How Cal AI turned creators into a growth machine — Jake Castillo, Cal AI

David Barnard:
Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.
Hello, I'm your host, David Bernard. My guest today is Jake Castillo, co-founder of Cal AI, the AI calorie tracker with over 15 million downloads, now a part of MyFitnessPal. On the podcast, I talk with Jake about the magic moment test for whether creators can sell your app, the one number that caps what you can pay them, and why cloning hit apps like Cal AI rarely pays off.
Hey, Jake, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Jake Castillo:
Happy to be here. I'm excited to talk.

David Barnard:
So most people know you for having co-founded Cal AI. Quite a story behind that and the recent acquisition by MyFitnessPal and everything, but I'd like to go back. I know Zach and the team are a decade younger than you. How did you meet up with them? What was that story? Because it sounds like it was an interesting one.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, it's really crazy to think about because there is so much luck involved and so many fortunate wins for me that happened along the way that needed to happen in order for this whole journey to have occurred. So I was, at the time, I was working in management consulting full-time, and then I was moonlighting for Oliver Oliver Brocato in his software company called StudyBuddy. So I would work my consulting job from 8:00 to 8:00 Monday through Friday, and then from 8:00-

David Barnard:
Jeez.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, consulting is terrible. And then from 8:00 to 2:00 AM every day, I would work on Oliver's project at StudyBuddy. And probably a month or so into me moonlighting there, we had an intern start, and that intern was Zach.

David Barnard:
Nice.

Jake Castillo:
And I remember in college, I had a bunch of really terrible internships that was just a waste of time, and I didn't learn anything or grow at all, and I didn't want that to ever happen to anyone else. So when Zach first started, I jumped on a call with him right away and said, "Hey, what would make this a successful experience for you?" And he explained what he wanted to learn, and I really made it my mission to make sure that he got exposure to all of those things. Turns out he was a genius and knew everything already, but in doing so, me and him became good friends and probably-

David Barnard:
And he was still in high school at this point?

Jake Castillo:
He was in high school.

David Barnard:
Oh my gosh.

Jake Castillo:
So we were both moonlighting. He was going to school and juggling a social life during the day. I was working during the day, and then we were working on StudyBuddy at night, which was really fun. He left in April of 2024, and then he went off to go start a business. I didn't know what business it was, but he was going to go and start this thing. And then in May of 2024, I left Oliver and my consulting job because I was like, "Hey, I get this internet money thing. I'm going to go and start a business of my own."
And then two days after, Zach DMed me on a Twitter account that I never checked. I was getting a new phone that day, so I was going through all my accounts to make sure I was fully backed up. And then I saw the message from him on Twitter and he said, "Hey, are you free to jump on a call?" And I was like, "Oh yeah, let's do it." He came to me, "I've got this app I built called Cal AI. Do you want to help us with the marketing?" So I said yes, and the rest is history.

David Barnard:
Man, what a fun story.

Jake Castillo:
It's just crazy, right? Because I think about what if I didn't check my phone that day or wasn't buying a new phone? This all could have not happened.

David Barnard:
Well, and could have not happened for Zach too. The coincidence is equally meaningful on both sides. As we'll get to, you're a huge part of driving the marketing and really helping Cal AI scale. And so Cal AI might not have been Cal AI for Zach even. I mean, he's a killer. Maybe he would've figured it out and found somebody else or whatever, but I can't help but think that it was the combination of the two of you that really made it work, not just him or just you.

Jake Castillo:
Totally. Yeah. So there was four co-founders, myself, Zach, Blake Anderson and Henry Langmack, and all of us had our own domains of expertise. And you're right, none of it would've happened if not for having all four of us in those positions because not only were we really good at our particular domains, but we worked together really well and we got along so well. And it just made for this synergistic relationship that allowed us to grow incredibly quickly and higher than we ever thought we could.

David Barnard:
It's a little verboten in tech to go too deep on topics like this, but as someone closing in on 50, I got to say, when I work with somebody young and energetic, there's just a fun vibe. In your late 20s, a decade older than Zach and some of the other crew, what was that like working with that team?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, it was really refreshing because at that time I had $70,000 in student loan debt. I had just bought a house. I was planning on proposing to my then girlfriend, she's now my wife. So I had all these big obligations and responsibilities, and that resulted in me being pretty risk adverse, because it's like I've got a path and in 30 years I'll be set and it's just like stay on the path and it's all going to be okay. I was miserable, but I understood if I just stayed on the path, it was going to be okay. And then I meet these kids that they've got no fear, no responsibilities, they just want to do something great.
And working with them every day, it got me out of my comfort zone and made me become comfortable being uncomfortable and taking risks and taking big bets. And yeah, it changed my life. So I'm super grateful that a lot of times people frame the age gap, oh, that must have been weird, that must have been awkward. It must have been so different. But it's I think the best thing that could have happened. I'm so grateful for it.

David Barnard:
All right, so let's move on to the next steps in Cal AI, because I really wanted to dig into the growth story and how you and the team really scaled, especially from the early days. And one fun story I wanted to touch on was I just had Dawson Gibbs on the Sub Club livestream, which would be a fun one if you're listening to this podcast, you might go check that out. He's great and told some of his own stories about working with Cal AI, but he was one of the first influencers you ever signed, right?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. Dawson was one of the influencers that changed the whole trajectory for Cal AI. He just happened to be one of the first people we reached out to. He responded to it and he wanted to work with us. And the really cool thing about Dawson, and for any creators listening, I would really try to emulate this because a lot of creators, if you ask them to do anything, they're like, "Nope, I'm going to charge you for that. No, that's outside of the scope. No, I'm not doing that."
Dawson was the complete opposite. There was nothing he wasn't down to do. He was always willing to take on more work and he wasn't demanding a rate for it. So much so that I was like, "Oh, Dawson, thank you so much. We're going to give you a bonus this month." And he became a friend, and now he is a very close friend. And his willingness to just put out content, iterate on content, try different angles, different formats, it allowed us to quickly find what worked for Cal AI. And once we found that format that worked, we could just copy and paste it across the millions of fitness influencers out there. And yeah, who knows if that would've been possible if not for Dawson's willingness to just work with us and to give it a go rather than nickel and diming us for every little request we made.
And yeah, for creators out there, a lot of times I'll hear them complain like, "Oh yeah, screw these brands. They don't treat us right, so we're not going to treat them right." But when Dawson did that, he was always so kind to us, we were willing to do anything for Dawson, whatever he needed. But if you treat the relationship strictly as transactional, it's going to always be transactional. And that's what it never was with Dawson. So shout out Dawson.

