GTM Sauce

Cal AI · B2C · AI calorie tracker

Give each co-founder one area to fully own

Team says no real fights; reached ~$50M/year and a sale

Workedteam-process

What they did

Four co-founders each owned one domain: CEO (Zach), co-founder/investor/advisor (Blake), CMO/COO for marketing and operations (Jake), CTO managing the tech team and product (Henry). Complete trust to handle their area; team said this avoided fights.

What happened

Team claims no real fights; took the app to ~$50M/year run-rate and a sale

In their words

I Spent 24 Hours With iOS Millionaires

Play from 3:16

… about the dream team. I know that there's two other founders that were deeply involved in Cal AI. Who were those and would you potentially be able to like get them on the line right now? We can just chat with them real quick. Yeah, of course. There we go. What's up, Jay? What up Jake? What's up guys? This is Pat. Starter story here. We're in the middle of filming right now and just get who you are, how old you are, what your role was in CalAI.

3:16

My name is Jake Hestia. I am 31 years old and I was the CMO slash COO at CalAI. So I handled our marketing operations and the overall business operations. I'm Henry, I'm 18 years old, and my role at CalAI was CTO. So I managed the tech team, made the product as seamless as possible to use, What about all four of you guys worked so well together? This is something I've thought about a lot. And I think what it is, is all of us had our own domain of expertise.

3:46

And we all had complete trust in each other to go and handle that one task. That's why we didn't really have any fights. We were just all so focused on the one thing that we became experts in. At such a young age, did you have any idea that CalAI would get this big, or this would become as big as it did when you first started it? When we first started it, we were still working for a salary on another app, and it was hard to believe that this would be the app that caused us to just go on our own and become, I guess, like, self-employed.

4:20

Well, thanks guys for FaceTiming it. I wish you could be here. We're gonna be having fun today filming, but thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Peace out, guys. Peace. Cool, all right, well, we're gonna talk all about all your apps. You have multiple apps, you're working on something new. So I'm excited to learn, go see your offices, go hang out in New York City and learn about apps. Let's do it. All right, let's go. Ready? Yeah. …

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Tags: cofounders, role-split, trust