think it would figure audience and would love to work for you with you if you're interested let us know and we could hop on a quick call and so this works really well because it optimize for that preview message the influencer will see in their inbox they only see the first line or two the paid promos is what sticks out and which influencer took what was your who who was it and where you where'd you get the money right so you're saying paid promo but your kids you're you're like hey dad can we get five grand to like see money to to try this like where did the money come from to start sure so before building cal i actually built an unblock gaming website my freshman year of high school this website lets students play games in class while their teacher was teaching the website blocking protocols and i grew that to five million users through tiktok it was generating money by putting ads on the site and then i sold it so that's where most of the money came in that we put into this by the way sam that that that's now the third or fourth person that's come with this podcast who has that same origin story of i was in school they blocked games on our school i'm guessing you guys had like chromebooks or something like you know very very odd sean it was val my friend val who came on and said his his his son was doing that now well they went to the same high school oh really yeah so 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 just the same thing with gaming servers at school so you had this you you figured out alright we have these school laptop people wanna play games to blocked how'd did you get around the block and and what was this thing called the website was called totally science dot c o 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 ti 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 they how can you play this is science not only this is totally science this is the only science alright so you you do that that that company you sell you were making how much you sold that for how much in made sixty thousand dollars for two years and then i sold it for one hundred thousand dollars when i was sixteen so this is like the first sign you know to have a kid to have your sign from your parents perspective to sixty grand in revenue and profit you know something like that when they're fourteen that's like asking you know like are you a drug dealer or what's going on how are you doing this did that take convincing on your end to let them know what you were doing was totally legal like at at any point your parents are lawyers were they like are you breaking the laws man are you are you sure you're on top of all this i definitely got question 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 are 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 games website how could that make money but i actually had money coming into my bank account that was under her name because i was too young to open one and she was shocked was do anything go with it the money well not really honestly i put all of it into ka i 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 eighteenth birthday party i flew my friends out to miami for a weekend trip my school that's awesome alright sweet so you you put the money in the cal you got the money you reach out to the influencers as you said two influencers start posting and what are they posting is there some science to we just had you know rob the bank on talking about tiktok as a distribution strategy about what makes great tiktok hooks and videos and how that game is being played do you know rob and i guess how do how have you guys played that game of short form content to grow your apps so totally science and kelly i were a little different for totally science i was the one making the videos myself i was recording my screening class saying hey if you wanna play on block 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 mh for cal i'm not the one making videos no one on the team is it's all influencers so we still use the knowledge from well what i learned from totally science to help these influencers make videos and make them go viral to give ideas but for the most part we just pay the influencer that fits our niche and then there are 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 him on cpm or how do you pay him so cpm would be 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 have to look at their previous videos but then you also have to keep in mind not all views are worth the same you have to analyze the comment section and see how stronger their community is and based on that way how much you're actually going to pay them that's wild so you is this thing pretty sticky and and where do you wanna take this so great you you you go viral you get people to download i'm assuming they hit some pay wall in the app that says keep track of all your calories blah blah is it kind of one of these churn in burn games where it's pretty profitable for the first couple of months and then you you'd lose people or is it a sticky product so it's sticky for the power users they definitely stay around and i mean the apps like my fitness bell they're doing over one hundred million dollars a year so i know we could get there you look at the reviews sean so he has sixty five thousand reviews and it's a four point eight out of five so this isn't like an arbitrage like or like a get rich quick thing like people really love the product yeah what's the churn on these subscriptions we actually don't know because it hasn't been a year and more than ninety five percent of our subscriptions are annual gotcha okay but they're still using it presumably so that you know if they're using it though they'll stick with it wow this is amazing and so you wanna take this to be kind of my fitness pal or you're like hey if somebody offered us you know a boat a cash like i guess what's your mindset because i'm so curious because if i was eighteen years old i don't know what the hell i'd be thinking like i have no i even now if thirty six years old i still don't really know what the hell i'd be thinking in this position what what's the mindset of an eighteen year old because you got many hits in you you know this may not be the only one either the 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 wanna do for a decade yeah and does it feel like you're still breaking the lot like if you if anyone what like if i i don't think that break the loan no but what i mean is like when you go zero to twenty million dollars in revenue in eight months there's some type of like getting this of like i can't believe like this is my life i can't believe that this is allowed i don't know there's something there's some type of