David Barnard:
And such a great lesson for brands and apps too. If you find that kind of creator that's willing to go the extra mile and feels more like a partner than a hired hand or whatever, it's like latch onto that and go the extra mile on your end. So when you see somebody going the extra mile on their end, reciprocate and it can build to something much better. And if you're working with a bunch of creators who aren't that, sometimes you do just, and I'm sure y'all ended up working with so many creators, sometimes it just has to be more transactional. But especially early on, if you can find somebody who feels a little bit more part of the team, more invested, that's just gold.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, especially in the early days when you're not working with that many creators, there's honestly no excuse not to build these personal relationships with the creators. You've got the time, you've got the bandwidth, really foster these relationships because not only will that manifest itself in the content they produce, but also these extracurriculars, you can have the creators go and refer their friends. And if you're miserable to work with, they're not going to refer other creators to you, but if you're the best brand they've ever worked with, they're going to be shouting it from their rooftops. Hey guys, come over here. This is the place to be. And that's what we always try to do.

David Barnard:
Well, stepping back, what was the original thesis and plan for marketing that even led to first reaching out to Dawson? And then if you would kind of relate it to what your advice would be today and if you think things are different today or if you think people should rerun that same playbook.

Jake Castillo:
Our thesis stemmed from the fact that we were a calorie tracker and we felt that the people that track their calories the most are people that are in health and fitness. And then when we looked in the health and fitness space, we saw that there was millions and millions of creators. There's probably more health and fitness creators than any other creator niche out there. So there's all of these creators, but there's a finite number of brands available to these creators. You got protein powders, you've got athleisure wear, that's about it. And they can only work with so many creators.
So there was all of these creators that never had had a brand deal before, and we finally gave them an opportunity to get a brand deal. So there was just a huge supply, the well ran deep. And then on top of that, the content that these creators were making made it super easy to integrate Cal AI into those videos. These creators were already making, "What I eat in a day videos." "In order to look like this, you have to eat like this," and those types of videos. And they were making maybe one a week. So it was super easy to ask them to just, oh, when you're showing your food in those videos, just scan it with Cal AI.
And that was the thesis. And then Dawson proved the thesis because when he executed on the format, it converted very well. So awesome. There's a million other creators doing the same type of content as Dawson, so let's just copy and paste. We did that and it worked tremendously well.
As for should this be the playbook for apps moving forward in today's environment, I think if all of those variables ring true for your app, then absolutely. Now that's not the case. If you're an astrology app, there's not millions of creators out there. And what are the brands available to astrology creators? Probably other astrology apps, that's kind of it. And those apps, if they got their stuff buttoned up, they've probably already signed those creators to exclusivity deals, which can make it tricky. So it's just like, yeah, you got to suss out the environment.

David Barnard:
Yeah, no, such a good point. I think that's something a lot of people miss and that I've been trying to talk about. I think Dawson and I even talked about this on the live stream is that when you see a Cal AI blow up and you try and go replicate that playbook and it falls flat, part of it is not understanding the kind of, I hate the word, but synergies. You're a former management consultant, you use the word synergies, right? But there were kind of inherent benefits like you described to Cal AI slipping perfectly into content where so many apps that try this playbook don't have that kind of hook.
There's layers to it. It's like creator app fit, like you said, health and wellness influencers with a calorie tracking app. But then it's even that's a step above that is our product even something that can be shown in a compelling way on social that's going to hook somebody quickly or even, I mean, part of the reason it works so well too is that the whole video wasn't about... People think they need to make the video a sales pitch for their app, but really by making great content that happens to mention the app, it's almost better if it's so compelling that that 10 seconds showing Cal AI scanning your food is so compelling that people take action.
And so it's like there's layers and layers of things that have to fit together for this kind of strategy to really pop off.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, there's so much to it. To your point, what we called it was the magic moment. And Cal AI had a magic moment. It was like a one, two, three punch. You scan, analyze results, and when you showed that on screen, people would do a double take. They'd be like, "Whoa, what was it? Oh, so cool. Did that really just calculate the calories?" They'd never seen it before, so it was very impressive to them. If your app doesn't have a magic moment, it doesn't lend itself well to a seamless integration because it's not going to cause that double take. Whoa, what just happened?
And if you don't have the double take, people probably aren't going to convert. They may blink and miss the integration and miss the tree for the forest, if you will. And that's maybe you're better served running paid ads for that where you do a hard sell and you're really communicating the value prop of your app.
Additionally, the magic moment needs to be easily digestible and easily understandable in seconds. It can't require some long explanation of how it works or why it works. Otherwise, it's going to feel like an ad, and if it feels like an ad, it's not going to go viral. If it's not going to go viral, it's not going to be profitable.

David Barnard:
And y'all did so many subtle things too that I think a lot of people kind of missed that actually helped so much. You did a build of the app specifically for creators so that when they were scanning, it had the Cal AI... Did it have the app icon or did it have a logo or what exactly?

Jake Castillo:
Both.

David Barnard:
Both. Nice.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, so you'd see Cal AI and then the little logo as well. And yeah, there's also we'd do these little things so that it just made it easier for our marketing materials to communicate the message that we wanted it to.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Any other little subtlety, almost hacks, but just smart things y'all did like that, that really took it to the next level?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. So one time or we have a streaks feature where anytime you scan your food, it'll pop up the streak and it would show up right after you scanned and it would interrupt the one, two, three. So we would make sure our influencers didn't show their first scan of the day because we didn't want to interrupt the one, two, three punch because people naturally, you see it in ChatGPT's writing, it always does it in groups of three because that's how our brains are wired to digest information. So the streak added this fourth piece in our barrage of marketing content, so we had to remove that so it stayed to just the three punches and that worked really well.
Another one, with certain creators that did more subtle integrations, we would have an onscreen caption that would say tracked with Cal AI, just to really drive that home. Whereas with some creators where it was less subtle, we wouldn't have that caption because then it would impact the views. So a lot of little things like that that we were constantly testing and we're still testing. I think that's the key thing is no marketing program should ever feel like a finished product. You're always a work in progress and you're always adapting and we are as well.

