WTF Is App Mafia? Four App Founders on Building, Marketing, and Scaling Consumer Apps | Edited Transcript

This transcript has been professionally prepared for readability. Repetitions, filler, false starts, and low-value crosstalk have been edited while preserving the substance of the conversation. Because the source captions do not identify individual voices in this five-person roundtable, ambiguous exchanges are attributed to the App Mafia panel rather than guessed.

00:00Cold Open: Is Cal AI Real?

App Mafia panel: Cal AI is fake. Have you guys even downloaded Cal AI? It is not actually a real app. Look it up in the App Store—it will not come up. Do the onboarding, then try to pay. See if you can actually sign up for the free trial. It literally will not work.

00:14What App Mafia Is and Why Four App Founders Joined Forces

Ti Morse: I'm here in Miami with Zach, Blake, Alex, and Connor, and they are apparently the co-founders of App Mafia. Guys, what the [bleep] is App Mafia?

App Mafia panel: That is a good question. You could think about App Mafia as—

App Mafia panel: I can take this one. App Mafia is esoteric in nature. It is all-encompassing. What we do is not defined by a limited set of products or operations like a traditional company. We are fluid.

Ti Morse: You're fluid.

App Mafia panel: We're fluid.

App Mafia panel: It is multidimensional. It is omnipotent. I think it revealed itself through photosynthesis—through the processing of light into energy. That is how it reveals itself. That is my best definition. I think it is all around us. Everyone watching, we are all App Mafia together.

Ti Morse: Amazing. What is the first thing App Mafia is going to do?

01:43Why They Are Launching a Course Despite Course-Seller Stigma

App Mafia panel: We are starting with education. By the time this podcast is released, we will have launched. We anticipate a lot of backlash. I have explicitly said maybe 20 times that I would never launch a course, and we are starting with a course. A lot of people intrinsically hate course sellers. They think that if you sell a course, you are a bad person; you are selling your soul. “Those who can't do, teach.” But for every nine bad courses, there is one that provides a lot of value and changes the course of many people's lives. That is our goal. Everything we do is public. With all the apps we have built, you can publicly verify the revenue we are doing, which is different from pretty much every course seller. Our goal is to make an impact, make change, and help people. Even yesterday, I was on calls with two separate people I had briefly worked with. They saw the strategies that I—and all of us—have employed in building and scaling apps. Separately, both now have companies doing more than $1 million a month in revenue just by applying this playbook. Collectively, we probably have more than 30 examples of apps doing over $100,000 a month that have either seen our content or come across our products, gotten inspired, built their own apps, and now have successful businesses.

App Mafia panel: As a group, we realized that we had no incentive to take the time to make this content structured. We thought, “Fuck it. Let’s all get together and drop a course.”

Ti Morse: Did this come together over doing it for the meme?

App Mafia panel: Honestly, yeah, pretty much. We all happened to be in Vegas for a mobile app convention, and Zach was going to Miami. We thought, “Fuck it. Why don't we all live together?” Zach and Blake were originally thinking about doing a course for personal brands, and then they thought, “Why don't we get Connor and Alex involved?” Now here we are.

04:02How Four Founders Divide Roles and Manage Ego

Ti Morse: Crazy. Collectively, you have scaled apps to more than 100 million downloads—some crazy number like that. Individually, you are very good at building companies. What will it look like when you are together?

App Mafia panel: All of us have CEO tendencies, so a lot of it is managing ourselves while managing each other. Sometimes some of us have to step up and take the lead, while others step back. It is fluid and dynamic. A big piece of it is managing your own ego—figuring out how you fit into the puzzle. All of us have greatness in us, and we are each better at different things. The question is how we fit together and put each other in a position to succeed. That is how we will take over. Even on the content side, we see different comparative advantages across the business. When it comes to content and sharing our stories, Alex and Zach will take the spotlight. They are younger, their stories are more viral, and they are cooler than us.

App Mafia panel: They are hotter. Actually, pull up the data. I think we are ahead of you fellas, but they are catching up. I would give you guys one piece of advice: entertain women who do not have boyfriends. Most of them have boyfriends going into college. When you are finishing high school, you want to go to prom with someone. How soon into the college experience do they start breaking up and deciding it is not going to work? It depends. Bringing this back, you have to drop your ego at times and recognize that, just as we do within business, sometimes you have to let other people shine. Sometimes girls have boyfriends, and you have to let them have their woman.

App Mafia panel: Listen up, Tech Twitter.

07:07Why Controversy and Social Capital Drive Distribution

Ti Morse: This will be amazing. You launch a course tomorrow, on Saturday. What is the next stage for App Mafia?

App Mafia panel: Photosynthesis. God dang. The strategy is: drop the course. We are all reputable in the app-building space, and people respect us. If we drop a course, we instantly lose everyone’s respect, but we also gain controversy. We are sacrificing social capital for actual capital. Then we thought, “Fuck this. We are going to be an entertaining group of young guys who also make a ton of money and vlog it all on YouTube.”

App Mafia panel: A lot of people are too scared to do controversial things because they worry they will isolate groups of people. But that is how cult-like followings are built. The biggest YouTube channels and celebrities have their core group of fans, but also their core group of haters. For every core fan, you will have someone who deeply despises you. It is the yin and yang, and we are prepared for it.