like matrix breaking idea or 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 eighteen years old and i'm making the company is gonna generate over twenty four 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 cal 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 laws 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 a post today from his partner blake he posted something on on on twitter today he said i guess he's working on something called ten x 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 the language you can learn whatever sounds like it's a a learning tool which is more in the direction of kind of good for the world good humanity impact style think that he's building and so it sounds like he's kind of look yeah know he started with like uma 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 than his ka ai and now he's going into like you know a learning tool it sounds like you might wanna do the same was there something that triggered that in you like did you watch like a movie or do you have like a conversation with a mentor when you were twelve years old like what made you wanna even what made you think differently than the average high schoolers who's hyper focused on just their grades and and you know just making friends or whatever whatever is just in their little pond it's funny you say movie the social network totally had a big impact on me however i did also feel this way before that so that amplified it that showed me it's possible through specifically software which made me super motivated to learn coding even faster but i have i'm not sure the initial seed where it was planted what do you think the app is worth right now right now i think the app calculating it's or taking its growth into account is close to one hundred million dollars in valuation which means you are presumably worth in the ballpark of thirty million dollars i think liquid and on paper is really different oh i know but like but you're you're totally right but like seventeen eighteen years old worth tens of millions of dollars i think is like a fair ballpark would you agree i would agree yeah that's amazing man congratulations i i i'm really i'm really inspired by you and i would say there's like a a handful people i've discovered that are kinda like you who are super young that are basically ai first so your all the tools you're building you build with ai because why would your not you like code them with ai the app uses ai the users get it ai type of experience and you figured out a growth channel that i think a bunch of old guys like us kinda suck at because you have what i call the bear on a bicycle phenomenon of my friend chris williamson said this to me it goes you risk basically wanna stack two skills that usually don't go together and it might create something remarkable so you know you see a bear wow that's a bear okay but i've seen bears you see your you see a bicycle okay that's a bicycle but you see a bear on a bicycle holy 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 this kinda the tiktok knowledge and you combined how to make tiktok 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 and you know hopefully people listening to this hopefully there's you know we trigger another twenty to a hundred people just like you who hear this 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 father lee part of me that's like shut up dude you 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 could always tell the story a little later you don't need to invite you know the other zac y of the world who are you know they can code they can make tiktok they got cool haircuts like you and they're just gonna do the same thing right so like why go on and and and spill your secrets you know what why do that so i've heard this before that they usually you know what it takes or people usually know what it takes to be successful but then they are looking for an easier way they're looking for something that is not as burden so i'm not as hard doesn't require as much sacrifice and i've been coding since i was seven i'm eighteen now that's eleven 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 of 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 sure where to go but they knew there was a world out there where they could have massive impact at such a young age even balancing school on the side and so i'd completely support those people you have a trait that like sean and good buddy jack smith is like the perfect embodiment of this trait but a lot of entrepreneurs are which is your logical which like a lot of times will be awkward on like day to day level like for example my friend jack is like he's so he'll he he does think so differently from everyone because his way is actually better but we've all done it in such a way for a hundred plus years that were 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 guess i to get to know before i can name and i like yeah that makes total sense it's just like strange think about you have that type of energy a you know you said well i'm worrying about grades so i can get a good job eric a good to do a good college get a good job to make good money what if i just make money now like that's like very that that way of thinking is is amazing and it's really fun to be around people like you and so i wanna hear your perspective on a few things this fresh thinking on on a few so the first is you have fifteen employees do you have any employees who are in their thirties or forties and what's it like having to go from being just you and your buddies in a room messing around to at fifteen people you're actually running a real company so yes we do have employees that are in their forties and it's difficult to be honest with you it's hard at times to to make them call you sir yeah i do not make them call me sir but it is difficult especially when i have to fire someone that has kids and it i do have impostor syndrome at times which is something i tried 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 tried 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 do your 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 coo and the third cofounder i didn't mention jake cast castillo he's really good at organization so one of the things we talked about was like you know why come and talk about this and part of you is like well i wanna inspire other the people but we don't wanna inspire just a bunch of copycat hats and so we asked you we were 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 school get to where you're at twenty million dollars year in revenue as a seventeen eighteen year old so what ideas do you have for us sure so obviously you know you could teach them