David Barnard:
Yeah, such great insights and so cool. I mean, these are the subtle things that you see the headlines and you're like, oh, Cal AI, we can repeat this playbook and oh, we're just going to copy the ads. And then you just completely miss all the little subtle details that you tested and iterated and tested and iterated that really reinforced what you were doing with the messaging.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. Well, and I honestly attribute that to people would... We were very public about Cal AI as we were building. We would share all of the successes and failures on Twitter, and with that came a lot of copycats. Everyone was like, "Oh, why are you doing that? You're bringing so much attention to your app and unnecessary competition." But we didn't see it that way because we knew that if people were building a Cal AI clone just because they heard about our success, they were never going to make it.
Because the reason why we were successful was we were obsessed. You know you're obsessed when you're dreaming about it. I would wake up and think about influencer deals. I was dreaming about signing influencers and creating content and all that stuff. I was truly obsessed and I knew it was impossible for anyone else out there to be as obsessed as me. And it was that obsession that led to a bunch of little small incremental improvements, and those small incremental improvements compound over time to be an insurmountable mountain that competition can't climb.

David Barnard:
Even the clones probably added to people looking for AI calorie trackers and then that app didn't deliver and so then they go found Cal AI or they just search the app store or search the web because the other team tried to copy and missed the subtleties, and so they just searched Google for AI calorie tracker. And guess what pops up first? Cal AI. Guess what pops up first in the app store? Cal AI. So in some ways those competitors probably helped create a little mini marketing engine that drove as many clicks to you as it did to them.

Jake Castillo:
100%. And even on Twitter, there was always a new Twitter thread being posted like, "These Cal AI clones are making X amount of revenue. Is this the best app opportunity out there?" And all that stuff, it would just drive traffic to Cal AI. So it's like go ahead. And it's that thing, when you're so confident in your team and your abilities, competition doesn't scare you. You want it. It's fun.

David Barnard:
So we've been talking about a lot of the successes and things that worked out, but I always love to talk about the failures and screw-ups along the way too. And I know you have some really fun stories of creators that didn't work, and formats that didn't work and things like that.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. So they're fun now. At the time they were left fun, they resulted in really good learnings about influencer marketing because there is a creator that may have a cult-like following and a really strong audience, but you have to understand does this audience even care about calorie tracking? For example, we thought the UFC niche would crush for us. And the thesis behind that is UFC fighters have to track their food meticulously. Every calorie matters when they're trying to cut weight.
So a tool like Cal AI is not only really helpful to them, but also really interesting because it can alleviate the need to weigh everything, which is so tedious. So we signed a couple UFC creators and we like, yeah, this is going to crush. This is a whole new untapped market that's going to open up doors to 1,000 more creators. The UFC creators we signed, posted, and crickets, no download spike, nothing.

David Barnard:
And these were big creators too, right?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. Thousands and thousands of dollars spent.

David Barnard:
Wow.

Jake Castillo:
And nothing. And we couldn't figure out why. And then as we dug deeper into the audience demographics and interests and psychographics is the average person watching UFC is doing so on their couch as they're drinking beer and eating pizza with their friends. The last thing they want to think about is tracking their calories because that's just going to give them bad news. While they were watching, these viewers were interested in watching someone put them through a severe calorie restricted diet, they had no interest in doing that themselves. So like, nah, I'm good. I'm good with that.
And so there was a lot of instances where we had experiences like that and it hurt at the time and it was a big punch in the face, but we never let that impact our ability to take what we called big bold bets as one of our core values. Because it's like for every deal that didn't work, there was one that did. And maybe it didn't work and you lose a couple of thousand dollars, but the ones that do win, you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars. So that's when I talk about the risk tolerance of my co-founders, it helped change my whole mindset. And now I'm ridiculously risk tolerant.

David Barnard:
That's amazing. What other stories do you have of creator types that just didn't work out? Because I think it really is so informative. And I think sometimes people, I'm guilty of this. I'll put out a YouTube video on Sub Club or I'll have a certain guest on and I think, oh, this is amazing. Just like you though UFC was a whole new channel and then it doesn't pop off and then you need to then pause and really introspect and what didn't work, why didn't it work? But too many people skip that. And so yeah, I'd love to hear any other stories like that to help people get in that mindset of really digging deep on why things didn't work when they don't work to better propel the ones that do.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. Another instance was mukbang creators. So these creators would be, they'd be sitting in their cars or in their dining rooms, kitchens, whatever, and consume 10,000 calories in one sitting, just enormous amounts of foods and unfathomable amounts of calories. And we're like, wouldn't this be so much more impactful if before they did it's like, yeah, I'm going to eat 20,000 calories right now. And that would give a huge wow factor to the audience and they'd see how easy it was to track all this food. But for similar reasons to the UFC fighters, the viewers of these creators had no interest in counting their calories because it just gave them unwanted information.

David Barnard:
Right. Yeah. I mean, to your point with the UFC fighters, somebody watching mukbang probably isn't your health and fitness. If you're watching a health and fitness influencer track their food throughout the day, you probably aspire to something like that. Whereas when you're watching mukbang content, that's just not on your radar. It's just a total different wheelhouse.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. And it's like I think, oh man, I want to do that. They see all that food, they get everything on the menu and talk about, "Oh dude, that sounds so good. I can't wait to do that. I'm going to do that as a reward for when I pass my finals or something." And it's like you don't want to think about calories. No, this is a reward. This is my cheat day. So it's just understanding not only what kind of content your creators can produce, but why your viewers are consuming that content and what are the psychological motivations behind that viewership. And if you can really nail that down, then it makes it much easier to sign profitable creators.

David Barnard:
Any other specific tactics or tips or strategies to figure out which creator niches, which types of content work and don't work?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. I mean, so I think the main thing people need to understand is views can lie, followers can lie, but comments cannot. The truth is always in the comments. And in a couple different ways, first and foremost, if you want to understand is this niche relevant to my app, look in the comment section of the big creators in that space. And are people looking for a solution that your app solves? If so, that's primetime. You go full steam ahead. And then additionally, on a more granular level, if you're trying to identify whether or not an individual creator, you already identified that the niche is going to work and the content type works, but it's like, will this actual creator work? Because for every 10 creators out there, nine of them probably won't convert and only one will. So how do you find out which is the one out of nine, one out of 10?
The way you do that is in the comment section and you look, I put it on two different sides. You've got one comment section, let's say it's a girl going through leg day, and it's her workout routine. And if you go look on health and fitness pages right now, you'll find a bunch of creators like this with comment sections like this, where the comment is a bunch of guys and it's like fire emoji, fire emoji, fire emoji, or the emoji where the guy's sweating and that stuff. So there's that type of comment section. And then there's another type of comment section where it's like, "Thank you so much for posting this video. I was really unsure of how to work out my hamstrings or quads or glutes, and this video gave me the info necessary." One of those comment sections is going to convert, one of them is not. And I think it's pretty obvious which one will.

