In our first month, we did 100,000 revenue. Second month, 200,000 revenue. And then we exploded 700,000 in revenue. Our third month, I was like, AI calorie tracker. That's what we should build together. Cali started to succeed. We're going to do over $30 million in 2025 in revenue. Chat GBT had come out just a few months prior. So, I figured that I would build an app where you can take a screenshot from the dating apps on your phone and then paste it into this AI consumer product and get the response. And so, this led to the advent of RZ GPT. We launched that in July 2023 and within like a week, we exploded. In like 3 days, we went from zero to 83,000 in MR. One of the greatest opportunities in the market right now is to help apps optimize app to web. The reason that we exploded so much was because it was organic content that went really viral. Now the big question here is how do you make it so viral? I think that portal we have a guest today and as you can understand the guest doesn't speak Greek so that's why we are speaking in English this is a guest I really really admire and uh do you want to do an intro for him yes so he came from US h flew here I just texted him when I saw the story that he was in Greece we told him like come to the podman we love your journey. You are going to inspire a lot of people. Actually like one month before we were talking about his app Cali. So today with us is like Blake Anderson. He is the co-founder of Cali a $30 million ARR like app that has been going viral to us. Welcome Blake. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me and thank you for adapting the format of this podcast to English for today. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh you're an amazing guest. Like uh I'm really honored to have you here and it was like we we didn't expect that because uh we had an episode uh that we were talking about Kali about your business basically and we talked about you and um it was a really nice uh a really nice thing for you to come to our podcast. Uh so thank you again. Yeah, thanks for having me. I was uh telling you guys earlier, I when you guys reached out to me, I went through your page and started scrolling through to watch some of the podcasts and I saw a video had my thumbnail on it. I went to watch it. I couldn't understand any of it obviously because I do not speak Greek. But as soon as I saw that, I was like, "Oh man, I got to I got to come speak to them." It's uh and once again, it's amazing to be here. Yes. So to give you some context uh what we are actually talking to this podcast we're talking about business business ideas like drop shipping agencies whatever is cool in US we bring it to Greek like Greeks to implement either like in US or here in our country. So that's why we were talking about like Cali. So having you here talk us directly about Kali it's something huge and we got a lot of messages when we did the episode about people that they know you Zach and they are trying to build like mobile labs AI mobile labs. So uh let's start from because like you are just 24 years old you talk and you look like more mature I would say. Uh so where did you start on this? Like how did you got in AI mobile apps because I know that you didn't have any background to uh coding. So how did you start? Yeah. Um I think that my journey really starts from when I was a child. I was always fascinated by and in love with entrepreneurship. Um, I wrote an ebook titled How to Make Money as a Kid when I was nine years old. It was like, "Here's how to operate a profitable lemonade stand and here's how to start a lawnmowing business cuz I would mow lawns for my neighbors." Um, and that evolved into selling candy in school and uh dropshipping and scaling Instagram meme pages, um, building an Ethereum mining machine, everything under the sun. And I think that for me um a big component of my journey has always just been following my curiosities. Whatever I see that interests me, try it out, see whether or not it works. If it doesn't work out, move on. Um so kind of continued that journey, but never really had anything that was all that successful. My senior year of college, I built a college marketplace app. Now, I didn't code it, but we had someone technical on the team that did. And this is like a very classic people's first time building apps. They build social apps. They think about what's a problem that I and my friends experience and now how do I solve this problem for all of us that often manifests itself in some social uh some social function. So for us, this was an app to buy and sell items with other students on your university campus. By the end of my senior year, it was like doing okay, but wasn't making any money and was really hard to scale. Um, Chat GBT had come out just a few months prior. So, this is spring of 2023. And I'm like, man, I use Chat GBT for all these new things. Um, but I feel like it hasn't been packaged into easy consumer experiences. And so I had a roommate that was always messaging girls on dating apps and he uh one time was asking me what he should say to this girl and I'm like I figure that chat GPT could give a pretty good answer here. So I take his transcript, I manually type the messages into chat GPT. The response is like okay. I start playing around with some different prompt engineering techniques and suddenly I was like man this is a viable product. Everyone uses dating apps on their phone. Okay. So, I figured that I would build an app where you can take a screenshot from the dating apps on your phone and then keep that on your phone, paste it into this sort of AI consumer product and get the response. And so, this led to the advent of Riz GPT. We launched that in July 2023 and within like a week we exploded. Um, in like three days we went from zero to 83,000 in MR. Um, so yeah, I guess that's kind of how my story of how I got into AI apps. Yeah, that's uh that's really cool. But the thing is that first of all, what I would like to ask is uh you didn't make any any money using all the other all the other ventures that you had in the past. I know like you you were really really young, but um you did a lot of things before that. I had made a number of hundred dollar to up to like $20,000 um at a time on these different other ventures, but I never built a sustainable business, nor did I make really life-changing cash. The money that I would make would go to paying for my own expenses. So, nothing that really uh reshaped my my life as a whole. Yeah. Yeah, that uh that definitely makes sense. So the thing with threes um I don't understand how you you launch and from launch you you go and you make it a hit because it actually seems really really difficult to do. I see so many um so many apps that try to do a like rap to chatd and um they actually have no users. So how did you actually manage to get all these users? That's that's the amazing part. Yeah. So, I would dive into like the specific social media strategy. Uh, but I think that people are generally aware of that now. Influencer promos, UGC, right? People understand this. The reason that we exploded so much was because it it was organic content that went really viral. Now, the big question here is how do you make it so viral? I think that one of the major benefits that my um companies and my apps have benefited from have been being essentially first to market. When we launched RZ GPT on Tik Tok, um no one had ever really heard of this. People were like somewhat familiar with chat GPT and yet it was still this