meant fish or you could give a man fish teaching is better so i have a few frameworks which i think will help even more but i also will give some ideas okay go well 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 assistant there are note taking tools where people have always taken notes by hand people have also recorded lectures but now there are ai platforms like turbo learn ai where you can record your lecture and then the ai will generate notes for you calorie tracking there have always been calorie trackers but now with ai you can just take a picture of your food and it will tell you the calories turbo 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 cal a 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 to that ai tool which is the aha moment and then there's a whole fitness app around that you stay to track your workouts on that app so that's the framework i generally like to use and so what what do you think is so you're saying work backwards from the the magic moment where ai does a magic trick and you're like holy shit that's cool and then build a sticky you know for you guys is take a picture get 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 you're the other thing you're saying is take any app that's popular that we've already been doing that and to say what's the ai version of this is that the is that the brainstorming session you would do is basically like alright evernote what's the ai version of evernote or yes you know our buddy and our buddy in san francisco mean in san c he had this chemical called 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 had you have may of the slack and you had the kids that were were on top of things the kids on top of things were the supply side of the marketplace they would give their notes and the slack would buy their notes and so oh cool i i don't have to take notes in this class because i'm getting them done for me and you're saying you bet your basically is saying that turbo malone has become an ai version of study suit right where it's like someone records it and now you have you have you have well we'll take an 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 and not so recent where someone put a bunch of their journal entries into chat and then asked what are some insights you could give me to making my life better you got i both do that yeah well that's great so i think there is the possibility and i think this would be a great idea to build a general app and these journal apps already exist so take an existing one put your and this is the spin so you could make it voice notes you can make it typing whatever doesn't matter but the key feature the a 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 and maybe sally is the cause of your bad days gotcha okay i like that so ai journal i feel like with the kind of younger generation i feel like therapy is a lot more normalized therapy cool basically whereas i it by by generation and my parent my parents generation was like therapy equals you're broken you're you have a problem and yeah it was like you know more taboo the whole the whole idea of sop was a guy who goes a therapy and now his friends are gonna murder him because he's so soft yeah exactly and now i feel like with the younger 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 i'm wrong but it's way more normalized it's not not a taboo thing and in fact probably being anti therapy would be a little bit low status now at this point and i feel like what the problem with therapy of course is that it's a a little bit of a loaded word and b you know who's paying a hundred dollars session for this step of 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 chatbot bots but i think they're all missing the feeling that you are actually being heard that the feeling you would get talking to a real therapist so maybe it's the verbal aspect that's missing and something like chat voice mode integrating that can now actually make it a better session than just typing but that is a good idea that uses the ai spend for sure gotcha and what what are some other ideas you have 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 cal 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 of this demand for an android app and it was problematic we had to take away from development time on the ios app to build out the android app and we had to release it a few months after it was it costed us thousands of dollars tens of thousands of dollars and every time you build a feature you have to build it twice you to build it on one and then on the other yes every single time so it's a annoying i think with all these ai tools there is definitely the possibility to build something that lets 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 ninety percent of the work but there will need to be a tiny bit of human intervention so maybe this would be best done as an agency 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 i had an app like years ago roommates app roommate finding app and we what was it called where we used something that turned a web app into an iphone app i but there's been a lot of tools like that and they were horrible like it was like it was really bad but there were huge companies yeah yeah yeah because this is a problem right like you you have to maintain two different two different here's 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 and the ios guy focused the ios and so now you have more head count and so you always want this thing that's like but but you need it but still you're you're right like having it be native actually results in a better user experience more stickiness more revenue etcetera so you if you try to do the web app thing and you just put a web app and you try to wrap it it doesn't work as well as doing a native app and so you're right that basically ai coding is getting so good that you could do seventy eighty ninety percent of the code transfer just through ai and then maybe you you you have you you do it as an agency or you have one person who's who's doing that last kind of the last mile to get it to work work well 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 some of the best places find start up ideas is you're you're trying to do a start and in the process of trying to do it you run into something that's like god i wish somebody had just built this and maybe you build it in house or you just keep dealing with the pain and that that's a very good source for startup ideas yes i have heard that a piece of advice to work at a start up to come up with new ideas and it's one hundred percent true so while working on cal and then a few other apps before cal while i was learning how the whole consumer