David Barnard:
That's such a great insight too. And these are the things you think, oh, female creator, she's good-looking, she gets a ton of views. But then you got to introspect, why is she getting those views? What kind of people are watching? Why are they watching? And unfortunately for some of those, it's not what you would think, and it's not the other women excited to try that next workout.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, exactly. You've got a following and then you've got a cult-like following. The cult-like following is where you want to plant your flag.

David Barnard:
Yeah. And how do you think about though these days with the algorithms, the difference between just a good creator who doesn't even necessarily have that much of an audience, but just knows how to go viral on TikTok, versus the ones that do have that kind of cult following and do have a more established audience?

Jake Castillo:
What I would say is a cult-like following is a lagging indicator. If you're a great creator, the cult-like following will come. So when you've looked at creators enough, as much as I have, you can identify the diamonds in the rough where it's like, oh, they're already successful that time just hasn't caught up yet. And then those are the creators. Yeah, you can get them on cheaper deals because maybe they don't have the track record to warrant a super high payment. So you can get them on a cheaper deal and then you're just riding that wave as they're following and influence skyrockets.
One creator we worked with, I remember he was probably, I don't know, the 12th or 15th creator that I signed at Cal AI. I watched his content, oh, this is really good. He's really funny. He's really charismatic. He's good-looking. But his views, just they're not there yet, but I believe in this content. And we signed him and two months, he wasn't really doing anything. He wasn't making much money with us either, but me and him were friendly. Like I said, you want to build those personal relationships with your creators and we were friends. And month three, he had a video. And when I say not so... he was getting 10,000, 12,000 views. And then month three, he had a video get seven million views. And then from that point forward, there's never under 500,000 views.

David Barnard:
Wow.

Jake Castillo:
And it was so cool. Not only was I happy that he blew up and it made Cal AI a bunch of money, but on a human level, I was so happy for him. I was like, "Hell yeah, dude." And I connected him with other brands. I was like, "Go and get your money, man. This is awesome. You put in the work, you deserved it." And it's so cool. And I love those stories. And we've had a couple of them at Cal AI and it's a feel good thing.

David Barnard:
Yeah. How do you think about pricing that? How do you structure deals? So when he's doing 10,000 view posts and then all of a sudden one pops off, were you on the hook for a ton of money? How did you structure that?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, so this is a key thing I think all founders should keep in mind is with influencer and UGC content, you are banking on a... The real money is made in the viral hits. You base your breakeven point or profitable rate on their average views and it's like, okay, this is the most likely scenario. We'll break even, maybe get a little profit. And where you make your real money is when they have one video go mega viral and all that is profit. And if you're not doing flat rates, it makes it hard to capture that asymmetric upside that is a viral hit. So whenever possible, I would try to do flat rate deals because it allows you to capture the asymmetry that is algorithmic content.

David Barnard:
But would you do bonuses?

Jake Castillo:
Totally.

David Barnard:
Or some kind of scale deals or how does that work?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, we would do bonuses. We would do scaled deals. And sometimes even the creator didn't have a bonus. Like I said, you want to have good relationships with your creators. If we're winning, we want everyone to win because we couldn't have done it without you. We would just give bonuses like, "Dude, you crushed it this month, here you go."

David Barnard:
That's awesome.

Jake Castillo:
No one does that in the space. Whenever I tell people, they're like, "Oh, you're too nice." But what I have found-

David Barnard:
That's how you win.

Jake Castillo:
Yes. When you treat people right, it's almost like a selfish endeavor because one, it makes me feel good, but two, it always comes around. Maybe not for that single person and they may take advantage, but over a long enough time horizon, you will reap benefits from it on top of just being able to sleep at night and look yourself in the mirror. How gross is that? Your app is crushing it and your creators aren't getting rewarded for that. So that's something I'm really adamant about.

David Barnard:
Yeah, that's a great way to think about it. When you do structure those deals though, I mean, just to get into the nitty-gritty, because people are going to be thinking, I want that to happen. I want this 10,000 view person to pop off to seven million views. How would you recommend actually negotiating those specific bonuses or scale deals? As the number of views go up, you pay less per view? Or how does that actually work? And I imagine it's like you sign a bunch of different deals with a bunch of different creators, but maybe give us some of the top ways you would advise people to try and structure it.

Jake Castillo:
So I think the first thing you need to understand is what is your revenue per thousand views? And that is what it is. Again, it may vary from niche to niche. It's within the niche that you're trying to sign this influencer, how much money can you expect to make per thousand views? Once you get that number, it's like you can't pay a CPM that is higher than that RPM, otherwise you are guaranteed to not be profitable. It's just math and it's super simple and it's like that means that there's a lot of creators that you won't sign. They may say no, that's not, I want to get paid more.
But it's like you need to understand there is no other alternative unless you are in the money losing business instead of the money making business. It's just the way it works. If you're trying to save money, can you spend more than you make? No, it is what it is. So that's the first thing. That's your guiding principle. And then from there, you just want to look at what can we reasonably expect this creator to make? How many views can we expect them to achieve? And then base your rate, your CPM, what you've deemed as a profitable CPM based on their expected views. And sometimes creators will come to you with like, "Hey, I want to work with you, but I need $1,000 a month."
And a lot of times a creator is if you meet their cash demands, they're less so concerned about the deliverable demands. So it's like a creator that maybe doesn't get many views, you can pay anyone $1,000 and maybe just the deliverables will have to increase. And it's that thing, if they come to you with a number and you try and meet them in the middle, it's like, "Yeah, I can work with you here. I just need you to work with me here." They're much more willing to do that. And the other thing is if you're just jump on calls with these people, show them that you're a human being and not some sleazy agent, if you will, that's just trying to maximize profit and it's like, "Hey, I'm a regular person just trying to make it like you. Let's work together. Let's find a way that we can both win here."
And sometimes we can't. Maybe based on your views, what you need to get paid is not what we can afford. And that's all right, but I'm going to handle that situation with kindness and with grace and they're like, "Yeah, sorry this doesn't work, but I can refer you to my friend that would be perfect for this."

