DM a founder who has already built apps to join as co-founder

… 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. Let's do it. Okay, so we're here at Elizabeth Street Garden.

What I love about what you guys did is that you built with your friends. So tell me how did the first Genesis of CalAI get started. Henry and I initially met at a coding camp when we were 10 years old, and that turned into us gaming almost every day together. And then eventually that friendship led us and our shared passion of programming to building a couple projects. Around that same time was when I initially sent a DM to Blake to meet him. And then after things started ramping up with CalAI, we were looking for someone to come in as like a COO role.

And I knew Jake was doing great work at StudyBuddy. So I offered that he join us. And thankfully he did, he wanted to join. And things just went great from there. The whole partnership, the whole team, we had a great dynamic. Can you give me an example of when there was like a fork in the road, like a really big product decision, or there was like a major conflict, and how you guys settled that? Initial acquisition offers, end of 24, we were receiving low eight-figure acquisition offers.

And everyone on the team was conflicted because on one hand, this is life-changing money for everybody involved. And on the other hand, we have this product which we deeply care about and we feel like there's so much more growth to be done. And I think the way that we resolve this was we kept super open communication. We would all call each other constantly during this period. And through this trust in one another, we were able to reach a …

… copycats? Because that was kind of the thing, like you could copy an app a couple years ago, just attach a sick distribution strategy to it, and it could kind of work. But do you think that still works today? It can work for getting to $10,000 a month or even $100,000 a month But the reality is that I think you see much greater potential in outcomes when you are building something new. And philosophically, too, I find it much more inspiring.

If Zach's initial DM to me had been like, hey, I created a copycat of this, I wouldn't have responded and we never would have worked together. And I think that a lot of legit professionals feel the same way. Any final advice, Zach, to people watching this who are looking for their differentiated idea or marketing strategy? I mean, this is like advice that a lot of people give, but if you're really solving your own problem, it really makes everything fall into place. because you know exactly what you would want out of the product you're building.

So it makes the app design very intuitive. And with the marketing, you know exactly who you're marketing to, because it's marketing to yourself. And so you know exactly the pain points that you hit on. It's a great way to start. I would recommend like if you don't know the idea to necessarily look for, look for something that would actually help you. What I want to talk to you guys next is what you're going to do next. But first, could you give …