apps 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 pay wall and there is no good solution right now to build these everyone has to do it custom in their own code base but someone could really easily make a system where anyone can swap out the questions remotely do ab d tests on these which another problem here is that anytime you want to test out something new within your onboarding flow or within your app in general you have to submit an update to the app store which could take a few days so building out a system where you can build out the whole onboarding survey questions and then also change what the screens are see how that affects conversion rate see how that affects completion rate drop off rate remotely would be huge are you the type of person that even though you have a full time gig you are experimenting on new ideas that are unrelated to cali so for the last few months i kind of was we we're orient ourselves as an app studio very briefly and the idea behind that was that our real sauce was in our marketing not in our app development and so we could build a bunch of these other ai apps spin them up apply the same marketing and blow them up really fast but at those scale cal is and the rate it's growing we realized pretty quickly that it made more sense to stay full time on cal 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 cal just because everything boosts each other increasing retention will increase lt tv and as we increase retention we could increase a funnel so one plus one can equal three instead of two i think that is totally the right move is there anything zach you know sean and i our parents and there's a lot of people who listen or who our parents is there anything that you you you seem traditionally obviously you're traditionally successful but you also seem like you you're very thoughtful i think you're not like yeah thoughtful like you seem like you'd be a good son regardless thank you regardless of if you who cares about this app you know like you you you're you're you're you have your shit together at of her young age emotionally what do you think that your parents did that set you up to have this success or do you think that and this sounds like a i do thing to say were you just born you know interested into this stuff at a young age you know like there's a lot of like self directed people i have four siblings i am the second oldest and from a young age i was very wired to want freedom and i think it be i think it comes from my siblings if i wanted to buy something my parents would have to buy something for all my siblings so they wouldn't do it i would have to find the way to paper myself that's what made me start teaching coding lessons at such a young age to earn money and related to that i actually have a story that when i was ten years old i wanted to cook scrambled eggs by myself i don't know what it was but i really wanted independence and freedom so the independence to just cook myself breakfast at ten it could have burned the house down so my mom didn't let me and i got so mad about this that she didn't trust me to cook eggs on my own because she was taking care of my other siblings getting them ready for school that i actually ran away from my house and i ran probably fifteen 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 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've i always feel almost trapped in situations where the outcome is determined 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 res 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 wanna make a good group of friends then drop out so be for you're gonna go what's your gpa right now my gpa is a four point o and pat you want to go and when did you go to the sat yeah yeah so i took the act and i got a thirty four okay that's so that's like i think right yeah it's like a that's two points away for it's like a ninety it's a ninety nine percentile ninety eight percentile okay so you're you're you haven't like neglected school you got a four point o and you don't i doing this with school i'm working hard in school i'm not by the way it's it's it's noon on a monday where where where are you right now i actually skipped class to do this podcast let's go oh sorry miss bigger staff if if boys are call are you at school right now are you home no i love school i'm home right now and you told your parents is because there's this podcast i wanna go on until we get for business yeah yeah how many other people do you know that are like you like is there a community of like a hundred of you guys who are like high schoolers who actually build shit and wanna do cool things there's not that many high schoolers but there are people who are slightly older nineteen twenty i how he's already got the mastermind hand pose he already has visionary hand hand position naturally dude straight out the bot i have a handful of people that i'm friends with but not manny definitely guys have a club can you have a name yeah like the gru yeah yeah it's the cool kids club that's the it it's you guys aren't pretty cool that's all that's a good day you wanted to be in yeah i've always wanna be one of the i've always wanted to be part of that if you or need 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 go to college or are you dead set on going to going that route well over the summer when things started taking off in june for cal i henry and i decided let's go all in we moved to san francisco for the whole month of july we lived in a hacker house we worked out of a c working office with people years older than us so we live the san francisco startup up life it was very productive but at the same time pretty lonely although we could have talk to some people yeah we made friends we would get lunch with people first of all san francisco is not the most fun city but also just the fact that people were years older than us always always 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 fourteen or fifteen 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 eventually had to break it with her that i was filler in that i'm like i'm sixteen and so like i imagine like it's weird big in these situations where you're like in these you're just as mature at you're more mature than a lot of twenty one 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 it's such a young age that like you literally couldn't go and do some of the stuff in san francisco that everyone else is doing because of your age but it's pretty amazing like i hope you enjoy like the time like i mean i think being eighteen 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 reinvest at all and that's not to say that we won't we are we do have profit every