Cal AI · B2C · photo calorie tracking app
Ramp up paid ads once influencer growth is working
Marked Cal AI's big growth inflection point; no numbers
Workedpaid-social
What they did
Cal AI hit a major inflection when it seriously ramped paid ads on top of influencer marketing; same pattern at Sway. No detail on platforms or spend.
What happened
Big inflection point for Cal AI
- Stage
- scale
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Daniel Heintzma - I speedran a new app from 0 to $2m/year in 6 months (here's how)“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.”
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Cal AI
All 51 Cal AI tactics- Have 25 hired assistants each email 100 creators a day~220K creators contacted, 2-3K signed; roughly 1 signed per 1,000 emailed
- Move the app mention earlier in videos until views start to dropSweet spot 20-30 seconds in; a friend's app peaks at 60 seconds
- Open 20 brand accounts so each outreach person can DM hundreds of creators dailyHundreds of creators contacted per account per day
- Pay big lifestyle creators to scan their breakfast in day-in-the-life vlogs, 4 times a monthMost profitable content; one video drove hundreds to thousands of promo code uses
- Show a spin wheel that lands on 80% off instead of just showing the discountDouble-digit conversion lift vs a plain discount screen in an A/B test
- Match download spikes to each creator post while volume is still lowEarly on every video showed a clear spike; gets murky at scale
More from this episode
- Sway AI: Grow an Instagram account on Hinge prompt tips before building, with a preorder linkSome videos took off within weeks; audience existed before launch
- Sway AI: Charge followers $15 by DM for a manual profile review before buildingPeople paid before any app existed; proved willingness to pay
- Sway AI: 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
- Sway AI: 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
- Sway AI: 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
- Sway AI: 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
- Sway AI: Open onboarding with short videos explaining the app before asking any questionsAdded after emails asking what the app does; no numbers given
- Sway AI: Ask for profile screenshots after the paywall, not before itSimple onboarding before the paywall performed a lot better; no numbers
- Sway AI: Sell extra analysis credits to people who rerun the profile checkAbout 11% of revenue
- Sway AI: 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
- Sway AI: Preselect the yearly plan on the paywall to collect cash upfrontWeekly plan also tried; grew a lot slower
- Cal AI: Redesign the meal logging screens so people keep paying after the 3-day trial
- Cal AI: Let users join friend groups and topic groups with streak leaderboards
- Cal AI: Add daily logging streaks, copied from Duolingo
- Cal AI: Let users post progress photos, meals and streak badges to Instagram storiesA lot of users share progress and meals; no numbers
- Cal AI: Make the 3 screens creators film (camera, loading, food detail) instantly clear
- Cal AI: Grow through fitness creators who sell coaching, so the app doesn't compete with themMain growth driver; guaranteed views vs hoping to go viral
- Robinhood: Launch in a month with game-like branding unlike bank-style crypto appsWent really viral; idea to launch in about a month