Cal AI · B2C · photo calorie tracking app
Let users post progress photos, meals and streak badges to Instagram stories
A lot of users share progress and meals; no numbers
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Daniel Heintzma - I speedran a new app from 0 to $2m/year in 6 months (here's how)
Joseph ChoiSo that that's a you're it's sort of like building a social network a little bit. Is this that seems like a a a big product challenge.
Daniel HeintzmanYeah, I think it's a mixture of like trying to get retention working, but also like product-led growth. And so you'll see like in the other screenshot on the right there was like up being able to upload progress photos. Not only do we get people We get people like to take pictures and they can upload it to like Instagram their Instagram story and show off like how many how much weight did they lose or how much weight did they gain. And so we get a lot of people like uploading that to social media. We also get a lot of people uploading their actual meals and the calories, and like
Daniel Heintzmanshowing that they tracked it with Cal AI. Another like product-led feature for growth was like milestones, where you can like get badges for like the number of days you logged in a row. So say you log like a full year of days every single day, then you can like post that on your story.
Joseph ChoiThat's cool. So you're you you're hoping that people will post that on their Instagram story.
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More from this episode
- Grow an Instagram account on Hinge prompt tips before building, with a preorder linkSome videos took off within weeks; audience existed before launch
- Charge followers $15 by DM for a manual profile review before buildingPeople paid before any app existed; proved willingness to pay
- Copy the text of a men's self-improvement account's most viral slideshows into your own designsSlideshows averaged 10-50K views; one hit 600K
- Make a month of TikTok slideshows in 1-2 hours from a spreadsheet and templateSeconds per slideshow; a month of posts in an hour or two
- Post unbranded slideshows until views come, then brand every slide with the appOne branded Christmas Day post got ~4M views and $5-6K revenue in a day
- Have one dating influencer make promo videos, then run them as ads from his pageTook revenue from $30-40K/month to about $2M a year; creative supply became the limit
- Open onboarding with short videos explaining the app before asking any questionsAdded after emails asking what the app does; no numbers given
- Ask for profile screenshots after the paywall, not before itSimple onboarding before the paywall performed a lot better; no numbers
- Sell extra analysis credits to people who rerun the profile checkAbout 11% of revenue
- Sell AI photo packs at $14.99 for one and $49.99 for tenBiggest upsell in the app; no spending cap lets big spenders pay more
- Preselect the yearly plan on the paywall to collect cash upfrontWeekly plan also tried; grew a lot slower
- Redesign the meal logging screens so people keep paying after the 3-day trial
- Let users join friend groups and topic groups with streak leaderboards
- Add daily logging streaks, copied from Duolingo
- Make the 3 screens creators film (camera, loading, food detail) instantly clear
- Grow through fitness creators who sell coaching, so the app doesn't compete with themMain growth driver; guaranteed views vs hoping to go viral
- Ramp up paid ads once influencer growth is workingMarked Cal AI's big growth inflection point; no numbers
- Launch in a month with game-like branding unlike bank-style crypto appsWent really viral; idea to launch in about a month
Tags: ios, instagram, shareables, progress-photos, badges, instagram-stories