month it is a difficult situation with the app store because we get paid out two months after we earn the money so our growth is so quick that the revenue we generated two months ago we have to put it all in the marketing to keep growing faster and faster i think in a few months we may start having a surplus where we can't spend it on growth even if we wanted to do yeah that's great dude this is awesome man congratulations and i'm excited to see what happens to who who are like who do you admire who are you who are you learning from and looking up to like who's who's inspire are you just like oh elon and jeff bezos that's what i that's what i care about or are there other people that you're more interested in personally like you said you useless listen to podcast as inspiration who are some of those people that you like to listen to totally so i love your guys podcast it's i'm more inspired by people who are dead than people who are a 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 love it yeah i get it you sick fuck you yeah makes sense they're not my competition anymore i already finished them yeah you people like people kill stamp think you just threaten this yeah okay so you like learning from dead people what does that mean books what what do how you learn from dead people i like audiobooks but i don't actually like reading physical books i also like learning about them from podcasts which dead people oh also like founders you like the david send podcast founders it's one of my favorites i do listen to that there's one i've listened to recently how to take over the world which you boy bet and let's go so let me ask you your question what what's a thing that people your age are doing that seems weird to us but 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 are they spend their money on this or this is a new trend that seems to be weird to others but we get it it's it's normal for us yeah is by the way is wearing ralph lauren ralph lauren polo sweaters is that a new trend that young people are doing you've influence sam yeah a grade 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 o buddy it's oc 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 that's tv mount you mount your you can mount your phone to any any surface basically and what do you mean it's not use how it's supposed to isn't that what it's supposed to be well i think it's more of something where now girls look at it like the color of their nails or having long nails on where girls get different colors and oh it's accessory stylist accessory status thing than actually function keep going tell me what young like right like whenever i a young guy i'm like tell me everything well that's the main thing that you wouldn't typically notice are your friends drinking yes definitely it's big it's a party do you do you guys like to smoke weed i'm someone who doesn't do any drugs i'm pretty against them and i don't drink either but it's i mean everyone around me is so it drink common very common very very you also mentioned this this like turbo learn thing that sounds pretty awesome what else is like a what other who else is like you out there who's who's basically scaling up to millions in revenue just off of this kind of like ai 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 apps space so new apps like quit which is an app designed to help men quit porn with all of these little social or like by having streak essentially to ga 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 abs by seeing kelly 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 that's pretty good yeah so they're on track to make over a million dollars this year i think consumer up right now are like the new drop shipping you know sean has said this once where he was like you know sean was like i'm a content creator you know he's got newsletters in twitter and podcast but these tiktok guys it's as if you know i am really good at riding horses but along comes henry ford and it just it's just the cars are no comparison you know i can't there's no way my horse are gonna out overrun even the the crappy car this is one of those moments that i'm having right now talking to you so like for a long time sean and i our friends will do drop shipping you know when we were twenty five 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 then yeah like you even look mister you even make mister beast look old you know what i mean like chocolate like what that's crazy make know what i mean mean but dude people used to look at being sam when we were like we met when we're i was probably twenty four or twenty five years were the prod and it was like probably again that's very generous but what i mean is like it'd be like if there was something on the on the fringe or the edge about either growth hacking or yeah a clever way to make money usually it was us who knew it and people would ask us about it like i remember having like 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 old news now these guys are so much better and we are that person now i'm gonna go to his office to be like 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 am becoming exponentially less impressive and there's someone that's going to come and be the next big thing the growth hacker that is in the front of everything i think it's just about building momentum and i'm pretty obsessed with this idea of making sure that everything i work on will ten x the previous thing so that i'm always moving forward towards a bigger goal you actually mentioned mister 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 eighteen and they're like fearful that when they're twenty two suddenly their accomplishments are no longer cool and i just wanna 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 seventeen eighteen they're still getting that high of of being the impressive person oh everybody's kind of padding on the back and actually the the the the only way to win the game is not to continuously be the youngest best looking richest person because you'll never win that game of comparison the only real way to win the game is to realize like oh i just need to be doing the things that are fun for me and like the the act of doing them is rewarding and not look for the rewards of impress people which is obviously easier said to done but that's the real thing to focus on and not like this feeling of i'm i'm running on quick sand you know because it's i'm getting older oh no or like i have to ten x my growth even though i'm already at you know twenty four million arr like sure that's all fine i don't i'm not against growth but somebody said this to us actually they said this while we were hanging out with mister beast they go be