# I Spent 24 Hours With iOS Millionaires

Channel: Starter Story
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAr9FWEQZAk
Duration: 14 min
Language: English
Words: 2562
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/sAr9FWEQZAk

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[0:00] This is Blake and this is Zach and together with two more of their friends they built one of the most successful mobile apps of all time. Cal AI Cal AI Cal AI Cal AI Cal AI Cal AI Cal AI. After millions of downloads they sold it for multiple millions of dollars but here's the thing. You might think you know the Cal AI story but what I wanted to get is the real story. What was it like for four friends [music] to build something amazing? How did they work together and how did they pull this whole thing off? But the most important question, is there still an opportunity

[0:34] to build successful apps in 2026 or is this trend over? So, I flew to New York City to meet up with these guys and had them share everything. And what they told me changed how I think [music] about the future of apps forever. Come join me as I spend 24 hours with iOS millionaires. I'm Pat Walls and this is

[0:53] Starter Story. We are here in beautiful New York City where apparently these 18-year-old kids built an app that sold for millions and millions of dollars. We're about to go meet them right now. I think this is it. Let's go check it out.

[1:13] Hey. What's up? How are you man? Good to see you. millionaires Yeah, what's up Pat? What's up Zach? Good to see you. Okay, tell me who you are and what roles you had in this amazing Cal AI story and all the other stuff that you've done. My name is Blake Anderson, 25 years old. From Philadelphia. I was co-founder {slash} investor {slash} advisor at Cal AI. I went to school at Tulane where I began building apps. The first apps I built mostly failed and then I started building AI apps. It was a little bit after I built my first two apps [music] that Zach and I got in contact and began

[1:50] building Cal AI together. 19. I'm from New York initially. My role at Cal AI was I was the CEO. I started coding pretty young at 7, put my first app on the App Store at 12. My freshman year of high school, I started my first company and I scaled that to 5 million users over 2 years and started making

[2:08] 60k a year, but sold that when I was 16. And so after meeting Blake and coming to the idea of Cali AI together, we ultimately decided like let's burn all the boats, let's go all in on this idea cuz now we have the dream team to like come together and really make it work. Walk me through some of the numbers of

[2:26] Cali AI. The first month we made 30k and the second month we made like over 100. And then within 8 months we were at a million dollars a month, which is pretty wild. And then from there we have grown to What are we on track for? 60 million this year? Probably like 50. 50 million this year? I want to talk about the dream team. I know that there's two other founders

[2:50] that were deeply involved in Cali AI. Who were those and would you potentially be able to like get them on the line right now? We could just chat with them real quick. Yeah, of course. There we go. What's up, Jake? What up, Jake? What's up, guys? This is Pat. Start your story here. We're in the middle of filming right now and just get who you are, how old you are, what your

[3:14] role was in Cali AI. My name is Jake Castillo. I am 31 years old and I was the CMO/COO at Cali AI. So I handled our marketing operations and the overall business operations. I'm Henry. I'm 18 years old and my role at Cali AI was CTO. So I managed the tech team, made the product as seamless

[3:34] as possible to use. What about all four you guys worked so well together? This is something I've thought about a lot and I think what it is is all of us had our own domain of expertise and we all had complete trust in each other to go and like handle that one task. That's why we didn't really have any fights. We were just all like so focused on the one

[3:56] thing that we became experts in. At such a young age, did you have any idea that Call AI would get this big or this would become as big as it did when you first started it? When we first started it, we were still working for a salary on another app and it was hard to believe that this would be the app that caused us to just go on our own and become, I guess, like

[4:18] self-employed. Well, thanks, guys, for FaceTiming and I wish you could be here. We're going to be [music] having fun today filming, but thank you for coming on and and sharing your story. Of course. Have fun, guys. guys. Peace out, guys. Peace. Cool. All right. Well, we're going to talk all about all your apps. You have multiple apps. You're working on something new. So, I'm excited to to learn, go see your offices, go hang out

[4:39] in New York City, and learn about apps. Let's do it. Let's go. Ready? Yeah. Let's do it. Okay, so we're here at Elizabeth Street Garden. What I love about what you guys did is that you built with your friends. So, tell me how did the first genesis of Call AI get started? Henry and I initially met at a coding camp when we were 10 years old, and that turned into us gaming almost every day together. And then eventually that friendship led us and our shared passion of programming to building a couple projects. Around that same time was when I initially sent a DM to Blake to meet

[5:15] [music] him. And then, after things started ramping up with Call AI, we were looking for someone to come in as like a COO role. And I knew Jake was like doing great work at Study Buddy. So, I offered that he join us and thankfully he did. He wanted to join and things just went great from there. The whole partnership, the whole team, like we had a great

[5:36] dynamic. Can you give me an example of when there was like a fork in the road, like a really big product decision or there was like a major conflict in how you guys settled that. The initial acquisition offers, end of 2024, we were receiving low eight-figure acquisition offers, and everyone on the team was conflicted. Because on one hand, this is life-changing money for everybody involved. And on the other hand, we have this product, which we deeply care about, and we feel like

[6:08] there's so much more growth to be done. And I think the way that we resolved this [music] was we kept super open communication. We would all call each other constantly during this period, and through this trust in one another, we were able to reach a collective [music] decision like no, we definitely should not sell. But I think in a co-founder dynamic and relationship where you don't have those levels of trust, you're not going to take your company to its true ceiling and its true

