The 17-Year-Old Who Built a $1.12M/Month Ai App | Zach Yadegari

how much money do you make make $1

million every month and how old are you

I'm 17 dude this is going to be one of

the craziest episodes I've ever done and

just because I know how crazy this

sounds and a lot of people aren't going

to believe you can you actually just

show us and refresh yeah here you could

refresh this is AB Store connect it's

showing that in October we made $1.14

million refresh the page and you'll see

is not fake dude that is [ __ ] nuts

and you're 17 17 okay what do you do

what is it I build mobile consumer apps

specifically this one is Cal AI okay

it's an app where you take a picture of

your food and it will tell you how many

calories it is so you literally just

take a picture of your meal and it just

counts the calories for you yeah it's

much simpler than any other app like my

fitness spell so there's a lot other

other apps like this on the App Store so

there are a lot of CopyCat apps of Cal

but there's really been nothing like

this in the past how did you find this

like how did you choose to make this

yeah so the whole story with CI is that

about a year ago my friend Henry and I

who's also in high school got started

building mobile apps the first one we

built was an app called grindclock

essentially a motivational speaker like

David gogins would wake you up in the

morning by just screaming at you get out

of bed get to work let's go start

grinding and so that app did pretty well

we got 20,000 downloads in the first

couple weeks but we weren't able to

sustain the growth

so we started building a few different

apps and down the line as we were

building different products I had been

reaching out to different people on X

different Founders in mobile apps and

one of these guys that I reached out to

was Blake Anderson I believe you had him

on your show so he had founded two apps

previously umax and R GPT both had

totaled a few million downloads and so I

started speaking to him about his growth

strategies and we worked out a

partnership where he would essentially

help with the high LEL strategies come

on as a co-founder with C ey Henry and I

would lead the day-to-day operations

making the up and growing it and then

together we all came to the idea CI to

work on and started going I think that's

specifically with the idea there's

always been yeah um the apps the calorie

tracking apps in the App Store have been

around for years and they've all been

super outdated and antiqu

My Fitness Pal everyone knows it as a

convoluted app that's hard to use I

personally wanted to gain weight in the

gym bulk up and I had to quit after 3

days it was super annoying to track my

calories so with this in mind and then

AI Technologies from chat gbt that came

out the same year we just pieced two and

two together and new Cal AI it was a

great idea to build so is it the one of

the first Cal AI calorie tracking apps

yeah definitely one of the first that

launched and so it's is it tracking Mac

protein carb sugar everything like that

or yeah yeah everything we really

simplified the app concept where other

apps like my fitness pal have so many

features like tracking your sleep your

hydration we really stick to the main

things calories carbs proteins and fat

but we have everything you need does do

you have to like choose like a specific

like outcome you're working towards like

I'm trying to lose weight I'm trying to

like gain weight is that like a segment

or is it just solely telling you the

data yeah so we do we ask them on the

onboarding all the questions that like

they're desired outcome and then we give

them a calorie plan protein plan

everything they need and based on that

as long as they follow it they should

get the desired results so you just

started like a year ago pretty much so I

started building apps a year ago but my

journey really starts when I was 7 years

old taking my first programming class

okay so you've been coding since you

were seven yeah I was obsessed with

video games and I wanted to make them

myself so I enrolled in a coding camp

and that really just inspired me to

continue taught me how like that there

is a possibility I can actually build

games myself so then after taking that

camp I got really deep into YouTube

tutorials making games I would spent all

day just binge watching content and I

got pretty good I put my first game on

the app store when I was 12 years old

and then at 13 that's when I started my

first Gaming website and my first just

thing that I programmed that I monetized

ized I'll say so what it was was an

unblocked Gaming website that let

students play games in school and the

website would bypass the blocking

Protocols of just in high schools so

generally if you would look up anything

like games.com or any online gaming

website it automatically gets blocked my

website would bypass everything damn is

that legal it was legal we had a few

loopholes we used so one of them the

website was called totally science . so

that got it categorized as an

educational site nice it thought it was

a science website and then you like did

you actually make the games on the I

didn't make the games myself that's the

only thing that it's questionable the

legality because we took the games

elsewhere online was like a mini clip or

something we took some games that were

made by mini clip actually interesting

yeah it was a bunch of these like mini

games and ripoffs of Minecraft a ton of

different games so you just wanted to

play games in high school and you just

like all right I'm going to find a way

to get around this and then monetize it

yeah basically how much money did you

make from that that website was making

$660,000 a year and then I sold it 2

years after building it for 100,000 you

sold it for $100,000 yeah how old were

you I was 16 when I did the sale holy

[ __ ] who' you sell it to I sold it to a

bigger Gaming website how'd they find

you I actually listed it on a public

website selling directory what website

flia flia flippa.com FP a interesting

how long it take to sell sell it so it

was actually quick and that was

intentional 2 years into the website I

started getting deeper into

entrepreneurship so instead of just

building it and putting it into the

market I thought okay maybe I could

scale this up somehow so initially I

grew through Tik Tok I made the videos

myself I you know we grew to 5 million

users just all myself acquiring users

and I started networking with different

Founders there was one specific guy I

met he had told me his story in high

school was like me he built an app that

had a few million users it was a

messaging app and it was making a few

thousand do a month I was like wow this

guy's story is just like mine like this

could be my best friend or something and

then he told me he was 25 years old and

I was shocked it scared the hell out of

me because he didn't go to college to

work on this app that had completely

stagnated he launched it in high school

and it peaked there and this guy was 25

years old he had so much potential in

high school but he never acted on it and

now he's sitting on this product that's

completely dead and he he's really going

nowhere I did not want to be like that

guy so immediately I knew I had to just

burn the boats I had to sell the website

and move on to something else otherwise

I could get stuck at the same place wait

so you saw another guy who had made

money as a teenager but then he was just

continuing to work on this the same

product that was similar to yours you're

saying it was a Ming app so his product

was different but it was a very similar

situation where he built it in high

school it scaled up he was probably the

coolest kid in his high school making