How Cal AI Hit $35M ARR and 20,000 Daily Downloads in Under a Year (Interview with Co-Founder & CEO Zach Yadegari)

Opening Snapshot: Downloads and Revenue

Nathan Latka

00:00Are you comfortable sharing how much revenue you've already collected this year?

Zach Yadegari

00:02>> A little over 10 right now. And

Nathan Latka

00:05Yeah. I mean, how many people are running how many people are downloading it right now per day? What's your sample size every day?

Zach Yadegari

00:09>> Every day, we get 20 to 30,000 new downloads.

Nathan Latka

00:14That's wild. How are you thinking about a user going into their second year and the activation rate, the renewal rate?

Zach Yadegari

00:19>> We just came around our year anniversary since launch. However, we expect that it's going to be between 25 to 50 renew.

Nathan Latka

00:26What is the team size today full time? How many folks?

Zach Yadegari

00:28>> We are 17 people actually

Introduction and What Cal AI Does

Nathan Latka

00:32Hey, folks. I'm here with the founder of calai, Zach Yadegari. Zach, you ready to take us to the top?

Zach Yadegari

00:37>> Hey. Thanks for having me on.

Nathan Latka

00:38Yeah. I'm thrilled you're here, man. You know, you're you're really good at press. You've built a great story. You're a great engineer, but you're even more powerful sort of marketer. We're gonna jump in today, to the story of calai. Just tell us real quick if for folks haven't if they haven't seen the app yet, what does it do? What's the main use case?

Zach Yadegari

00:53>> Calai is an app where you can track your calories just by taking a picture of your food. So it's the easiest way if you're trying to lose or gain weight. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

01:04You you were on your other interviews talking about how you're a skinny kid, it's really hard to, like, measure every fish that you put in your mouth or every meal, and this just makes it easy. How much of the code I mean, this do you consider yourself a really, really good engineer? Was this a hard breakthrough that is only possible in the world of AI, or could this have been built five years ago?

Building on AI APIs Instead of Training a Model

Zach Yadegari

01:21>> I think it definitely is only possible now because of the breakthroughs with AI. However, that's mainly because of APIs like ChatGPT. We did not train our own model to do this.

Nathan Latka

01:35Yep. Yep. Okay. That makes a ton of sense. So a lot of things I want to touch on with you today is just growth. So I don't wanna lose the the audience. I don't wanna bury the lead. Right? This is your screenshot you posted back in 09/04/2024, when you guys this is your first million of sales. Right?

Zach Yadegari

01:48>> Yeah. That was, like, five months into the company.

Nathan Latka

01:51That's wild. Okay. So first line of code was written what? In, like, May 2024?

Zach Yadegari

01:55>> We launched May 2024. The first line of code was probably written in March 2024.

Nathan Latka

02:02Solo founder here or multiple co founders? How did you guys get the company going?

Zach Yadegari

02:06>> Started as three co founders. Two of us were working on it. The third was more of an advisor. And then we brought someone else on. Everyone became more hands on as it started taking off.

Nathan Latka

02:17This is the crew?

02:18Is this the right picture or no?

First Million in Sales and Early Timeline

Zach Yadegari

02:20>> So that's that's three of the co founders. I'm on the left. Henry is to the right of me. He's our CTO. And Jake is all the way to the right. He's our COO slash CMO. But Blake is the fourth co founder. He's not in that picture.

Nathan Latka

02:33Okay. Got it. That makes a ton of sense. So if we fast forward a little bit, again, growth has been pretty impressive. I cheated here and used perplexity, but why not? Why as well use the tools? Right? You get going in May, two folks. You scale to six people. I'm really focused on this concept, like tiny teams and huge revenue. Are you comfortable sharing where you're at today in terms of revenue and team size?

Annual Run Rate and Revenue to Date

Zach Yadegari

02:51>> Of course. Today, in the next twelve months, we're looking to generate over 35,000,000. That's just based on our annual run rate.

Nathan Latka

03:01So just to be clear, you think in 2020 we're recording this in May 2025. You think by December 2025, total revenue in 2025 will be about 30,000,000,000.

Zach Yadegari

03:09>> So that's assuming no growth, but accounting for growth, it should be higher.

Nathan Latka

03:13Okay. Are you comfortable sharing how much revenue you've already collected this year?

Zach Yadegari

03:17>> So this year alone, we have collected

03:24>> something like

03:29>> 9,000,000.