David Barnard:
How do you think about the difference between experimental creators and experimental formats versus... Because for someone to understand our RPM is X, that would almost necessarily be a very specific format that you know that works, that you've run the numbers on. But I would imagine some formats, some hooks, some other things that you're experimenting with could deliver two or three times that RPM because it's either a different audience or the hook really landed or whatever.
So I mean, first, how do you even analyze what your actual RPM is when you're working across hundreds or thousands of creators? And then two, even if that's your average, how do you think about the outliers and trying to find those outliers?

Jake Castillo:
First off, how do you calculate the RPM? In the early days of building an app, it's easy because when you don't have a creator, say you're not running any other marketing efforts other than influencers, and if you don't have a creator posting on that day, you're getting zero downloads and zero sales. So the second you see a creator post, you'll see the spike and then it makes it very easy. It's like, oh, this creator posted, we got 1,000 views and we made $100. So we had this much RPM. I don't want to do the mental math and mess it up. I think it's either a $10 or a $1 RPM. I always forget the zeros, but it's one of those numbers.
And that's your RPM. And it's easy in the early days. As your app grows and maybe you're getting thousands of downloads every day, you can still see spikes and you just get comfortable with that spike. And as you grow and become more experienced, you'll become more trained with analyzing even the slightest spike and what that really means. I think the best app founders and marketers are experts in data analysis and you have to be in order to do it because attribution is so murky with organic marketing.

David Barnard:
When you're looking at those things, all things being equal, if you have one video pop off and do a million views that has four times the number of comments or likes or saves, then the other one, do you assume that... Let's say they both pop off on the same day, do you look at these kind of secondary metrics to help price, oh, this one's actually what drove that spike that day, this one that got a million views, but nobody commented, nobody liked. It's likely that that one is not the one that drove the revenue.

Jake Castillo:
As you get more sophisticated in your analysis, there should be all these little data points that you take into consideration in your calculus of whether or not to renew someone. I created this unique equation for Cal AI called our renewal score that took into account a million different metrics. Because you're right, once you actually grow, you do have a bunch of influencers posting on the same day. We would have 50 to 70 influencers posting on a day. And when you're doing that, multiple are going viral within a day, so it can get murky. But if you look at all the other metrics, you can start to suss it out. Another one is easy when incrementality tests, look at the demos of the influencers following and where did you see the spike?

David Barnard:
How do you manage all of that? Hundreds, thousands of creators, 100 posts a day. Did y'all build internal tooling? What was your ops machine to manage all of this?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, so I really owe that to my management consulting days because that's what we had. We'd go into these businesses, had these really complicated problems and how do we scale, all this stuff? And that's what I did for eight years is figure out how these businesses can do that. So it got to the point where the marketing was easy for Cal AI. It's like if we work with these creators and we have them make these types of videos, we will make money. Simple as that.
What was difficult was managing it at scale, hundreds and hundreds of creators. I built systems and automations out over time that made it super easy to manage at scale. That was instrumental to our success because otherwise we would've been always bottle-necked at bandwidth.

David Barnard:
So as a former management consultant, were there a lot of spreadsheets involved or did you actually build custom software or how did you actually do that?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, so in the early days it was spreadsheets. Everyone would make fun of me because I was always in Google Sheets and I was obsessed with it. I called it my Magnum office. It was this beautiful thing that had all these automations behind it. Since then, yeah, I've built out a formal software. Yeah, I'm going to start releasing it to the public for anyone that wants it.

David Barnard:
Yeah, I was actually just going to ask, are there good tools for that now? Because I'd imagine there are, but it sounds like maybe you have one that's coming.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, up until I built it, we always used our spreadsheets because I was always left severely disappointed by the existing solutions. And I think it's because what we did at Cal AI was so unique and a lot of the people building these tools had never done it, of course, because we were the first ones to ever do it. So my solution is built strictly for influencer and UGC marketing and by someone that's actually done it. So I think it is a much better solution than those available today.

David Barnard:
I didn't even know about this, but I usually give guests an opportunity to pitch at the end, but we're on the topic. I mean, is this going to be a SaaS product? People are going to be able to pay for it? Give us a pitch. I mean, honestly, perfect related to this whole conversation, if somebody wants to do this, they're going to need software to figure it out, and it sounds like you're building that software.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. I promise I didn't come on here to-

David Barnard:
And I had no idea you were building this, so this was not a planned pitch, but hey, you're taking your time out to share stuff, and I actually think this is super relevant and people will be excited to check it out. So tell us more.

Jake Castillo:
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's called Virality. The idea is that it should streamline and automate a lot of the tedious and monotonous work that comes with managing influencers. You store all of your deals, you can automate contract sending, you can auto track their posts so you know when they tag you and it'll update the views. It'll give you view clauses or bonuses. It'll track all that and tell you how much you're supposed to pay them, when you're supposed to pay them. And then also it'll give you the renewal score and whether or not you should renew the influencer.

David Barnard:
Nice. When does that launch?

Jake Castillo:
It should be, I'm thinking the end of October.

David Barnard:
Okay. Okay. So probably a couple of weeks after this podcast is released.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah.

David Barnard:
Nice. So check it out. I'm sure by the time this launches, we'll at least have a landing page we can link to or something. We'll put that in the show notes.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. Awesome.

David Barnard:
Cool. Well, I want to keep digging deeper because this has just been so amazing understanding this influencer playbook. How did you reach out to and land creators at scale? I mean, it's kind of the hardest part of the job is talking to 10,000 creators to land, what, 500? I mean, what was even your hit rate?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, it was low. It was low. And a lot of times I'll jump on consulting calls or someone with me and they're always asking, what is the secret and how can I do this? And I always feel so bad. It's like, oh man, you booked this call. I hate to break it to you, but the secret is you work really, really hard for a really, really long time and you do the work that no one wants to do. So it's like, yeah, you are sending thousands and thousands of messages to creators all the time, and most of them aren't responding. The ones that do respond, a lot of them are asking for ridiculously high rates that you can't afford. And every negotiation is like you're pulling teeth and can be very difficult, but that's where the magic happens.
And that's why we were able to be successful because we were willing to do the work that no one else was willing to do. Because if people can do it for a day, they reach out to 100 peers like, oh man, that sucked. I'm not doing that again. We did that for 18 months every single day.

