A Chair Fixer Turned a Two Week Trial Into a 60 Million Dollar App Engine
Cal AI had only a few dozen creators when Dickens arrived, and grew to more than 200 posting at once.
The Superwall Podcast · Alfie Dickens - Meet The Marketing Genius Behind Cal AIAlfie Dickens worked part time as a stadium ops guy at Minnesota United, fixing chairs. He had finished school and had no full time income, only the stadium shifts and commission work helping a couple of influencers try to land brand deals.
One of those influencers gave him a reason to contact Jake, the founder of Cal AI. Cal AI is an app that estimates the calories in a meal from a photo, so people do not have to log each ingredient by hand. Dickens and Jake started talking about soccer, got along, and Dickens asked if the young company was hiring.
Cal AI said it was not really hiring. Dickens asked the team to keep his resume in mind because he had some experience with influencers, and he landed a two week trial in marketing. The trial became his first full time job. He had joined a month or two after the team started, when the app was new and few people had heard of it.
He started with about 20 to 30 creators. Over the next two years, he said, he helped grow the influencer program from scratch to more than 200 creators working at one time, each posting four videos a month.
At its peak, Cal AI reached about 60 million dollars a year in revenue before it was acquired. To build that result, Dickens said, "We reached out to about 220,000 influencers."
Dickens went from fixing chairs part time to running the outreach program that took Cal AI from a few dozen creators to hundreds posting every month.
Questions people ask
What exactly does Cal AI do?
Cal AI estimates calories and nutrients from a photo of a meal, rather than asking users to type in every ingredient. The point is to make tracking faster and easier to stick with, since manual logging is tedious and many people quit. Dickens said the team never promised the scan was exact.
How do you contact 220,000 influencers?
The team started with about five assistants sending about 100 cold emails each per day, and later grew to about 25 assistants sending about 2,000 messages a day. Dickens said they reached about 220,000 influencers and signed about 2,000 to 3,000, or about one percent. A rough funnel was 100 contacts leading to 10 replies and two calls and about one signing, with 10 signings from 1,000 a good result and sometimes only one.
Can another startup still copy what Cal AI did?
Dickens said overall influencer marketing has become more expensive, with prices skyrocketing as influencers and agencies learned their value. He said finding one dollar or two dollar deals priced per thousand views became much harder over the last six months, which helped drive the rise of lower cost user style videos. Cal AI tried that style early, paused it when influencer deals were cheap, and in recent weeks began looking at it again, and Dickens said a new app should run both because those videos can bring cheaper views but may convert less without a trusted influencer.