new kind of like unexplored thing. And then when we launched it, everyone's like, "Holy wait, what? You could have AI tell you what to say on dating apps. It was just inherently so viral. UMAX was similar. So UMAX was the second app that I built where you can take a picture of your face. It will tell you how attractive you are and how you could become more attractive. When we launched that, everybody is like, "What the AI is now raiding me and telling me if I'm cooked or not." Right? And so, um, I think that once again, what my products have really benefited from are taking these core human sort of insecurities or desires and um, orienting a product around that as opposed to figuring out some sort of like overintellectualized use case thing that you're solving and then asking yourself how to make that viral. I find that that is a much much harder task. Yeah. Do you think do you do you actually have any ideas um that can actually go viral right now or do you think it's too late for a simple um simple need u chbd rapper to come and scale as much as re or uh your other businesses did? I certainly don't think it's too late. I think that it is getting harder and harder. Okay, so what do I mean by this? Um, I've got a few uh takes here. One, I think that there will have been more One Function uh viral AI apps that scale to millions a year in revenue built in 2024 than will be built in 2025. I think that most of the super simple, super obvious use cases have been solved. uh the the lowest hanging fruit, AI to talk to girls for you, AI to rate your face, AI to uh track calories for you, right? Those are the three products that I have built. Um but there's still so much opportunity. For example, nowadays, uh let's look at one of the most recent super viral AI products, Cluey. Are you guys familiar with Cluey? So this is Roy Lee, a good friend of mine. Roy built a product that is essentially hidden on your laptop that will help you cheat on interviews. Um, this is a not it's not nearly as simple as the products that I've built. It's much more complicated and yet it's extremely viral and they're doing extremely well right now. Um, and so I think that there's still a lot of opportunity in this space. Um, the alpha is becoming harder to capture. So uh because like our audience it's not uh like um they don't know they cannot really understand many of the things that you take it as uh like for example you said about GBT we launched it and we went viral so you had some skills of how to get something viral on Tik Tok for example so this is like a skill that you learned from the other ventures that you had right like the to go to reach out to influencers to convince them because like a lot of times we see like because we work with e-commerce brands h they want to work with some influencer and they get rejected for example they don't want or the price is like on the roof so you did something well there as well it's not only the product which was really like unique and first to the market but you did also something really good with like taking this thing viral the partnerships do you have any tips around like this for example I take a ton of shots like I don't just I Often times people will reach out to a few influencers and they're like, "These are the influencers that I need to work with and they get so caught up on working with those influencers that they forget about the hundreds and thousands of others that would also form great partnerships. So, um, if you're not DMing hundreds of influencers per day and you're asking yourself why you can't set up partnerships, you're not taking enough shots." Now, if you find that it's the case that um maybe you you are targeting a $5 CPM on average, so you don't want to pay more than uh $5 for every,000 views. And every single influencer that you reach out to, it says $20 per thousand views. Now, I usually pay on a flat rate basis, but we have minimum view clauses where we're like, we'll pay you $10,000 with the expectation that you generate at least 2 million views, right? Um, some niches are just way more expensive. Um, you know, edtech is up there. It's expensive. Uh, fintech is so, uh, financial, uh, influencers or creators are the most expensive. You can see CPMs there ranging from $50 plus, so over $50 per thousand views. You also have to examine view quality. So, taking this all into account, like what would my recommendations be? Take more shots. Find niches that are not too expensive. Um, and you know, don't get caught up if you can't get deals done with individuals. If you just keep firing, reaching out to every single creator that you can find uh whose audience has an overlap with your target demographic, then you'll figure out whether or not influencer marketing will work on your app. If your app isn't inherently viral, it's going to be an uphill battle because you're relying on these uh organic sort of recommendation engines or social media algorithms. Um, so and if anything that I just kind of explained there to anybody who's listening, if anything I just explained doesn't make sense, then you need to kind of go back to the basics and you need to study this industry uh more deeply before you ask yourself why it isn't working for you. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Um, of course, that's uh that's something really really important. We always forget that and we we talk technical a lot. um without uh taking into account like who is the listener uh which is like a really bad thing. So um how did you actually figure out the number the cost per CP and the CPM that you are going to actually pay and uh that the economics can actually work because the problem because we we help e-commerce brands scale and other business using an ad. So we track everything so it's very easy for us to actually scale an ad. If it goes well then we can actually scale more. that in your um type of uh organic growth which is something that uh I'm not an expert at, it's very hard to actually track. So, how did you actually make the economics work for you? How how did you actually make that work? You're right. It is way harder to track and um I think that that's one of the reason that there is so much opportunity. If it was easy, everybody would do it, right? Um, and so to your point, when you're working with the platform, so you're doing platform ads, Meta, Google, Tik Tok, whatever it may be, they provide all these uh values just very clear labeled in a row for you. The cost per thousand views, cost per conversion, whatever it may be. Now, when you're doing organic, you don't have this the same level of insights. So, what we've set up are essentially uh uh like automated spreadsheets where we can input video links, we track the views, we track uh the number of likes, the the engagement over time, and then we kind of map that to the downloads that we're seeing. To anyone who's getting started, you don't need to do all of that. You should just have an intuitive understanding of you make a video or you pay someone to make a video and you go look at the views over time and you go look at your your downloads over time uh and the conversions and over time you will start to develop a an intuitive understanding of what hooks work best, what sort of creators convert best, that sort of thing. Uh what I often say is I think that being really good at social media marketing and scaling organic compa camp campaigns comes down to a deep understanding of statistics and psychology. You need the psychology to understand uh what hooks