Cal AI

Zach Yedegar started coding at age 7 and by his early teens was already thinking strategically about entrepreneurship. At 14-15, he posted a now-famous YouTube video titled "How I'm Gonna Make One Million Dollars in High School," where he broke down the math: $80,000 per month, $20,000 per week, $3,000 per day—or selling 30 $100 items daily. The video now has 7,000+ views and perfectly captures his methodical, ambitious mindset. But before Cal AI, Zach built "Totally Science" (totallyscience.co), an unblocked gaming website for students that eventually reached 5 million users through TikTok. He sold it for $100,000 at age 16, generating $60,000 in revenue over two years—capital he'd reinvest into his next venture.

CalAI emerged from Zach's personal frustration. He'd been trying to track calories on MyFitnessPal for two years to gain muscle and impress girls at school, but the app was tedious: manually typing food items, estimating weights, dealing with multiple conflicting database entries. When advanced AI models like GPT started becoming accessible, Zach saw the opportunity. He assembled a small founding team: Henry Lang (CTO, met at coding camp at age 10, relocated from Long Island to New Jersey but stayed in touch), Blake Anderson (found on Twitter, who had previously launched multiple apps with millions of downloads), and Jake Castillo (COO, handling operations). They built a bare-bones MVP in weeks that let users photograph a meal and receive calorie and macro breakdowns. The scanning achieved ~90% accuracy on average—better than FDA nutrition labels, which can be 20% inaccurate.

After launch in May 2024, growth was "slow to pick up." First month revenue: $30,000. But Zach and team had a clear hypothesis: there was a middle ground between hardcore macro-trackers (who weigh everything) and people who don't track at all. To test it, they did something unconventional: they paid fitness influencers on Instagram and TikTok to promote the app. Getting responses was brutal—"it took me over two weeks to get my first response," Zach recalls. His pitch was surgical: "Paid promo" (hook), then a question mark, then the pitch. This optimized for the preview line in busy DMs. They studied influencer past performance, analyzed comment sections to gauge community strength, and negotiated payment upfront (usually flat fees, not CPM). By month two (June), Cal AI hit its first six-figure revenue month.

Influencer marketing was the singular growth driver—there was no SEO, viral moment, or organic word-of-mouth. It was pure paid acquisition through creators. The product stuck because power users loved it: Cal AI maintains a 4.8/5 rating across 65,000+ reviews, and over 95% of subscriptions are annual. Churn is unknown (the app hasn't been live for a full year), but usage data suggests strong retention among committed users. The team did experiment with building as an "app studio," spinning up multiple AI apps simultaneously, but quickly realized that reinvesting in Cal AI's core product and growth was more efficient: "One plus one can equal three instead of two."

Ten months post-launch, Cal AI is on pace for $24M+ in annual revenue. The company has 15 full-time employees (including people in their 40s, which challenged Zach's leadership early on). Last month, they did $2M revenue—a run rate suggesting they'll exceed $10M in revenue from May launch to end of year. The app is entirely bootstrapped; no outside funding. Zach remains CEO at 18, maintains a 4.0 GPA, scored a 44 on the ACT (99th percentile), and plans to attend college "for the social life, then drop out." He lives by a hunger for freedom and control over his destiny—a trait born from having to earn his own money for things he wanted as a kid with four siblings. He's already thinking beyond Cal AI, viewing it as a stepping stone to companies that touch billions of lives, possibly expanding the app from nutrition tracking into holistic health integration.