David Barnard:
Did it ever get easier? Did you ever have enough influencers where you felt like, I can just slack today and not reach out to 100 new influencers? Or it just was a constant grind because you got to keep the machine flowing?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, it was a constant grind. You got to keep the machine growing and there's just job's not done. We weren't stopping until we were the number one calorie tracker in the world, so there's always more work to be done. And like I said at the beginning of the episode, there's millions and millions of these health and fitness creators, and it's probably the biggest niche on social media. So there's always another creator to be signed.

David Barnard:
One thing a lot of people listening will think, and so I'm curious your thoughts on it, in 2026 compared to 2024, influencers are more savvy. Dawson and I were even talking on the live stream about how there's influencer training courses now that tell them you need to negotiate this with the brand, you need to get this CPM, or they're undervaluing you. It does feel like the landscape has shifted since the early days of Cal AI. Do you think it's harder? Any advice? What do you see that's changed?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, I don't want to be the guy that's like, oh yeah, I'm glad I'm not starting from scratch today because it's like I don't want-

David Barnard:
But you're glad you're not starting from scratch today.

Jake Castillo:
I mean, it's a lot tougher today for sure. But for everything that makes it more difficult, there's another thing that makes it easier. We did not have Codex and Claude Code in 2024. These are new. It's crazy, it wasn't that long ago, and I can't imagine life without these tools, but these are new tools. So that stuff can streamline operations and make things so much easier. So I think it's always a push and pull. Yes, it's harder in some respects, but it's also easier to do other things.

David Barnard:
Any specific advice of the kind of influencers or ways to do it today that work different from the advice you would've given two years ago?

Jake Castillo:
I mean, yeah, influencers charge higher rates today than they did before. There's more brands vying for them. So the supply has probably remained constant of the influencer population, but demand has increased. So naturally price will adjust and it's a little more expensive as a result. But just remember, it's going to be very hard to sign these influencers, and that's a good thing because if it's hard, that means your competitors aren't going to do it. So if you're willing to do the hard work, you will win.

David Barnard:
No, that's great advice. So we've been talking almost exclusively about UGC, in part because that's a big part of the story of Cal AI, but at what point did you layer on paid ads? Because my understanding is that Cal AI wouldn't be what it is today without having moved on, or not moved on, but layered on paid ads on top of what you're doing with UGC. What made you start that? How did that work?

Jake Castillo:
Paid ads, once you get that machine up and running, it's so much easier than influencers. Sourcing creative, that's easy. You can just pay someone to create creative. There's now amazing tools like Tribe where you can get creative for free and you just pay them a percentage of ad spend. Whereas with influencers, one, just getting in touch with them is so difficult. Once you get in touch with them, negotiating with them is extremely difficult. And then managing them is also very difficult. A lot of them can be prima donnas and they're not the best to work with.
And it's like attribution is murky, the views can fluctuate. There's just all this friction with influencer marketing. Whereas paid ads, you get the content, put it in Meta, sit back and chill. And so from a work in to money received ratio, it just made sense to start doing that. Also, you should always diversify your risks. So it's basically probably after a couple of months of Cal AI, we started spending on paid and then it's become a larger and larger part of our marketing mix.

David Barnard:
Yeah, that makes sense. With paid ads, did you end up using some of the content that would pop off in UGC or was it just a totally different motion? Or would you have the same creators but create a different version of the hook that worked better as a paid or would some things that went viral actually work as paid?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, so in the early days, when we first started our paid ads program, we just recycled our influencer content and it yielded some results. But as we grew and became a more sophisticated company, we invested in dedicated paid ad creative and that performed far better because if you think about it, with organic content, you are taking a swing at the plate for a home run that is a viral hit. And in order to do that, you have to make it a subtle integration. With paid ads, whether it's super viral or not, you're paying for every view. So if you're paying for every view, you might as well ensure that every view, they understand what it is they just saw and what it is you were promoting in that video with a hard sell.
Because in some of our influencer videos, the integrations were subtle and if they blink, they could miss it. And what if we paid for that exact impression and that's like you're throwing money away? So where we really started to see results is when we invested in dedicated paid ad creative.

David Barnard:
And I mean, there really is an art to it too, because you talk about the hard sell, but it's still got to be good content because as an ad, even if you're playing for views, if somebody gets five seconds in and just swipes right past it because it's not good content, then Meta's going to deprioritize that. It's not going to work anyway. So talk about the art of getting that hard sell into a piece of content that's actually good, even if it wouldn't go viral on its own, but it's good enough that people won't just scroll past it.

Jake Castillo:
There is an art to it, and I learned a lot from the team at Speechify. They're close friends of mine and they're killers at creating paid ad content. And it is so different than creating influencer content, a completely different muscle, and you have to build it over time. So I think the key is, yeah, you got to have a great hook, and you also want that hook to be related to your product. You'll see things where it'll just be someone like a pitcher throwing a baseball and the camera is from the POV of the catcher, and then the baseball comes and cracks the screen, and then it'll go and it'll talk about, I don't know, an accounting software.
And it's like, okay, cool. Yeah, you stopped the scroll, but for the wrong reason. If you were then going to promote a pitching app that was going to improve your pitching, that's a banger, that's going to crush. But it's like, you're trying to get accountants? They probably scrolled through the second they saw it was baseball. And sorry to any accountants that love baseball, but you want the hook to be related to your product, and then from there you want to communicate the value prop as quickly and as interestingly as possible.

David Barnard:
Once you're doing paid ads, it then becomes even more important to align the ads to the app store screenshots and align that whole experience from ad to paying on the other end. How did y'all think about building that contiguous funnel of making that experience seamless between ad to actually paying you money?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, it's just about congruency, right? And it's like, how weird would it be if you go into a hotel and it's this amazing hotel lobby, five-star lobby, and there's a concierge service, all this stuff. And then the second you check in and you go into the elevator, it's some rickety elevator, and then you go into the room and there's cockroaches everywhere and it's super dirty. It's like, wait, this is not what I thought I was getting.

David Barnard:
I've been to that hotel in New York City.