are going to resonate with people, what sort of uh messaging to use, how to like actually negotiate with the creators themselves, and then the statistics to be able to make inferences um about what converts and and and what does well. And then you lean into the the sort of creators, the sort of hooks that convert well um and scale up from there. Yeah. Yes, that's uh that's really cool. Um I know that I'm about to ask for a shortcut, but I I I always down for it. Um because um it's a lot of work to actually go and and hire uh like sendund like hundreds of messages uh to you influencers. So I was wondering the first question is is there any with your intuition that you have built over the years um have you actually find like what is the what is the follow count or the engagement rate or or something that um really really gives you the best uh the best value for money. Let's say the best uh comment sections. That's it. That's the that's the hack. It's comment sections. Um, at first early in social media in like the 2010s, it was all about followers, how many followers do you have? Um, and then it started to shift to how many views are you getting. As the algorithms became more optimized for highquality content as opposed to just seeing um, you know, uh, posts from people that you follow, it became all about content quality. Now, uh what I index for within my companies is what creators have really engaged comment sections. Uh cuz it's very easy to create a video that's 6 seconds long, gets a few hundred,000 views, and does not convert at all cuz people are just like kind of interested in the content. Maybe it's aesthetic, maybe people want to like it, whatever. But to have an engaged comment section usually implies u at least one of two things. one, the creator has a very deep uh dedicated fan base and people that have that sort of trust with their audience um are going to convert better. The audience trusts them, they promote the product, the audience purchases the product. And then two, which is that the content itself is um informative, engaging, whatever it may be, it's leading people to take the time out of their day not just to like it, not just to view it a couple of times, but to go into the comment section and leave a thoughtful reply. Um, and so what we really look for are comment sections that it's not just number of comments. It's not just a bunch of fire emojis. It's people responding with um, insights or uh, maybe they're applauding the person that posted whatever they did, whatever it may be. Um, if a creator's comment section looks like that, that is generally a great creator to work with. Yes. Yeah. Also, you want to see the top comments should have a good number of likes. Um, if you have a ton of comments, but there aren't any likes on any of the comments, that's not good. Uh, you want a community to exist within the comment section. Uh, and real engagement. And you see that when there are comments with a lot of likes and thoughtful reply, like sub replies and conversations going on within, then you know that piece of content is somewhere where real people come together and engage with one another. Yeah, that's that's something that it's actually really smart. I haven't uh thought about it, but it totally makes sense. It totally makes sense, especially if you want the viewers to actually take an action. You don't actually want to have a really viral video just for the sake of having a really viral video, which if they're not willing to go into the comment section and engage there, what makes you think that they are going to go to the product that the creator tags? Right. It's It's not a perfect one:1 mapping, but it's generally a pretty good It's a It's a very underrated metric, I would say. Yeah. And do you actually have um um a function that you actually calculate how much how many comments? Very intuitive. Okay. It's we have uh basic functions that we use to calculate like median view count um as well as average likes, average comments, that sort of thing. But in terms of getting the more uh like very deep understanding it it's it's definitely intuitive. Yeah. And with the creatives, it's I it's something that I really want to understand. How much of a guidance do you give on the creative? Because I'm assuming you know how to sell your product, but actually the influencer is the expert at going viral. So, how do you balance that? Basic content brief. We have a content brief that says these are different ways that we would integrate the product um or like ideas. These are examples for you. Here are some links to videos that have done well. Uh maybe we require that you show the product for at least two seconds and not after the 15-second mark of the video so you integrate it early enough within the video and that it's shown for enough time. Uh maybe you tag us, whatever it may be. You have these like basic stipulations. Um so these are the ones that we use, but each product and within each niche, you'll find different ones that work best. Um, and then when you start to set up the deal with the creator, you send them over this PDF and uh, it provides a little guide. Uh, then you have them get video approval before they post. So, you have them send it in. As you start to scale up, maybe you don't do that. Maybe you start to trust certain creators, whatever it may be. Um, but yeah, the the the core lesson here being uh, content briefs. Content briefs with key information. share that PDF to every creator before they begin making videos. It saves them time and it shows that you're professional and that like you don't want to it it saves it saves both parties time. It's it's a great practice. Yes. And how big it was like your team uh when you launched and you did like the first 80k month. Uh three of us. Three of us. Three of you. Me and two co-founders. And like what was that going forward like? Uh what was your mindset? why you launched UMAX and why you didn't scale even more RGBT like you thought like okay I did it I know the like uh how to do this I will build another 10 apps what was like your mindset so uh with RZ GPT one of my co-founders and I um started going headto-head about where we thought the product should go I had one vision of the app he had a different vision he was best friends with the other co-founder and uh we were essentially like, we can't really work together anymore. Um, and so we were like, one of us has to leave. And he said, I want you to leave. And I said, okay, fine. So I left. I kept my equity. Still on good terms with them. We've since rekindled our friendship. Like we're great. Um, but I left, kept my equity, and then began building UMAX on my own. Um, and so I would have continued working on RIG GPD for a little while longer, but yeah, it just I we we couldn't work together functionally anymore. And so I began building UMAX and I think in retrospect, I'm really glad that everything went down the way that it did. And like I said, like we're all on good terms. So there's no no bad blood. Um and like in UMAX like uh you build it by yourself then you brought a team. So I brought on as like half partners I guess kind of like co-founders but uh my older brother and Sam Zia for them both it was a very part-time project. Sam was an influencer with a lot of followers and uh and a lot of reputation within the looks maxing niche. And then my older brother, he was working a job doing uh data analytics and uh he helped me with some of the backend engineering. Uh and so Sam and my brother are both co-founders. But