At TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday, 19-year-old Zach Yadegari, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus, explained how Cal AI, the AI-powered calorie tracking app he founded in 2024, reached viral scale through a systematic influencer marketing strategy. The company has generated over $30 million in revenue in two years and was acquired by MyFitness in March for an undisclosed amount.

Yadegari said the turning point came when one influencer’s post brought roughly a thousand new users over two days. That convinced him the channel could work, so the team started recruiting influencers as fast as possible, paying as many people as they could to post about the app. He described the pattern as a ‘clear formula’ that was ‘pretty linear, but extremely fast’: each post produced a predictable number of viewers, and a portion converted into users.

The mechanics were straightforward. The company negotiated rates tied to reach, promising influencers payouts for a certain scale of exposure and asking them to keep posting until they hit the target. Yadegari noted that many influencers are ‘broke college kids’ who ‘just want cash.’ The main selection criterion was finding influencers with ‘very tight communities,’ because their reach could be measured and conversion was dependable.

Yadegari credited his family for giving him the freedom to pursue his ambitions, but not higher education: he said the only real reason to go to college is to have a fun social time. Earlier this month he launched Persona, a new AI agent startup that has raised $10 million. Its stated mission is to ‘make computing seamless with human life,’ with a personal AI assistant that lives anywhere with an internet connection—iMessage, app, email, phone call—and a planned ‘hardware ecosystem around’ the app.