Nathan Latka

03:309, okay, great. That's pretty good over the first five, six months of the year. So good growth. What I'd love to jump into is a little bit about how you actually architected the application. So I went ahead and, you know, went through as a user, recorded it here. I'd love for you to just, like, take us through this. Right? So someone searching calorie tracking in the App Store. By the way, I guess we should probably start

03:49there. Do you do any sort of like the equivalent of SEO for Google, but sort of meta tags in your app here to show up for those these key keywords?

App Store Optimization Strategy

Zach Yadegari

03:57>> So we do. We have actually done some things like our keywords. You could definitely see through our name and and the subtitle. We definitely try to fit in as many keywords as we can.

Nathan Latka

04:08Mhmm. What what tools are you using to figure out what keywords are the most searched on the app store so you can then rank for them?

Zach Yadegari

04:14>> 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.

Nathan Latka

04:25What's the dome?

Zach Yadegari

04:26>> It was mainly off the top of our minds.

Nathan Latka

04:29Oh, yeah. Come on, man. I'm 35. You're like a young guy. Like, these all these phrases. I'm still catching up. So okay. So you just came up. You just said, hey. Listen. I'm I'm the power user. What would I search? Let me go rank for those terms.

Zach Yadegari

04:39>> Yeah. That's how we did it initially. And Going off a little bit, we started to talk to some agencies, had more of a clue, but definitely most of that is just what our intuition told us.

Nathan Latka

04:52So let's get into the app here. So I'm just scrolling through here. You got Vowel Dellons LLC, the holding company. You told me that's not the strategy, multiple apps like calaii just crushing it, that accurate?

Zach Yadegari

05:02>> Yeah. So the goal initially, basically we saw, we thought that the one thing we had that other people didn't was our influencer marketing strategies. We hundreds or we have hundreds of influencers that are promoting our app posting about it every single day. And so the plan was to apply that same thing to other apps, but calaii just kept growing faster and faster. So by the time we had finished development on those other ideas we had, we

05:32>> realized it didn't make sense to spend any time there just given calaii's growth rate. It deserved all of our attention.

05:39>> Yeah, that makes tons of sense.

Nathan Latka

05:40And I meant to ask you earlier too, so 9,000,000 collected so far this year, original team, you just walked us through it. What is the team size today full time? How many folks?

Zach Yadegari

05:48>> So I was backtracking on the revenue calculation, probably closer to like a little over 10 right And in terms of the team size, we are 17 people. Actually, we're bringing some people on now. So we're moving from 17, which we have stayed at for the last few months to we'll probably be at 22 people by the end of the next month or two.

Nathan Latka

06:13Mhmm. And and how are you finding some of these folks? I mean, I I saw on Twitter somewhere someone posted, like, just sent you new screenshots of the app and said, hey. I could make the conversion better. And you said, okay. Like, join the team. I mean, how are you recruiting folks? Is that easy?

Zach Yadegari

06:24>> I'd say most of our talent came straight from X. So as you mentioned, two days ago, someone redesigned a calaii screen, and I like the design. So now we're interviewing him to join the team full time. I made a post the other day yesterday actually looking for someone to come on as a Facebook ad buyer for us.

Nathan Latka

06:44Yeah. This is the is the easy way to do it. Not the easy way, but it's a quick way to do it. Right? These are the hustlers posting real time stuff here instantly trying to capture your attention, which is great. So let's keep let's keep going through the app experience. Right? So how much testing did you guys do in sort of the first five, you know, screen sessions and what should we show? What GIFs should we

07:01show? What's too fast? What's too much, etcetera?

Zach Yadegari

07:05>> Are you asking about the onboarding flow specifically?

Nathan Latka

07:08Yeah. Let me let me just actually here, I'll just make this easier. I'll just actually share the parts I'm specifically curious about. So, yeah, this onboarding flow here, right, how do you decide what GIFs to show, what headlines to show, what to put in the onboarding flow here?

Zach Yadegari

07:19>> Yeah. So that's a good question. 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. But then over time, we started AB testing different things. We started adding in different questions, which made the user spend more time, but these questions

Onboarding Flow and Conversion Testing

Zach Yadegari

07:51>> didn't actually have an impact on the end result at all. But we saw an increase in conversion rate. And the hypothesis there, which is pretty confirmed, a lot of other people see this, is just that the user invests more time. So something like following a specific diet doesn't impact their app experience at all, but that actually boosted the conversion rate adding these questions. And then we had the idea to, okay, let's add a screen that says,

08:16>> thank you for trusting us. Let's add a screen that says, you're gonna lose weight faster with calai. And that was cool. That increased the conversion rate. So how do we take this one step further? We animated those screens, tested it again, also boosted the conversion rate. So it's just been a game of creating hypotheses and then testing them out.