the reason I said like half is cuz for them both it was kind of a part-time project whereas for me it was like the the main thing. But then after we began to succeed on launch. So in our first month we did 100,000 revenue. Second month 200,000 revenue and then we exploded 700,000 in revenue our third month. Um and so then that's when they started working on it full-time with me. So for you to actually go because that's uh that growth is really huge like just for the first month. Uh most businesses actually fail to go to 100k and you did it in one month. So, how many creators did you work with for you to get to 100K? At that time, it was probably like 12 12 maybe less. Maybe less. Maybe like eight, but was really high like follower follower count and stuff. Uh, decent number of views. The thing is that the looks maxing niche was to what I was saying about the comment sections, it was like the pinnacle. It was such a tight-knit niche community that was also kind of large and there was no monetization occurring in it. There was nothing because it was pretty much guys aged like 16 to like 24 and um like it was very new, very very new niche and yet it just like took them by storm. So that you have people that were just like obsessed with it out of nowhere. And then when I came in with like the first one of the first products to really monetize within it, it was it was just like immediate immediate product market fit. Um, and so this is kind of what I was saying earlier about like that was a product that like just I mean GPT vision had just been released as well. And so I got like very very lucky with timing to be honest with that one. But I mean I say lucky but at the same time I was like I was analyzing all these different factors. I saw that looks maxing was growing. I have a few different market thesis at the time and then I see that GPT vision is about to get released. So I built the entire product so that the day that GPT vision became production ready. I could plug in that URL and submit to the app store. And I launched I think about I think you could look at when GPT Vision got released. I think I launched like 2 days after it hit production level um uh API rate limiting. So I was I was very um you know deliberate. Uh yeah, you would be lucky. I would uh I would count you as lucky if you did one time, not three. So yeah, you're not like like even even selecting the idea is a really big part of the the process like seeing the trajectory and actually saying okay I'm going to use this complex new tool to a really fundamental problem that anybody has. It's something that um no nobody thinks of it like it's it's a really unique idea right now. Yeah. Uh many many people have thought it but you've thought first. Yeah. I think that um in times of rapid technological growth and progression like we're in right now where there are new AI technologies, new sort of implementations coming out every single week. One of the most important skills if you want to really capitalize on the alpha is to pick the right things to work on. like it would be a very bad idea in my eyes to devote yourself to something and put on complete blinders for multiple years right now um when it doesn't take advantage of the new developments um in AI. Now that it wouldn't always be a bad idea, but I think generally for most individuals, that's probably not a smart way to approach the market as it stands, which is one of the reasons that I have been so quick to move on and work on different things cuz I always want to stay at the frontier of uh new AI technology. Yeah, that's uh that's amazing. And also um it's it's a question that we actually do at the end of the conversation but I want to do it right now because uh you are the expert at that like you have done it multiple times uh you have find amazing ideas and uh so I was wondering like what other opportunities do you actually see in the market that someone can exploit and I'm telling you that because not it's a skill that you have but it's more more like a trait. uh not many people have that. So I think that um you have really high believability if you say like an opportunity out there. So do you have anything in mind? Um okay let's first define who are who am I answering this question for? Is it someone looking to go 0 to 10k? Is it just general opportunity in the market? Is it someone looking to uh build a million dollar business? Yeah. more like let's go to million dollar business. Okay. Um h if you have to uh 0 to 10k uh you can say that as well. Yeah. So I think that these sort of general advice questions are very interesting and I really like them but they're very very hard to answer. Um, I've recently been thinking more deeply about this, which is like I've myself have given a lot of advice on the internet and I'm like, man, they're just that the advice that I've given is just not applicable the majority of the time. So, I want anyone who's listening to take this with a grain of salt. Now that said, okay, 0 to 10K, uh I so strongly believe that the most important skill right now is to get um extremely skilled with AI, different AI tools. So, I'll give a real life example of this. I was hiring a designer the other day or actually a few weeks ago and I put out a uh challenge um a listing on Upwork and I said, "Okay, here is a preliminary design challenge. I want you to for 2 hours of work. Everyone got paid for it. I hired 10 different designers uh to design some logos and do a basic like uh brand design, whatever it may be." And this one designer produced way more than everyone else and it was highquality work. And I asked him, I said, "How did you get so much done in so little time?" And he said, "Oh, well, I use this new AI tool to generate the icons." He was able to operate so much more efficiently, produce so much more with his time. So I think that that's the fundamental skill that can apply to everything. It applies to design, it applies to copywriting, it applies to development, it applies to marketing, every single domain. So, if I'm going to zero to 10K, I'm getting really skilled with AI, I personally would probably apply it to content creation. I think that um to build uh and generate AI content and understand how to distribute it across every platform right now is a massive skill. If you can generate a few million views a month, um and you do it for a company, you can very easily make 10 plus,000 a month. So that is probably what I would pursue. Um in spite of the fact that we all know that like AI content is a thing and like people are doing it. I don't know many people that are actually doing it really well. Um so that is only going from like 0 to 10k a month. Uh what so I would do content myself maybe start like a UGC agency. Try to work with different app founders in terms of making million plus. Oh, okay. I have another answer here which isn't specifically for a million plus. One of the greatest opportunities in the market right now is to help apps optimize app to web. So the uh there was a recent court ruling in the US. Are you guys familiar? Yeah. With Yeah. Yeah. With Apple. Yep. So, mobile apps in the United States are now required to allow apps to um offer web uh web payments. So, Apple takes 30% of your earnings or of your revenue if you make over a million dollars a year. If you make under, it's 15%. I and some other people I know have began testing this, seeing what the relative conversion change looks like across the board. It looks like it's going to be at least 20% increase in profit or excuse