Grow through fitness creators who sell coaching, so the app doesn't compete with them

Joseph ChoiSo you feel like with with dating creators, they're making a lot of money already like selling dating coaching, basically, or courses? And then for fitness influencers, they just Like, I guess you could sell fitness training, but from in your experience, they just the most fitness creators are just not like making that much money?

Daniel HeintzmanYeah, I'd say it's that, but also it doesn't conflict with their business. So, for Cal AI, it's a calorie tracking app where you're like tracking your your meals, whereas what they're selling as a product themselves is the fitness coaching. And so, it doesn't conflict, right, with our app. With Sway, the product kind of conflicts with their offerings because they offer What they offer is like giving feedback on your profile and photos. And that's basically what we provide, but in an AI form. And so, if they're promoting the app, it kind of cannibalizes their own product.

Joseph ChoiI see. Yeah, yeah. That's a good insight. It has to work with the with the creator's existing business model. That is that is a big advantage that Cal AI seems to have. So I want to talk about the the product also. So like you are the head of product at Cal AI. You co-founded Sway. Did you have a team with you building Sway? You said you had a couple of co-founders. Were you Like, what was your role in in Sway?

Joseph Choi… on social media, like uh a very specific type of strength training, or whatever, like science-based lifting, whatever. And then is going viral on social media, and then you can plug Cal AI into that content niche as a solution. And it's not It's not so much that you're like creating a product around the niche, but you're just like If you have a broad enough niche, you can you can tap into different demographics or psychographics, I guess.

Daniel HeintzmanI think the other way that Cal AI thinks about it is like how many influencers are there in the niche that can promote the video, or that can promote the product in their videos, and then how expensive are those influencers. With Cal AI, there's just so many fitness influencers, and they're also like not super They're like reasonably priced, as opposed to like say you go into like the beauty niche where they're getting brand deals from these makeup companies. I think that's like a tough niche to like come up with like a female looksmaxing app, and you're trying to promote it through these people who are getting brand deals from like makeup companies, because they have such big margins. But

Daniel Heintzmanyeah, trying to find those niches where you can like distribute on social media where the people who are creating the videos like aren't so expensive and there's a lot of them.

Joseph ChoiWhat do you think about distribution these days? I know you're on the product side, but I'm sure you've like you've been like super embedded in these teams. Like do you think that is there are certain growth strategies that are dying out? Are there any ones that are that you're paying attention to that are coming up?

Daniel HeintzmanI think influencers is a pretty cool niche. I mean, Cal AI, it's proven that out. What you'll notice if you look at other apps in the App Store is all the apps that have done just primarily UGC or primarily done what we did with Sway, which is like the slideshows or the create your own content, it's harder to scale, right? You can only create as much content as you can push out yourself, as opposed to doing influencers, you can just keep stacking up um influencers to create posting videos. And then you're also The key with influencers is you have guaranteed views, as opposed to doing UGC, you're hoping and praying that you get a month where you go viral. And so it's less consistent.

Daniel HeintzmanI think I mean, paid ads also is when Cal AI took uh had a like a big inflection point is when we started like really ramping up on paid ads. And same as the app I was working on before. It's like once we started doing paid ads is when it really started scaling. And so, I mean, if you can get paid ads to work, it's the best option, but it's also kind of hard to do, right?