Launch in a month with game-like branding unlike bank-style crypto apps

Joseph Choi… a bunch of different things. Like you've been at your own startup. You've been at pretty large companies. Um other entrepreneurial things. How What is it like? Like being at a a scrappy like fast-growing startup like Cal AI? But it I say startup, but it's like I don't I don't know if you would call it a startup. It's like, [laughter] you know, like it's like a you guys are bootstrapped, um but you seems like you kind of operate like a startup.

Daniel HeintzmanI think that that's what probably the biggest takeaway from Cal AI is the co-founders, they they all talk about like moving with speed and being very fast. That's actually like a lesson I've learned from other teams I've been a part of. I think he said something about how human motivation only lasts like about 2 weeks. So like if you have like this insight to work on this like new feature, human motivation only lasts for like 2 weeks to work on it, and like really follow like finish it. That's another thing I saw like at Robinhood, too, is like we launched Robinhood Crypto, which like got went really viral when I was there.

Daniel HeintzmanAnd that product went from idea to being launched within a matter of a month, which was pretty fast in comparison to like most big companies. And so I think that's like probably the biggest takeaway is like once you have like a big project where you can get like the whole company to rally behind, I think being able to move fast is a key differentiator.

Joseph ChoiI'm curious. What did you do? What was your role in the crypto rollout?

Daniel Heintzman… all the apps that I think are like really well designed, and we'll constantly like go back to them and look at them, and think about like what makes them much better and like see how I can like get inspiration from them. But I think like one lesson I actually got from Robinhood when we were working on the Robinhood Crypto feature, which is like so so long ago, but I think still sits with me, is how much the team thought about like branding. And

Daniel HeintzmanI mean, I don't think I'm like the like great at branding, but I think like the idea of like being very intentional with coming up with like lots of different variations, and I think it helps with growth a lot if you can have a product that looks unique from anything else that exists on the market. It'll stand out, and people will be more curious to try it out. And I think that's what happened with Robinhood Crypto is cuz there was a lot of other crypto apps that had existed at the time, but nothing had looked quite like this. They were a lot They looked a lot more like, you know, Coinbase is

Daniel Heintzmanone example where it was more like a banking product, whereas this looks more like a It looks like a video game almost. I think being able to think of it like that, like what is going to catch people's attention, is a good way of thinking about it when it comes to branding.

Joseph ChoiDo you use that at all with Cal AI? Like the there's some aspects of it where it like doesn't feel like a calorie tracker, you know? It like feels very sleek. The scanner itself, you know, is a a novel feature compared to uh the existing calorie trackers that were out before Cal AI existed. But are you Are you trying to be like on the edge in a in a way that you described with Robinhood Crypto, or are you trying to be more like minimal and not …