[6:36] potential. Well, guys, well, trust is the number one thing. So, for anyone watching this who's building alone, looking for other people to build with, find people you can trust. Now, we're going to go to your office, and I want to talk more about the opportunity of iOS and see if it's something that you would recommend for people to still who are watching this right now to do next. So, let's do

[6:56] it. Let's do it. All right, guys, I'm just finishing up the edit on this video right here. And putting this video together, it got me thinking about something. AI has made it easier than ever to build, obviously. But what I typically see founders getting wrong is not working on the right ideas. So, we worked together with HubSpot to put together a free resource for you to help you ship your iOS app in 7 days. [music] We will show you how to go from a simple idea to an app live in the App Store, and you can even do it if you've never written a line of code in

[7:26] your life. So, if you're ready to build, just click the link in the description and grab it 100% for free. All right, let's go. All right, we are here at the 10X office. I want to understand is what is the size of the opportunity of building apps in 2026? People think Call AI was this massive pie that we were eating from. They'll say Cali I 50 mil per year, but then the App Store as a whole, so the entire pie is 100 billion. We're 1/2000 of the amount of total opportunity. I know a lot of people they think the opportunity looks like this. But if you

[8:05] apply new technology either AI or in other forms, the real opportunity looks like this. It's a 100 billion dollars today. It's growing over 10% year over year. I think almost within the next 6 years it'll be over 200 billion dollars spent just on the iOS App Store alone. What do you think about copycats? And because that was kind of a thing like you could copy an app a couple years ago, just attach a sick distribution strategy to it and it could kind of work, but do you think that still works

[8:38] today? It can work for getting to $10,000 a month or even $100,000 a month, but the reality is that I think you see much greater potential and outcomes when you are building something new. And philosophically too, I find it much more inspiring. If Zach's initial DM to me had been like, "Hey, I created a copycat of this." I wouldn't have responded and we would never would have worked together. And I think that a lot of

[9:05] legit professionals feel the same way. Any final advice Zach to people watching this who are looking for their differentiated idea or marketing strategy? I mean this is like advice that a lot of people give, but if you're really solving your own problem, it really makes everything fall into place because you know exactly what you would want out of the product you're building, so it makes the app design very intuitive. And with the marketing, you know exactly who you're marketing to cuz it's marketing to [music] yourself. And so you know

[9:35] exactly the pain points that you hit on. It's a great way to start. I would recommend like if you don't know the idea to necessarily look for it, look for something that would actually help you. What I want to talk to you guys next is what you're going to do next. But first, could you give me a tour of this office?

[9:51] I'd love to check it out. Let's do it.

[9:57] This is the office. We got 10X Studio works out of here. So, we have a number of subsidiary companies. And then we have a bunch of friends that work out of here as well. Jake, founder of Early. This is Ethan, CEO of Ego. How you doing, Pat? What up, Fred? Sorry, sorry, right? Yep.

[10:14] That's right. You guys sold Cali AI for crazy amount of money. I know you can't share the exact amount, but it's just an amazing story. What did that feel like to like build something huge, sell it at such a young age? It didn't hit right away. Part of the reason was because we were all fragmented, we were all in different states when it happened. So, there was no like big celebration or anything to tie it off. And then the next like 6 months after that, just a massive sense of honestly relief. Just like I can just [ __ ] up on everything for the rest of my

[10:46] life and I will still be in a comfortable position. So, tell me about that. I think a lot of people watching this, they might see you on X or YouTube or whatever. They're going, "Okay, this guy's got millions in the bank. Why is he even doing this?" Yeah, I played video games when I was growing up. I was obsessed with video

[11:02] games. It's all I did. [music] And I just look at entrepreneurship as the greatest video game in the world. I would be so bored just like sitting around, maybe going on boats, just like living life. I like playing this game and I want to keep doing it. An analogy I've been using with my friends recently is if you were playing GTA, would you ever go put your

[11:25] character down and watch TV for 4 hours? [ __ ] no, you would not do that ever. And I think that for us entrepreneurship is that game. Yeah. Obviously you just had this sale just a few months ago, but you're already working on new stuff you were telling me. So could you just give

[11:41] us a little details on that? My primary project right now is called 10X App Builder. [music] 10X is Shopify for apps. And so beyond just writing code for the individual, we're helping with the process of ideation. We're going to be hosting user back-ends, helping users design their Instagram page in aesthetic manner. Like I could not recommend it enough to anybody who's

[12:06] new to building apps. Right now my primary project is [music] called Flow and it is a brand where we will have a suite of tools and products that will power people's productivity and also their health. And I've been documenting the entire journey of building this company on my YouTube channel because I really want to show other people how [music] being an entrepreneur really looks to help people like myself who when I was younger I always wanted to be one, but I never knew exactly what went into it,

[12:37] what it looked like. Well, good luck guys. Thank you for having me. Thanks for having us. And I wish you the best. Congratulations on the sale and you guys are you guys are crushing it. So thanks for Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay, we are here outside the office. So is this opportunity still available? When it's so easy to build now and the App Store is flooded with apps? Yes, but take distinct ideas and put your differentiated spin on it. Whether it's different features or a different

[13:05] approach or it's different distribution. So there you go. That's your answer. I think iOS apps are going to get bigger and bigger every year and if I were starting right now, that's what I'd be building. All right guys, hope you guys enjoyed this episode. This is me spending [music] 24 hours with app millionaires. Hope you enjoyed. Let us

[13:21] know in the comments. Peace.

[13:35] Mhm.

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