very careful because growth for growth sake is the ideology of a cancer cell and so you know growth for growth sake is not not not where it's at and there's there's more to the game than that and he's like i'll leave you with that to kinda figure out what what what is the answer i'm not gonna sorta 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 it's the only thing and it comes from a little bit of a 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've thought okay once i find my success and let's say i'm quote unquote financially free will i even want to start something new or will i not care anymore and just want to find happiness elsewhere maybe i have one of the tenants of happiness which is i'm financially taken care of but then i want to prioritize relationships and happiness and other aspects so you you're always gonna be making stuff i'll predict the future maybe maybe you'll take the foot off the gas and one relationships and a family and all that stuff you are going to be creating stuff for a very very long time well that is why i'm going to college it's almost to take my foot off the guys a little bit build relationships and then i want to drop out after a semester or two i mean i that's really smart because you 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 and that college experience because that there's a window of time that expires and so do that because you still have fifty years to make money after that what school do you wanna go to if i got in then stanford is likely the top surely we have listeners this is gonna reach a lot of people surely they are sub some people dean listen i know you're listening y y a d h yeah you could fight about twitter him actually that's that's nice to do a real if i'm a if i'm out of college right now i'm dm this kid and acceptance letter that's how the college needs to hustle i'm tired of these calls yeah you're gonna yeah you it's so like sup you're just gonna get dm from the this sup who who's your favorite who are your most inspirational follows on twitter i wanna i wanna basically i find you so fascinated i wanna be in inspired by the people you're your inspired yeah 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 on inspired i that's interesting what 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 dag for example he just pumps me up so i i've 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 mister beast elon musk i followed both of those on twitter my own cofounder blake anderson who's a few years ahead of me in life and knowledge too so definitely learn a lot from him cliff wei she's a recent friend of mine i think one of you know him yeah yeah we know cliff yeah so he's super inspiring to myself as well that's dope okay you're basic sam anything else is there that's don't ask me zach is there anything else that you want to inspire me by like you're you're you're amazing like anything else that you wanna 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 of 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 had a lot of debate over the personal brand then i wouldn't have so many opportunities that i have had i sean my one of my best buddies val i think zach asked them out to lunch or something the other day like the other day and like at was this asking him for advice on maybe coming on this podcast but also business advice because valves a great guy i'm really successful and i thought it was funny because actually you remind me of about a lot zach but it was funny apparently val kids were like were you hanging out with our friend zach like at lunch the other day and he was like yeah but it was like a very you know oddly a business context but anyway val called me and was like this guy zach is one of the most impressive people i've ever met and val is a very hard person to impress he's pretty low key and so well one of the funny things is like you have this paradox because you when you wanna 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 naive the beginner mind and so you wanna keep that on 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 just three three known thing right it's like there's the things you know you know there's the things you know you don't know but then the the real one that matters is the things you don't know that you don't know and and so talking to whatever smarter people people who have played the game for fifteen twenty 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 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 wanna keep what you got as your big asset you're naive your beginner minds your your you're 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 little little a little bit of a a a push in one direction or the other they'll kinda 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 wanna find those people who are you're you're two millimeter people the people that would just give you that slight angle adjustment in order to make it happen i don't know how you do that exactly the keep both of those but that's what i would do if i was you i'll try to find a way to keep both i totally agree i have heard that that it's much easier to learn from someone ten steps ahead of you than one hundred steps ahead of you one hundred steps so much is missing but ten you can piece together they can lift you up this the extra steps and help you get from zero to ten yeah and one other thing you're gonna figure out is that all successful people do not have equally valuable advice so you will meet a lot of people who are successful or it sound interesting but their advice is not great and the hard part is figuring out how to parse it and dis like dis associate slightly from the results because their result might be totally dependent on the context look because there's a whole bunch of different variables that believes that or maybe just their understanding of your situation and so if trying to figure out how to parse advice is like an underrated skill and and make sure that the people you take advice from that they're actually happy and they're people and they're they're people you admire or who themselves and they're happy for you you know i like you want their life it's a very good point alright well on that point let's call it a let's call it today i think you gotta go back to school now of yeah lunch is over hey thank you zach you're the man anytime you wanna come on please let us know congrats dude thank you for adding me and i'm gonna i'm gonna use the app so i mean i'm a dollar around house i'll start trying thank you and that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rude wear and know i could be what i want to put at all in it like the days off on a goal travel never looking back