Nathan Latka

08:37Yeah. We I mean, I joke with folks. I say, listen, whichever teams are moving the fastest and hustling the hardest, the one that gets to 10,000 tests the fastest will be the winner because you're learning the quickest. And so are you following any testing framework on this stuff? Is there a software powering this question loop that we just went through? It's all sort of custom coded.

Zach Yadegari

08:54>> It's custom coded. We use Mixpanel for our tests right now. And I'd say we don't do anything that crazy. We also are definitely not testing as much as I would like to. The 10,000 tests, I would love to run 10,000 tests. We are we've only started running tests since maybe January, three months ago.

Nathan Latka

09:15Mhmm.

Zach Yadegari

09:16>> We are behind on that front and have mainly operated through intuition. But now everything, every new feature we release, we are running tests.

09:25>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:26Mean, many people are running how many people are downloading it right now per day? What's your sample size every day?

Daily Downloads and Paywall Strategy with Superwall

Zach Yadegari

09:30>> Every day, we get 20 to 30,000 new downloads.

Nathan Latka

09:34That's wild. Okay.

Zach Yadegari

09:35>> So we're setting it up here. I've already invested in the app because I just spent a minute telling you my weight, my birthday, like, all that kind of stuff. How many people convert from this experience, like the $30,000 per day right into So a paid

09:46>> we have a three day free trial. Not everyone goes right into a free plan. I'd say into the trial, it's about 25 percent 20 to 25 will convert either to paying right away or into a trial.

Nathan Latka

10:00That makes tons of sense. You guys do like, this trial process here is so freaking smart. Like, when I was clicking through, I'm going, this guy is a freaking genius because you have this continue for free button here. Right? And it goes $2.49 per month, and I'm like, of course, I'm gonna do a three day free trial. It's 29 per year. But then what you're thinking is you don't just like you don't just lay back on

10:17your laurels at that point. You then actually upsell me here and you say, wait a second. I've got a code for you. You gotta use it today. If you use it today, it'll take you, like, directly into a paid plan. Whose idea was that? Is that software? Do you have a is there a tool that's powering that or is that, something that you guys built from scratch?

Zach Yadegari

10:32>> We use a tool called Superwall

Nathan Latka

10:34Right here.

Zach Yadegari

10:35>> For our paywalls, and that's actually worked out really great for us.

Nathan Latka

10:38Can you quantify that? This is Superwall right here. Right?

Zach Yadegari

10:41>> So this is all built through Superwall. Yes. Yeah. It's a web paywall viewer. That makes it super easy.

Nathan Latka

10:46Yep. And so you true or false, once you installed these, you saw higher conversions, more people paid on the first session?

Zach Yadegari

10:53>> So you have to build the paywalls. Well, have templates and then run the test, but 100%, our conversion rate is much higher for using Superwall. It has allowed us to run so many tests. That's the one thing we don't lack on. We definitely lack on testing features, but testing out paywalls, we're we're running so many tests on that. 100 crazy.

Nathan Latka

11:13It's very different than b two b SaaS. You don't ask for the sign up until all the way at the end. Like, all the way at the end. That was That was intention. You got it, man. Yeah. What other things did you eliminate from, like, traditional onboarding flows so that you could have less friction?

Zach Yadegari

11:25>> That's a good question. Well, early on, we had, like, nothing, but then we saw that adding more questions would increase the conversion rate. Definitely moving the sign in screens to the end because there is a lot of drop off there. That was the biggest by far.

Nathan Latka

11:38Mhmm. Mhmm. Okay. That makes tons of sense. Look, we've covered a bunch of stuff so far. We talked about onboarding flows. We talked about pricing. What else is top of mind for you? Anything I should have asked that I haven't asked already?

Zach Yadegari

11:47>> You're asking some pretty good questions. Pretty spot on, I would say.

Nathan Latka

11:51Alright. Alright. Cool. You're doing the whole university thing. You wanna spend that time with other folks your age. Like, I totally get that. It's also potentially great, but you're gonna end up hiring professors, I think. Right? You're gonna go in there and recruit the head of CS.

Zach Yadegari

12:05>> Yeah. I mean, we'll see.