me in proceeds for apps that are above that million dollar mark. And for even apps that are below, you could see like over 20% as well. I'm not going to say the number that we're uh the increase that we're seeing, but it's well over 20%. There's so much opportunity here to help apps um optimize their web flows. we are already coming up with different strategies and I we have like 10 different things that we want to work on right now. Uh but I'm realizing that it's such an unsolved problem space. So if you start an agency where if you were to come to me right now and say hey like I want to do this all for you for free. I have this amount of expertise or like maybe this is why you should trust me. Um, maybe you give me a reference and you say, "I want to do this for you for free and then I'm going to use your name to source future clients who will pay me only if I do a good job for you." I would immediately say, "Great, let's do it." Um, so I think you could very easily scale an agency to like over $50,000 a month profit doing that. Um, okay. the agency actually answers like the million because you can go to a million dollars with an agency model. Certainly, you certainly can. Um, in terms of AI apps, yeah, I mean, people are often asking me like, "What are the new best AI apps to build? You've done it a few times. Like, you must have all the best ideas." And I'm like, man, the market is getting competitive now. It's like it's no longer a completely unnown area. A lot of people are entering it. There's a lot of competition, but there's the classic uh sell the pickaxes during the gold rush or sell shovels during the gold rush, which is that a reliable way to get rich is when there is a gold rush to build one sort of product or make money in one way, be it digging for gold or building AI apps. Um there are reliable ways to get rich by just servicing those people. Yeah, we have a friend actually that um um you can make money both ways like if there is a gold rush uh you can create a lot of wealth by mining the gold or by selling the the shovel. So uh we have a friend so that he was doing launches for other people that they were doing NFTs for example and uh he made a ton of money. He made millions doing that. And so yeah, he was selling sles. But um in my opinion, like I we have another friend that in the Amazon era, they instead of doing a product, they do a service-based uh for other Amazon businesses and they regretted it uh so so much. And so I was wondering like do the saying actually works because you made the money by the gold ring. So here Yeah. by by the what I would say is that um mining for gold is a lower probability that you strike it. I think on average if we look at the number of people that are building AI apps versus the number of people that are going to make life-changing money from it. Um there are going to be more people as a whole that make a lot of money from AI apps than people that do from servicing those apps. But there's a higher probability of succeeding if you try to be uh one of the people servicing it as opposed to one of the people building. It's also, you know, the whole thing about striking goals is that like maybe it's luck, maybe it's whatever. It it's generally easier, less grindy, more upside if you're able to get it done. Um, so I'm fortunate that that's kind of where I've been operating. But I mean, hey, listen, it's like some of the biggest companies are the people servicing, right? you could say cursor uh lovable, right? These new AI dev tools, they're not building the they are kind of building AI software, but they aren't building like the AI consumer products. They're helping all the people that want to. And they are going to become massive massive already multi-billion dollar companies uh as a result of doing it. So, I certainly question sometimes whether or not I should be in the servicing uh field as well. Personally, I enjoy building consumer products. I find it very fun. Um, and I think that that's an important caveat to add here too with with all the recommendations that I've given or that anybody listening hears on the internet of you need to do this and you need to do this and I think that there's a one of the best strategies is just to do things that you find interesting and enjoyable. uh because those are the things where you are going to be able to um work the most like put in the most hours as well as apply the maximum amount of your creative um output as a human. So that's honestly how I got into AI apps in the first place and kind of the uh general framework or principle that I tried to live my life or my professional life by. Yeah. Yeah. Really nice. I have a question about like do you think it makes sense right now for people that they build ups to like to like to stay on this and to work on this for like long time for example one year or like to try and find a quick hit which is maybe it's going to be like $5,000 the first month or Yes. Yeah. It actually ties up the question ties up with what you said because um how long will you keep keep uh traveling to to struggles and to be lucky uh at some point like um you'll have to actually see what and change course. Yeah, it's really hard to say. Um personally I have worked on five different projects in the past 2 years full-time um from RZ GPT uh to UMAX to Cali to Apex to 10X and some of these projects still endure like I still do some work for UMAX but not much. I still do a good amount of work with Cali. I moved on from Apex. I moved on from 10X. So, um I don't have I don't know. This is another one of those pieces of advice where like it's so individual. It's so contextual. It's based on who you are as a person. It's based on the product that you're working on. I will say I think that um a lot of people will work on the wrong projects for too long. And on the flip side, a lot of people won't give a project enough time to f fully mature before they move on from it. So I would say that you should probably recognize the person that you are, what you have a propensity for and ask yourself, for example, me, I move on quickly. I often uh try to ask myself like, is it really the right time to move on or is this just me wanting new excitement, right? Um, and so you have the classic like indie hacker that maybe builds 20 20 different products a year. And I'm like, all right, that is probably way too fast. Um, but it works out for for different types of people. So I don't have a strong strong stance here. No, it makes sense what you're saying because like I have seen like it depends also on the level of execution. maybe this one year like this person that he has an app has done like the things that you can do for example in two months and make a decision. So it really depends on the person that like the like the level of of execution like the level that he is like how much money he has on the side many like different it's a complex complex system I would say that um there are a few universal principles I think that apply and one for me at least is to optimize for learning everything that I do I want to know that I will come out of it um with either material success um or the bare minimum that I learned something that I worked on something that I didn't already know. I think one of the worst things you could do would be to spend time working on projects where uh if you fail you don't learn transferable skills or have transferable knowledge. One example here would be day trading. I think day trading is like if you succeed maybe you make some money but