Jake Castillo:
Whereas people would be much more willing to accept that crickety and eerie room if the lobby matched it as well. And vice versa, everyone's going to be cool with the five-star thing, but you want consistency, consistent communication across all channels.

David Barnard:
I know y'all spent a ton of time on onboarding, and this is another thing. If you're going to get UGC to work, if you're going to get paid ads to work, it's not just the UGC, it's not just the ads, it's getting them from that ad to the moment of payment. And you have the black box at the app store in between that, but probably the most impactful part is in once they open the app, what happens? Tell me about some of the iterations and how you thought about it from that congruency perspective.

Jake Castillo:
You want to see your marketing, that's what gets people in the door, and there's a couple pain points you want to hit on in your marketing and say, "Hey, we can solve these pain points for you." And then in your marketing, you want to reiterate that like, hey, are you suffering from this pain point because otherwise you wouldn't be on this app. It must have resonated with you and you want to drive home the impacts of that pain. This pain point has probably caused you to do X, Y, and Z, and what if there was an easier way? And what if this way helped you achieve X? Wouldn't that be nice?
And you just are nurturing them and framing yourself as we can help you with this problem. And then once you've communicated that adequately, you say, "This pain is real. This solution can solve that pain for you. What's it worth to you?" And when the price of that is not some astronomical fee, people are really willing to do it because it's like, oh yeah, now that we've talked about it for the past five minutes and this onboarding, that pain is a problem and it's worth $30 a year. That's nothing. If I can stop feeling this way, totally.

David Barnard:
It sounds like that $30 price point was really intentional. I've commented on this before that I do kind of think is one of the genius moves of Cal AI that helped make that whole engine work is that you didn't try to be the price leader. You didn't put a $70 a year price tag like MyFitnessPal, who eventually acquired you, but you made it accessible to everyone, to that college student who saw the influencer. Did you experiment with price at all or was it just always 30 and you did that for that specific reason?

Jake Castillo:
So we definitely experimented a ton. Being a management consultant, management consulting 101 is you cut costs and increase prices, that's how you make more money, right? But major shout out to my co-founder, Blake Anderson, he was always super adamant like, "No, we're not optimizing for profit. We're optimizing for mind share." Like the way we become the number one calorie tracker in the world is not, I mean, of course making the most money, but that comes secondary to being the most popular. And the way we can be the most popular is it's the easiest to purchase, which results from the lowest price. So yeah, he was always adamant we keep our prices low.
And it makes so much sense. We did go after a very young crowd that doesn't have the most disposable income and maybe hasn't suffered from this problem that we communicate to them in onboarding for nearly as long as an older demographic. So when you haven't suffered from it as long, it doesn't hurt as much. When it doesn't hurt as much, you're not willing to pay as much to solve it. And so it just makes sense. Shout out, Blake. Absolute genius.

David Barnard:
Pricing is so tough. It goes both ways because for some apps, I do think it makes sense. And maybe what you said there helps inform how you think about pricing is that your strategy wasn't to maximize profit. And so that's a very different mindset and a very different approach to pricing then. And again, it probably helped a ton that you were able to do UGC and get to a level of profitability to where you didn't have to raise it. Because a lot of folks, it's tough to make ads work below $50, and so they keep raising the price just to make it work. But then they're alienating a whole set of users and then retention suffers when the price is higher. There's so many downstream factors that if you can make it work at a lower price and you're in a market that can go big, it can just be magical to leave that excess money on the table for the consumer, versus trying to capture it all yourself.
But then on the flip side, there's markets where it's not going to go as viral, it's not going to be as big, it's going to cost more to acquire the user. The pain point is more valuable. The demographic is older. It's like you need to understand all of those things in your philosophy of pricing. Don't just price it for $30 because that's what Cal AI did, and don't just raise your price because you heard that on some podcasts. You got to really think deeply, what's our motivation? What's our market? What's the pain point? How much are people willing to spend? Why are we doing this? And so it's really cool to hear you talk through that.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. The easiest way for an app founder to blow a ton of money is to copy what Cal AI did or copy what you saw on a podcast. Because my app is not your app. Your app is not my app. What works for us isn't going to work for you and vice versa. So figure out what works for you. Really think about it. Don't just be a robot and look at everything through a critical lens and let that inform your decision making.

David Barnard:
Yeah, totally. Well, we are coming up on time, but before I do, I think people would be mad at me if I didn't at least ask what you can talk about the MyFitnessPal acquisition. I mean, dream scenario. So many people listening to this podcast are like, "I'm going to blow up my app and then I'm going to sell it." I know you can't share the price or any details, but what can you tell us about that part of the story of finally getting to that exit?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah. What I can say is I absolutely could The MyFitnessPal team. They have been so nice and so welcoming and so willing to let Cal AI still be Cal AI. And that's so cool. And I've learned so much from them. My goal remains the same. I want Cal AI to become the number one fitness app and number one calorie tracker in the world. And MyFitnessPal is helping us do that because they have a bunch of institutional knowledge and experience. And yeah, we're so lucky and fortunate. And yeah, shout out MyFitnessPal. You guys are great. Thank you so much.

David Barnard:
That's awesome. Did they call you or did you call them? How did that-

Jake Castillo:
Zach, our CEO, Zach, he handled all of it. And that was I think why Cal AI worked so well is I was focused on marketing and nothing else. Henry, development, nothing else. And we just let each other focus on our domains of expertise, trusted each other wholeheartedly, and the outcome was greater than any... I couldn't have dreamed of a better scenario. This is just everything I ever wanted.

David Barnard:
That's awesome. I asked a question knowing you couldn't say much and you're at a bigger company now and there's PR people and everything like that, but thanks for sharing what you did. And then maybe five years from now, if you've moved on or a decade from now, come back on and we'll get the full story. Again, not to say you should because you can't and you probably even have contractual obligations and stuff, but for the acquisitions where people can talk about it publicly, I think it just is really fascinating.
And so the stories that are told are really interesting. So eventually the full story will be told and it'll be really fascinating to hear all the ins and outs and negotiations and how things happened and what the price actually was and stuff like that. But I wasn't at all expecting to hear that today. So I think it's great though, and I think what you did say is super informative though. If you're trying to sell your app and you're going to stick around and if you really believe in the app and you're not selling it just to cash in. But I mean, I'm in some ways kind of surprised that you've stuck around this long. A lot of these acquisitions, it's like you sell the app and then maybe you give a three-month transition and you move on, but you're there more than a year later or almost a year later.
And it just speaks to what you just said. It's like you believed in the app and you didn't sell it just to cash in, you sold it to take it to the next level, which is really cool.