Nathan Latka

12:07You you know, you're not just someone that sort of, I wanna I wanna say, really good at social media here. You also know how to take an acorn piece of content that might go viral on Twitter and translate that into into traditional media cable appear ances, things like that. That doesn't just happen by accident. Right? How have you done that?

Viral Twitter Moments and Media Appearances

Zach Yadegari

12:23>> Well, I had this crazy moment on Twitter going viral about my college admissions. I knew it would go viral. I'm kind of wired to know when posts will go viral just because I grew

Nathan Latka

12:36up on social media, but I thought that it

Zach Yadegari

12:37>> would get like two or 3,000,000 views. It got 28,000,000 views. And then if you scroll down, the personal statement got 40,000,000 views by itself. And so that garnered so much attention. And we actually had a few stations reaching out. Early on, it was like one or two, but then as I made appearances, more started reaching out. So it's definitely a snowball effect here where once you're seen on one, the other stations probably get some FOMO. They

13:03>> see, okay, this guy actually can present well on camera. We should bring him on our show too.

Nathan Latka

13:08Mhmm. That makes sense. What I appreciate about you is there's a lot of people that are sort of hustling and stuff, and they just say provocative stuff. That's just like it hurts somebody else when they say it. You're going viral in ways where you're you're just a genius storyteller. You're not knocking somebody else down while you make the post. Right? And so this is just proof that you can get attention, you can build a great media

13:26brand around your company doing it the right way. And so this is great. I'm excited for you. Excited to see what you do here in college. Anything else that I'm I wanna make sure. So we touched on the early team here. We touched on downloads. We touched on conversion rates. All the team's remote, I assume. Right?

Zach Yadegari

13:42>> Everyone is remote. Maybe we should touch on marketing a little bit.

Nathan Latka

13:44Let's do it. Where what's what's top of mind for you on that right now?

Influencer Marketing and Retainer Model

Zach Yadegari

13:47>> So our biggest way that we've marketed the app, our biggest channel is through influencers on both TikTok and Instagram. We have about 250 influencers right now on retainer that are just posting, integrating us into their content monthly. So this account right now, I I wouldn't actually say this. I'd say go to our Instagram and then go to our real section, and you'll see our collab posts with other influencers.

Nathan Latka

14:14How many you mentioned something interesting though. You mentioned so so you find let's say I'm an influencer with a big audience. You would reach out to me and say, Nathan, I'm gonna pay you a thousand bucks a month fixed. Just make two posts per month. Walk me through, like, let's negotiate live with how you do with other influencers.

Zach Yadegari

14:27>> So we would definitely start by making an offer like that. We would first look at your account is first and foremost. We would look at your metrics, your views, but then not just views, because not all views are valued the same. We'd look at your engagement, and based on all of these small factors, we would come up with what we think is a fair price, the maximum and minimum that we would wanna pay you for your

14:52>> posts.

Nathan Latka

14:53Interesting. So can you share maybe what's the you don't have to name the influencer if you don't want, but what's the largest influencer? Like, do they what do you pay them per month, and and what's the expectation that they deliver a number of posts wise for that?

Zach Yadegari

15:07>> Per month, the largest, it's in the tens of thousands per month, and the expectation is four posts.

Nathan Latka

15:15Interesting. And do you give them any guidance on that? Say, listen, just be creative. Figure out a way to mention calai. They

Zach Yadegari

15:21>> are the professionals. They know what goes viral for their audience. So our best our job is to make sure they integrate the product well. But in terms of the video concept, we'll leave that up to them.

Nathan Latka

15:32Interesting. And how many influencers are you paying at least a dollar in fixed fees per month?

Zach Yadegari

15:38>> We are paying 250 influencers right now.

Nathan Latka

15:40Wow. Okay. So two fifty. And so, I mean, is that just one on one recruiting or do you use an agency to go those folks?

Zach Yadegari

15:45>> That's why we've had to build out kind of a I mean, you say this is a small teams podcast. I feel like we're a big team at this point. Not that big, I suppose, but 17 people, about half of those are just on the marketing side right now working with these And

Team Structure and Recruiting on X

Nathan Latka

16:01these influencers, why not only pay them for when they drive you a customer?

Zach Yadegari

16:04>> Go it's like a commission structure.

Nathan Latka

16:06Why pay them a flat fee instead?

Zach Yadegari

16:08>> That would be the dream, but the reality is that there's too much competition out here with the brands and they want to be guaranteed a payment. And if we're not gonna do it, another brand will.