if you don't succeed um you don't really learn many transferable skills that you can take into a different business unless you actually do content and you sell courses around date trading. Yeah. Which it's transferable transferable. Yeah. Uh no it's really good answer like what you said like if you build like transferable skills it makes sense. Yeah. for example, and it's a good way to optimize for like Yeah. But but still there are some some things that you can I can point you to to a person that is actually working for a TBD rapper for 3 years now. Um you would say, "Yeah, it's probably like he has stop." So there are some some hard like uh fundamentals like some some things that you that you know it's it's wrong hard to say. You know I've I've got a friend um Cliff Whitesman, founder of Speechify. Speechify uh Cliff and his brother co-founders worked on it for a number of years uh not making much money. Um, and so, you know, he could have easily said after 3 years of it's it's not doing much and he's like, "Ah man, I just got to move on. This isn't it." But he stuck with it. And now speechify uh makes I actually don't know if I can say, but it makes a lot more than any of my businesses, right? Um, actually, I can say this. If you go to Sensor Tower, for example, you can infer that they're making at minimum $50 million a year, but I know that the number is higher than that. So yeah, you know, it's it's um there are counterfactuals and so I I try my best not to um make bold claims if there are many counterfactuals, which I think there are. So um to each his own is kind of how I view it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Completely understand. And like uh do you think about uh do you reverse engineer when you think about ideas, new products about the distribution channel for example or uh for example like okay this idea it makes sense we can do influencer marketing on Tik Tok this we can run it with paid ads. Do you think like about it? 100%. You got to or you don't have to but it is very helpful to know what your distribution strategy is going into something. People that are engineers, for example, might uh first think exclusively about whether or not it's technically feasible, right? Does the uh technology exist? Is it sufficiently widely available to be able to build the product? People who are maybe more growth oriented might think solely about does the distribution channel exist? Can I get uh the customers at a lower price point than they are going to earn me? Um, as with most things, I think that you need to do somewhat of a holistic analysis, which is why I advocate for anybody who um, seeks to replicate sort of my strategy is I'm like, you should understand both the uh, marketing and growth side of things as well as the engineering. You don't have to be extremely technical. You don't have to be uh you know extremely like a tick tock brain rod like super deep in that niche but you should have sufficient understanding of both to be able to accurately identify and understand the playing field and what tools are at your disposal. So I would say yes certainly you should be thinking about uh whether or not for example with paid ads paid ads are going to be conducive to very high LTV. So you're probably going to want a higher price point in your product. Maybe it's $20 a month. Maybe it's a free trial and then $100 a year. Organic is usually more conducive to a lower price point. Maybe you do $30 a year, maybe it's $4 a week. Um, so those are pricing strategies that I've used. So yeah, the the distribution channel will inform the sort of product direction uh and and reverse. So it's like a positive feedback loop. Yes, you have said something like uh study for product Silicon Valley and uh study drop shipping for marketing. So that's sums up absolutely I mean drop shipping is an industry where you have essentially or you have minimal product differentiation and you differentiate on how cheap you can generate the views for um your Facebook ad strategy, your your organic content strategy. Silicon Valley on the other hand they somewhat tend to ignore distri not ignore but place relatively much less emphasis on distribution strategy much more emphasis on product I think when you can it's very difficult but if you can to some extent take the best of both worlds um there's a lot of value to be created at that intersect for the sort of individuals in the world of entrepreneurship in which we operate. Yes. And I was thinking um when you launched I was thinking the timeline that you were launching all these apps and I was thinking why to not do like Tik Tok shop everyone was it was like really hot at this period why to not go on this direction because I'm coming from this e-commerce world about you and like what you actually did because Tik Tok shop it was all about affiliates uh and like creator like um videos that were doing the going viral and you did you took like what they were doing for Tik Tok shop. You did it for your apps. So that's a really smart like way to go. Everyone is going, they are listening about Tik Tok. They're let's do this. And you take like the strategy of like what they were doing about the products on Tik Tok. They did it you did it for your own products. So yeah, it's it's funny that you say that. Um do you know Jimmy Farley? Jimmy Farley Creators Corner. So Jimmy is like one of the kings of Tik Tok shop. He has a community where they have the most successful Tik Tok shop creators. Um, do you know Santa Cruz Medicinals? Uh, so Brandon Santa Cruz has one of the most successful uh, Tik Tok shop brands where he sells electrolytes and whatnot. And so I had a bunch of these friends in this world that are doing Tik Tok shop um, at the time that I'm building AI apps. the way that I viewed it, um, I guess was kind of that I I this was one of those things where I was really optimizing for learning, not just short-term cash. So, I was like, okay, I could, you know, transition and build businesses in the Tik Tok shop world, but that seems less interesting to me. I love AI. I think AI is fascinating. I think this upward trajectory of AI is probably good. uh good um you know long-term position for myself just try to follow the trend and um I had had the apps that were working and I was like I'm going to lean into this and you know thankfully I think that it was the right decision. It's very easy to fall victim to the to shiny object syndrome um to just do whatever the new hot thing is. Uh once again this is why I optimize for learning as well as following my curiosities. I think a lot about uh mimemetic desire or acting mimetically which is to see what other people are interested in to say well if so many people are interested in that thing so many people are doing this thing it's probably a pretty safe bet for me to do that thing as well. I think it's a very dangerous uh trap to fall into because then you are generally going to get the same results as everybody else. If you are able to think differently and if you are able to uh read between the lines and see the opportunity that most people do not, that is where um you know, I think you're going to be able to create the most upside in your own life. So yeah, I'm I'm a I'm a big believer in following your gut, following your curiosity. Um, and so that was what led me down this path. Um, and what's now kind of leading me down the path of AI hardware. I started building uh different little AI hardware devices with my brother over the course of the past few weeks. So I'm