This essay is based on a conversation with Jake Castillo, the 31-year-old CMO and co-founder of Los Angeles-based Cal AI. He built the AI app together with just three other people. Despite the small team, they managed to achieve millions in monthly sales in a short period of time – and were acquired by MyFitnessPal less than two years after launching. His statements have been slightly shortened and revised for better readability.
Imagine holding your breath for two years and then finally breathing out. That’s how I felt when the app I co-founded in 2024 was acquired by MyFitnessPal at the end of last year.
Cal AI, our AI-based calorie tracking app, launched in late April 2024, and I joined as one of the co-founders in early May. There were four of us in the founding team, and in the early days we wanted success more than anything else.
In the age of AI, anyone can build a product, so our speed of execution was key for us. We didn’t need millions of dollars to build a company that would make millions; we just had to be very determined and trust our instincts. That has brought us far.
Influencer marketing was our fastest path to growth
We decided to work with health and fitness influencers on social media as our main marketing strategy as this was an immediate sales channel.
They have already produced videos about what they eat in a day, how to lose weight, and low-calorie snack content. This made integration super easy by showing how CalAI was used in these videos and secured us instant views.
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Influencers get free access to the app. At the beginning we didn’t work with a fixed budget. Instead, we invested aggressively in influencer deals as soon as we saw them work. If we had 1,000 euros available and a promising opportunity presented itself, we used the money there. We focused on putting capital into channels that directly drove growth.
We’ve also tried to leverage user-generated content from non-influencers – posts from people who post through our app without already having an existing audience. Since we had to rely on the algorithm to generate views, we quickly moved away from this strategy.
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When we realized that the influencer strategy we were implementing for this product was working well and we were seeing growth, we trusted our gut and relied on it even more.
We went from winning one influencer to winning 20 a week
In the beginning we had one influencer partnership, then three. Then when we saw the direct impact on our business, we set a goal of signing 10 a week – that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was a hell of a lot of work.
I was on the phone all day every day, and soon we reached our goal of 10 influencers per week. We now have over 160 influencers under contract, but this number fluctuates daily.
Speed is our greatest advantage in the age of AI
I’ve heard people say that the only difference between your product and other apps now is the taste. I actually don’t agree with that. I believe AI can do a lot of the flavor discovery for you. I firmly believe that the only competitive advantage we can create is speed.
AI can increasingly direct what should be developed, what should be canceled and even how things should look. That’s why we believe speed is the more sustainable advantage: how quickly you can bring products to market, learn and iterate.
We tried not to take any withdrawals in the first year because we wanted to invest everything back into the company. This allowed us to hire more influencers and quickly advance our marketing strategy to stay ahead of the competition.
If similar apps continually emulate us, our strategies, and our features, they will continue to emulate us as long as we maintain our pace. I think that’s what it ultimately boils down to.
Trust your instincts because the simplest strategy is usually the best
Often people try to overcomplicate things, when the simplest solution or strategy is often the best and fastest approach.
Whenever a new idea comes up, we always think about what it will complicate. We think about it on both the marketing and product sides, and if the answer is yes – meaning it would complicate things – we generally don’t pursue it.
Many of our decisions are also based on trusting our gut feeling and intuition. That’s one thing I definitely want to give a big shout out to my co-founder Zach for. He trusts his gut feeling so much. When he has a premonition, he says, “Yeah, let’s try.”
We’ve grown our team but maintained the same lean mindset
The team is now larger after the acquisition, but we still don’t want to bloat it unnecessarily and we try to keep our management structure fairly flat and with a very high level of ownership.
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We want everyone to feel like they can make decisions and make an impact, and that there is no bureaucracy to wade through to get things done. Once too much bureaucracy comes into play, we slow down, and when speed is our only competitive advantage, slowing down is not an option.
Some of our first employees are now in management positions, which is great. I no longer have to take on all the roles of accountant, legal representative, marketer and COO. We can now delegate these tasks and responsibilities.
Acquiring MyFitnessPal taught me to always keep an open mind
Talks to acquire MyFitnessPal began some time ago and continued on and off until around the end of last year, when they really began to gain momentum. We agreed on the terms, completed the due diligence and finally closed the deal in December last year, which was surreal.
Even if a conversation doesn’t seem promising at first, you should always keep the door open – you never know how it might develop. If we had closed that door at MyFitnessPal when the deal didn’t make much sense, we might have missed that opportunity, but we kept it open.