Jake Castillo:
Absolutely. The way I see it is that Cal AI is my legacy. I built this, I care about it. I love it. I was truly obsessed. When my kids and my grandkids are scrolling through the app store, I want them to be able to see Cal AI and be like, "My dad built that. I'm proud of that." So it's really important that in Cal AI's next phase that it continues to be what I envisioned it would be when we first started building it.

David Barnard:
Yeah, that's so cool. And again, I think folks who... And I'll say, looking from the outside in, made different assumptions and had different views on how it all went. And in talking to you, it's just so clear that you guys put so much work and so much passion and so much time into this in a way that people who are like... I mean, I'll call myself out. I never put as much energy, thought, and deep introspection into my apps, and that's part of why they never took off the way they did.
And so it's like you can say, "Oh, Cal AI was lucky. They launched at the right time," or whatever, but you guys really worked hard and crushed it because of those things you did and how passionate you were about it. And it was fun having this conversation with you to really get that on the table, that the success wasn't just some lucky fluke. It's like you guys grinded and you were really smart about so many little intricate details that so many people don't sweat.

Jake Castillo:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. I'd be remiss to deny the fact that there was a lot of luck involved, right?

David Barnard:
Yeah, of course.

Jake Castillo:
We had tailwinds that helped us, but the way I see it is hard work and dedication increases your surface area for luck, and it's like we couldn't have had one without the other.

David Barnard:
Awesome. Well, as we wrap, I am going to ask you the three questions I ask every guest now, and it'll be especially fun now that you have almost a year under your belt with MyFitnessPal. What's the most impactful experiment or change of the past year, your biggest win? And let's just say since the MyFitnessPal acquisition.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, I think Tribe. Tribe has been super helpful in our paid ad, sourcing paid ads. It's been a game changer. It just allows you to source paid ads at a much faster rate, and the quality of the ads is amazing.

David Barnard:
And so you shouted them out earlier. The way that works is that you actually pay a percentage of ad spend. So instead of paying a creator $10,000 for this or $500 for that, you just say, "Create a bunch and whatever works, you get paid based on how much we spend behind it." So the creator can make a ton of money or not much, but it's very aligned.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, that's the thing. It aligns incentives for the first time ever.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Hey, I meant to ask this earlier, but since we're on the topic, what are your thoughts on affiliate marketing? That is almost like an affiliate type deal.

Jake Castillo:
Totally. Yeah. If you can do it right, I think it's great. Whenever you can align incentives, I think it creates a scenario where it's a win-win. And like I mentioned with our influencers, that's always what I wanted. I want everyone to win. There's enough to go around. So I think affiliate marketing is probably the easiest way to make that happen.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Did y'all do much affiliate or at all with Cal AI?

Jake Castillo:
Anyone that wanted to, like a promo code or whatever, they were welcome to use it.

David Barnard:
That's awesome. Can you share how you thought about pricing those and how much you paid out and whether it was... One of the things, and again, if you can't say, totally understand, but one of the things I've thought about with affiliate is a lot of affiliate deals will be forever. If they use your promo code, they're going to get the renewals for decades to come, and that is exciting to create this passive income for an influencer. But from my side, I've always thought if I'm going to sell an app, that can really complicate things. I've got this money that's just sitting, hanging out there that I'm going to owe to people over the long haul. Now it's tied to profit, so at least there's a tie there. But yeah, how did you think about and price those affiliate deals?

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, so I mean, this is public. It's in the app. Anyone can sign up and it's $10, you get $10 for every signup.

David Barnard:
Oh, nice. For every sale, not downloaded the app.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, exactly.

David Barnard:
Right, right, right, right. So basically on the gross margin, 33% of the sale, and then it's just a one-time sale.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah.

David Barnard:
Gotcha. Yeah, that's a great way to structure it. I like that. All right, next question. What's the worst experiment, the biggest fail, the change that bombed?

Jake Castillo:
I mean, probably a bunch of influencer deals. There's always those that just... Yeah, they didn't work for whatever reason, but you never fail without learning, so that was the key, just as long as we learn from it.

David Barnard:
Yeah, that's great advice. And the last question is fill in the blank. Growth would be easier if...

Jake Castillo:
Growth would be easier if people would focus on the work. There's so many people that do everything but the work, and it's really not that complicated. It's not easy, but it is simple and it just put in the work, just do it. And it sucks sometimes. If it sucks, that means you're probably doing something right, and just do the work and stop procrastinating.

David Barnard:
Such good advice. I said this, I think on the live stream with Dawson, or I've said this a few times before for those who listen to the podcast and live streams regularly, I vibe coded a little app. I didn't expect it to make a bunch of money or anything, but I fell for the same exact trap that every developer falls for, is that I got so burnt out vibe coding this app that by the time it launched, I didn't have any energy left to market it. I can make excuses. I mean, I got four kids. It was the summer. They were all home, but that's where the rubber meets the road. I never expected it to make thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, but had I put a little more effort into marketing, I probably could have made enough to take a nice vacation with the family or something like that, but you got to put in the work and it's hard.

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, that's where the magic lies. It's in the work you're avoiding.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Oh man, such good advice. All right, Jake, this was so much fun. I usually ask at the end what you want to pitch, but you already pitched, but just anything else you wanted to share as we wrap?

Jake Castillo:
If you want to follow me, you can follow me on Twitter. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I've got a newsletter. The goal is just to share as much value and help you guys build the next Cal AI. That's always cool.

David Barnard:
Do you do consulting?

Jake Castillo:
I do, yeah.

David Barnard:
Okay. I mean, are you open to clients or is it pretty just...

Jake Castillo:
Yeah, just reach out to me on Twitter, LinkedIn. I'm happy to help if I think I'm a good fit.

David Barnard:
Yeah, still grinding. Full-time job.

Jake Castillo:
I can't stop.

David Barnard:
Spinning up side SaaS and doing consulting. That's amazing. All right. Thank you so much, Jake. This was a blast.

Jake Castillo:
Thank you.

David Barnard:
Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.SubClub.com to join our private community.