Nathan Latka

16:19Yep. Yeah. That's super smart. It's limited resources. It's not it's scarce.

Zach Yadegari

16:22>> Totally.

Nathan Latka

16:23Yeah. Interesting. Can you are you you quantify like last month how much total you paid out to influencers?

Zach Yadegari

16:29>> 6 figures. Mid 6 figures.

Nathan Latka

16:30Mid 6. Okay. Like 4 or $500 something like that. Mid 6 figures. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Is that something you're gonna like double triple down on assuming you can find enough influencers to pay?

Zach Yadegari

16:41>> So that's what we've been mainly focused on doubling down on the last twelve months. And that's yeah. We've continued to grow every month we're signing new influencers.

Nathan Latka

16:50Okay. Very cool. Hey, Zach, I want to be respectful of your time. You want to talk for maybe four or five more minutes on other marketing channels or you want to wrap up?

Zach Yadegari

16:56>> I'd be happy to stay on for a few more minutes.

Nathan Latka

16:58Alright. So we just talked about sort of TikTok. Sorry. I'm trying to get into Instagram here on my desktop and I don't remember my password so I can't get to it. Is there any other way I could showcase or can you screen share something?

Zach Yadegari

17:08>> I'm actually banned on Instagram at the moment.

Nathan Latka

17:12What? Why?

Zach Yadegari

17:13>> Think I'm being targeted by some other account.

Nathan Latka

17:16Wait. Tell me more. I mean, why? People are jealous you're growing so quick or what?

Zach Yadegari

17:19>> Maybe I I think there's probably some aspect of jealousy. There's also a business aspect to this. Uh-huh. People I I saw someone made a fraud account of me, and I'm imagining that they're DMing my followers, probably offering some course or something that's generating them revenue, and they're making enough to justify paying to get my account banned.

Nathan Latka

17:40Wild, dude. All this Art of War social media edition. Right? Crazy. This is wild. What kinds of things are there any sort of, like, ninja things you're doing that I haven't asked about besides the viral stuff, besides the influencers? You've got the referral code system. You've mentioned, like, rapid product iteration in other interviews. Is there anything you wanna touch on there that's sort of not common?

Speed as Core Value and Specialized Hiring

Zach Yadegari

18:00>> Rapid product, the main thing that's

18:05>> I think product is

18:08>> It's kind of straightforward when you just talk about rapid product iteration. I mean, it's just about moving fast and I think that's what most brands, most companies don't do well, is moving fast. I think most companies move too slow. And that's actually our number one core value at calai is speed. Above everything it's push things out fast, develop it fast, push it out fast, see the test results quickly so that we could get going, get more

18:32>> experiments running, move along very quickly. Something interesting we are focusing on though is hiring. 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 the conversion rate? Another guy, his only job is making the food scanner more accurate. Another guy, his

Retention and Annual Renewal Rate

Zach Yadegari

18:58>> only job is the homepage. That kind of thing is what we're focused on right now.

Nathan Latka

19:01Really interesting. Super, super, sort of project specific. Are you using any of these sort of like GumLoops or these MCP agentic interfaces to like like automatically run any of these viral loops or is it all it's all humans right now?

Zach Yadegari

19:13>> Right now, all humans. I mean, definitely some of the developers are using cursor.

Nathan Latka

19:17Okay. Yeah. And then I guess we should touch on retention here. Right? So you do a really good job of driving people in annual plans. You really don't even act it's crazy. You've done so much revenue. You don't even really have a year under the belt yet. But how are you thinking about a user going into their second year and the activation rate, the renewal rate?

Zach Yadegari

19:31>> That's something that we're starting to focus on now a lot. We don't have the data yet because we just came around our year anniversary since launch. 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.

Nathan Latka

19:47Very cool, man. Well, hey. Listen. As we wrap up, is there anyone else you just really respect that we should get some love to that are the tiny teams, giant revenue, young, and hustling?

Zach Yadegari

19:56>> I'll think about that, and I'll send you some people.

Wrap-Up and Closing

Nathan Latka

19:59Alright. Guys, there we have it. Zach at calai doing over 30,000 downloads per day. Over 10,000,000 of revenue collected so far in 2025 on track for 30,000,000. He says, you know what? I'm making a lot of money. I'm still gonna go to school. I'm still gonna have fun. He's focused on hiring viral loops, a lot of pricing, payroll updates. Zach, thanks for taking us to top, man.

Zach Yadegari

20:16>> Thank you, Nathan, for having me.