very excited for this. I think this is um you know I think that there's an insane amount of opportunity in hardware right now. So Oh, that's great. We'll see where it takes me. But yeah, because the the area of hard AI hardware is really fascinating like and I want to explore it a little bit. So uh for the people that they don't know what what do you actually mean by AI hardware? So um what I'm really interested in will be uh local inference. So uh embedding a large language model. You can take an open- source large language model. You can put it onto a S or an SD card. So a little storage and then you can have a processor that is able to compute that um independent of your computer, independent of any uh network connection, whatever it may be. What we're starting with right now is an AI pocket recorder. Um, so we're pretty much just building a tape recorder or we already built it. We built a tape recorder uh where we have a uh tiny little uh like a a board. So, we use like an ESP32. Um, this hooks up to a little microphone um an SD card to store the audio data. It has Bluetooth on it. We connect it to like a lithium ion battery. Uh this is nothing new. Uh pocket recorders have been around for decades. You just press a button and it records your conversations. What we then do is we upload it to a computer where we um pull out the transcript or the conversation that it heard and then we summarize it. This product is not novel. Uh Plaude uh does this. Plaude makes multiple million dollars a month. They sell the pocket recorder for $160 whereas the cost of goods here is probably like $25. They sell the uh the the subscription for $250 a year. Um whereas the cost of inference there is like pennies. Um and so this company is just killing it starting here as we get more complex. So the next thing I want to build is an AI smart speaker. So we have um you know a processor uh like a Jetson or a Nano for example. Um, we could upload a a model like a I think Quen uh 2 or there's the recent uh Quen model I think it is that's really effective um where you can speak let's say that we could have this speaker right now and we could speak back and forth without having to process this um externally through the cloud right when you talk to chatt it's sending it to the openi server and then returning it um and we could carry this speaker around and it could have 12 hours of battery life as uh Moore's law states that transistor um density uh 2x's every 18 months. We also see something similar with LLM performance by model size. And so we're going to be able to embed extremely powerful LLMs into your watch within 18 to 24 months. So um these are some basic uh examples of implementations of AI hardware of these projects um or this is an example of a project where the probability that this becomes um enterprise for me where I build a business out of it is not super high but worst case scenario I come out learning a lot of new things. Um, and I think that this is kind of how I've always been and something that like this is a very tangible recommendation that I would make to pretty much everyone, which is that you should have hobbies and you should have fun things or fun intellectual hobbies that you engage in because you never know how these are going to come back to be able to help you professionally in the future. Um, so yeah, that's great. You again optimizing for learning. So you are doing it actually. Yeah, I'm not one of these people that's like you need to do this and then I'm just like off and like only only trying to make money on the back end. I don't I don't know. I don't think that that's like a another pattern that I see through like the apps that you have built is like because I listen from other people they are saying like one person business right now you can easily make it but I constantly hear from you that the term co-founders so you bring like a team big advocate for uh co-founders if you can find the right people like all the businesses you have done it through co-founders right also with Cali you coached like Zach, you brought him in and you did it with him, right? So, Cali is a great example. So, we actually have four co-founders. It began with um Zach and Henry came to me and they were like, "We've seen the success that you've had with RZ GPT and UMAX. Um we started building apps ourselves, but they're doing okay." Um, Zach gave me a list of ideas and I was like, AI calorie tracker, that's what we should build together. So, the structure was I would serve as somewhat of a coach, provide the marketing strategy and capital um that I'd gained through my previous ventures and Henry and Zach would run the day-to-day. Cali, I started to succeed. We brought in Jake Castillo, who is the uh marketing chief marketing officer and co-founder uh as the fourth team member or fourth co-founder. And since then it's been amazing. The reason that I'm a big advocate for co-founders is, you know, it's easy to look at Cali now and say, "Okay, we're going to do uh over $30 million this in 2025 in revenue." To say, "Well, um Blake, theoretically, you could have just given Zach and Henry 10% um and then you would have, you know, higher percentage." You could say the same thing to Zach and or Henry. You could say you could have just built this and then had the majority and you know figured out a way to structure it so that other people had less. I think that great co-founders are multipliers on the business. If we had set up theru the partnership that um you know so when Zach Henry and I started we did a three-way equal split. If we had not done an equal split, then it would have decentized people. Like after the product started to succeed, maybe if I had less equity, I may have moved on or Zach may have moved on or Henry or Jake or people would have left. Um, I like the analogy which is it's a lot better to have 50% of a watermelon than 100% of a grape. So the correct co-founders will enable you to take the business to heights that it previously would not have been able to get when I first started working with Alex and Evan for RZ GPT. If any one of us had tried to do that individually, maybe it makes like 10 20K a month. Maybe we don't even get the product off the ground to begin with. The fact that the three of us were working together and we were able to uh work together effectively in the early days enabled us to hit 250k a month within the first three months. Um co-founders can also go bad. I've worked with people before where uh you spend a lot of time working together and then it just like it doesn't work out. It's a risk that you take. But when you don't when you have pretty high cap on the amount of upside, the big question is not what your share of that upside is, but whether or not you're able to capture it all to begin with. And the correct co-founders will help you capture that. Yeah, for sure. I completely agree with co-founders. It's really really important to have uh to have that but also it's it's a risky risky thing to actually do to give such a high percentage to to somebody. So um have you from Kali and and after have you actually made other partnerships like this that actually didn't pay off and this is the first question the second question that I have is also how what is the structure of the partnership because many people don't see how it actually works don't see from internal like and uh how the partnership is so you do the work do or do you consulting and you give some money and what is the m what is the money the the amount of money that you