Cal AI

“People have been building mobile apps since 2008, and it became increasingly harder to build something that people are going to download and pay money for. Until two things happened, actually. AI came. Anyone could create something, but more, even more than th…”

“Cal AI, which does fifty million in ARR”

“My fitness pal bought CalAI, right? Cool story, right? What was it, Harry? A hundred million dollars, 19 year old kid from Miami, something like that, right? A great story. Two days later, it was instantly breached. All the records were stolen. 3.2 million rec…”

“You have the Cal AI guys doing like three million dollars a month and so many people copying it.”

“You're seeing the Calais of the world making millions of dollars a month with relatively simple apps with AI baked in. So I think that there's going to be a lot of people who want to build something similar in different niches.”

“And I think that people think that it's getting saturated with consumer mobile apps, but I don't think that's the case. That's my hot take. I think there's going to be so, so many examples of, you know, there's gonna be like a hundred, you know, mini versi…”

“We did not train our own model to do this.”

“Yeah, that was like five months into the company.”

“So tools, we actually don't use any tools. I know app figures is a very popular one, but we mainly use, it was mainly off of the dome, actually.”

“And so we, the plan was to apply that same thing to other apps, but Cal AI just kept growing faster and faster. And so by the time we had finished development on those other ideas we had, we realized it didn't make sense to spend any time there. Just given Kal…”

“So I was backtracking on the revenue, revenue calculations, probably closer to like a little over 10 right now.”

“I'd say most of our talent came straight from X.”

“Initially, we had no animations, we had no GIFs, it was, Very bland. We only asked the questions we needed in order to give the user their calorie daily intake estimate that they would need to gain weight or lose weight, and That was, it was purely utility, bu…”

“And then we add the idea to, okay, let's add a screen that says, thank you for trusting us. Let's add a screen that says, you're going to lose weight faster with Cal AI. And that was cool. That increased the conversion rate. So how do we take this one step fur…”

“Every day we get 20 to 30,000 new downloads.”

“20 to 25 will convert either to paying right away or into a trial.”

“Definitely moving the sign-in screens to the end because there is a lot of drop-off there, that was the biggest by far.”

“We have about 250 influencers right now on retainer that are just posting, integrating us into their content monthly.”

“Per month, the largest, it's in the tens of thousands per month, and the expectation is four posts.”

“17 people, about half of those are just on the marketing side right now working with these influencers.”

“Six figures, mid six figures.”

“That is the number one priority right now is hiring, but not just hiring anyone, specialized talent. So my goal right now for the company is let's bring someone on whose only job is just paywall experiments all day. He's just thinking about how can I increase …”

“Right now, all humans. I mean, definitely some of the developers are using cursor.”

“However, we expect that it's going to be between 25 to 50% renew, which is very broad, but that's the window we expect it to be.”

“You know, the reality is anyone can go and make a calorie tracking app, but they built an amazing funnel, right? So I think like the key lesson in a Cal AI is they packaged it really, really nicely and made it seem even more valuable than it is, which I think …”

“For example, the one, the flavor right now is Cal AI, you know, apps like that. Like those companies are doing like twenty million dollars ARR on, on downloading an app.”

“There's tons of those, but there's going to be like a hundred of them in the app store in like two months. And then Cal AI will not be able to charge what they are.”

“A hundred percent. This is a Cal AI. This is like your, I want like some college kid who's like, I want to get in and get out. I want to come in. I want to get it to a couple million dollars of ARR. I want to cashflow it. And then maybe it's a thing in two yea…”

“The popular example right now is like Cal AI. And I've had those guys on the podcast that they're doing thirty million dollars a year.”

“Had the founders of in two separate pods Cal AI come and Riz GPT come, come and do an interview. And I asked them how much do they pay per CPM? Like what is successful for them? So they basically acquire, I mean, they're doing like a million dollars a month. M…”

“CalAI was launched about six months ago and is now doing over a million dollars in revenue per month.”

“My validation process primarily looks like a deep dive into the niche on social media. So what I'll do is I'll create an account, say Cal AI, and then purely consume nutrition and dieting and calorie counting, weightlifting content. Essentially becoming the ta…”

“Cal AI does a few 100,000 dollars in profit a month.”

“I've actually really liked the concept of just showing a log, kind of like an Instagram feed of your content, even if it's a single person utility app.”

“Between, you know, between Riz, GPT, Cal AI, you guys have kind of invented this whole new primitive, and there's probably like a thousand different apps that like Cal AI for X could work for it.”

“Well, Cal AI was grown through influencer marketing.”

“And what I noticed with a utility app like Cal AI is that people don't really care to share their food.”

“Showing it on an influencer video, when it, when the phone is only on the screen for two seconds, you need the viewer to understand what this app does and why they want to get it for themselves. And if it's unclear, if the app is too convoluted, then influence…”

“A lot of people will make GPT wrappers for things like Cal AI. We have so many clones right now, and most of them have done nothing to make the app more accurate. They just put a basic prompt in and have GPT estimate the calories, whatever that means from the …”

“And then most recently Cal AI, which we launched just like a little bit over six months ago and is at about two million downloads and over a million dollars in monthly revenue.”

“Appending AI is valuable when you are creating innovation within a relatively stagnant industry, such as Cal AI.”