actually agreed so I think it's very important to clearly define expectations from the jump um with my first partnership Alex and Evan the expectation was that I did the engineering so I built the app Alex did the design um Evan did the marketing within that we all actually kind of had a hand in the marketing and you know uh Alex helped a little bit with the engineering and like it was a little bit convoluted but there were pretty clear expectations about what our responsibilities were um with Cali similar the expectation was that Zach uh Henry and I would be equal co-founders on equity and that I would not have as much day-to-day involvement but I would apply the high lever skills I'd learned from my other products as well as the capital to get the thing off the ground. Um, Zach helped a bit with engineering, but his main role was growth, marketing, and design, and then Henry with engineering. Um, and that partnership has been amazing. Like, we all have very clear responsibilities within the business and as a result, we don't often have conflict about who should be doing what. The biggest issues that I've seen and experienced myself are when expectations and rules are not clearly defined. Maybe one person wants to build a billion-dollar business, the other person wants to build a product that makes $50,000 a month. Um, that is very hard to merge those two realities. Maybe one person is expected to produce something on the engineering side of things um and they they don't deliver. Right? That become I've experienced this issue before. Um, so I think clear expectations is the biggest in terms of finding the right person. Super hard. The I think that it's generally organic people that you meet and you develop relationships with, then over time you realize that you'd be great to work together. when you go out very explicitly trying to find someone as quick as possible, you're not sourcing the highest quality candidates. So that that can certainly be an issue. So after like this like success that you had, I think like you're getting a lot of requests from people that they want to build something for sure. And uh you to be the adviser. Do you like respond to those people or like I I I hate networking. I hate speaking to random people. Not from like a place of superiority, whatever. I just I don't do a great job juggling a lot of different relationships and I have a hard time when I create a relationship with someone and then they're like, "Oh, hey, can you do this favor for me?" And blah blah blah blah blah. And I'm like, man, I kind of want to just like be in my own world. I have like my small number of people that I'm close with and like distance myself from everything outside of that. And so I've started leaning more towards that. Like I turned off DMs on Twitter. I like I don't really respond to many people anymore. Um so I definitely have that inbound, but yeah, you know, I I don't have a perfect solution for it. Um I you know, I know I know a lot of people like to just network with everyone. Like I think Zach, for example, does a much better job um handling a lot of relationships. He's really good at it. I'm not so good at it. So, I I kind of tried to just like keep my peace and avoid everything else. Yeah. So, like if someone reaches out and they're like, "Hey, I'd love for you to be an adviser to blah blah blah." If anyone's listening to this, think, you know, don't it's not going to be worth your time. I'm not going to do it. The only thing that I would like to mention about that is um I see that I've seen it over and over over and over um people giving advice. For example, this thing that you have that you don't reply to messages that you you like to be decent, it's not what you are uh what actually made you successful. But if you are not thought thoughtful enough, um you might give an advice like this to someone because for example like Zach is not like that and he's actually as successful as you for example. Um, so, um, what do you think about giving advice? Like, how do you actually give advice based on your personal experience? Because it's a trap. I love this question. I think that it's a great question. Um I think that people are very very complex systems and that uh what I mean by that is that the the different things that make up who we are uh both both our material position how much money we have what skills we have where we live what languages we speak as well as um like our general affect what we're interested in um you know what sort of uh personality type we have, right? You take all of these variables into account. And it's very hard to create universal uh principles that apply to everyone. And so throughout uh this podcast, I've said things I'm like, "Oh, yeah, but that doesn't really apply to everyone." And like I don't know whether or not this is actually even good advice. Um, so the way that I view it is the most impactful advice that I've received in life has not come from. So, so I think that there are a couple of ways to view it. One is like you take in information on the internet. You take in advice that people have about business, about working out, whatever. You test all of it out and you figure out what works for you. That is one framework that's very helpful for me. Second, I think a lot of the most uh impactful advice that I've received in terms of prescriptive advice from other individuals comes from the really close relationships that I've developed. So, different people that I've worked with over time, different people that know me super well because they are able to understand who I am as a complex system. They're able to take into account all of these variables and help figure out what's going to work for me. if you spend too much time listening to sort of like podcasts and whatnot, which I think are great, they're great to distill information down and uh they can be enjoyable to listen to, but if you take the advice too literally, um you're going to end up uh following paths and doing things that are um that that maybe aren't that applicable for you as an individual. Um, so I'll come back to the classic example of like Peter Teal famously does not give advice. Um, and this isn't because he's not a very intelligent individual and doesn't really understand the world. It's because he understands what I think a lot of people do not, which is that uh the the best advice that an individual can create for themsel in my opinion is through their own experience um and through those close to them. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And uh your people around you, they do it subconsciously. They just know better because they they have processed you. So the advice that they give you, it's personalized to you. So that's uh that's uh really amazing and I completely agree. Uh completely agree. Yeah, I think uh we have been doing this for one hour now. So thank you very much for coming. Uh thank you for responding to our inbound. Yeah, I I appreciate you guys having me. I also want to applaud y'all's conversational ability in English. It was great. I felt like you guys didn't skip a beat, which is awesome. Thank you. and I uh I really enjoyed speaking to y'all and um hope that uh I hope that everyone that listened had a good time. Yeah, thank you. Uh thank you very much for coming and uh yeah, it was it was a pleasure. Really nice conversation. Uh we could have you here for 3 hours more but we have to wrap up. So yeah, thank you for coming and we talk to the next one. Okay, cool. Have a nice day. Bye. Ciao.