App Mafia panel: People are too scared to take risks. Those people are not remembered in history. The people who change how things are done are remembered. Why would we be followers? We have all built our apps by seeding the algorithm and taking over TikTok and Instagram. Blake had a great quote about leaning into your ego—maybe lean into your ego and rage it—because that is how you get views. I made an Instagram Reel/TikTok saying that I was going to start being more of a douchebag on social media, and that to do that, I had to set my ego aside. You might think, “Wait, you have to set your ego aside to be a douchebag?” But ego preservation is what leads us not to take risks or do controversial things that would enable us to gain influence. Instead, we want to take the risk-averse path. Trump would not be president if he had not been on *The Apprentice* or run that show. There are many examples today: Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, AOC, Bernie Sanders. These people rise to positions of mass influence and status through being controversial. For some, it is more calculated; for others, it is just their nature. What we have realized is that the value of social capital and general notoriety is only increasing. We experience this day to day and week to week when it comes to hiring. The more algorithmic reach and distribution you have, the higher-quality talent you can attract. That is what Cluely and Roy Lee are doing well, and why I am bullish on them. Their product has a ways to go, but getting a crack team in place is most important, in my opinion. Leaning into controversy enables you to increase algorithmic reach, which enables you to build bigger and better companies throughout your life.

App Mafia panel: That makes it much easier. Yes, some people are not supporters of Blake or Zach, but you get far more views, and more people want to work with you because of it. That is how Zach and I began working together. I posted a very egotistical tweet about UMAX’s initial traction—my second app. Zach had seen RizzGPT and UMAX organically on social media and Twitter, and he DMed me. Getting inbound from super-intelligent, hardworking, mature professionals—

App Mafia panel: Why are you laughing? Sexy, super-hot 16-year-old guys.

App Mafia panel: It is pretty cool.

11:48Direct-Response Growth, Mindshare, and the $500,000 MrBeast Ad

Ti Morse: How do you think about hyperscaling when you are each growing these apps to millions and millions of users?

App Mafia panel: Most of our strategy comes down to direct response. It is not much of a brand-awareness game. We know how much we are paying an influencer to post, how much we are going to get back, and whether we will make a profit. We do the same with paid ads, UGC content, and organic content. With every channel, the goal is to be profitable. Then we scale the number of posts going out. As long as each one is profitable, that is generally how we have all scaled our apps thus far. Recently, at least at Cal AI, we have been taking much bigger swings. The Quittr guys can talk about what they are doing as well. For example, we just had a MrBeast video drop. It was the most expensive influencer promotion we have ever run: we spent half a million dollars on it. We knew it was a huge risk. If it had been any other influencer, based on our average view-to-dollar ratio, we would not have done it. But because it is MrBeast, there are second-degree effects. Working with him makes us more trustworthy with other brands, so they will work with us. People talk about it because working with the biggest YouTuber ever is such a big thing. Getting that many views at once has other effects too: people talk about it and share it with their friends. That is the mindshare game, and it is something we have been doing more. Mindshare gets to a point where you have so much that everyone almost at once—that is where you get hypergrowth. We are not there yet, but we are seeing all these weird places on the internet where we are just popping up.

App Mafia panel: I agree with everything Zach said. To put it succinctly, increased mindshare makes direct-response marketing more effective. When people are generally aware of your product but have not yet experienced the pain point or needed to download it, then they see a video that really hits that pain point, they download it immediately. For Quittr, for example, maybe someone just jerked off and then sees the ad. If they are already aware of the product, they will download it immediately.

App Mafia panel: Most of our downloads come in at night because people see it then. A buddy told me, “I was about to jerk off last night, and I thought of Quittr immediately and downloaded it.” That is the mindshare game. Quittr saved me from jerking off the other day. I was about to crank one, and Quittr popped into my mind. I thought, “Man, I should not be doing this.” The frequency has certainly decreased.

App Mafia panel: Luke Belmar was at the house yesterday and said something similar. Instead of just trying to market your product, tap into culture. Try to change what people believe. Most people think porn is a good thing, but if we shift the culture and make people aware that it is not cool anymore—and that all the cool people are using Quittr—that is how you get into hyperscaling.

App Mafia panel: Taking a step back, it’s like what Alex just said: porn is cool to watch, which is why young kids watch it. Among friend groups in high school, it’s the cool thing to talk about. When I was in a fraternity in college, everyone talked about their favorite porn star. It was so prevalent that, while we were pledging, another member of my pledge class and I had the first birthdays in the class. As a joke, they got us a Cameo from a porn star saying, “Happy birthday, Blake and Jackson.” I don’t think that’s particularly cool, but it shows that culturally it is viewed as this funny, whatever thing. With Quittr, we’re moving beyond direct-response influencer and organic, brain-rot, faceless content. We’re seeding the algorithm to influence culture, because we win if people start viewing porn as uncool and Quittr as cool to be on.

Ti Morse: Interesting.

App Mafia panel: Companies can turn into movements. A lot of these brands are doing that. Represent is popping up recently.

App Mafia panel: That’s your boy, bro. Heaton London Tang.

App Mafia panel: I’ve been seeing him more and more. Even WHOOP is kind of pop culture now. When you see someone else wearing a WHOOP, it’s instantly something to connect over.

App Mafia panel: I think that’s mostly because they do big sponsorships. That plants a seed in your mind, and you start thinking about it every time you work out. It’s crazy.

App Mafia panel: When people start using it as rizz, that’s when you know it’s a movement. People are DMing.

App Mafia panel: Literally. It’s like a dating app and a subtle flex: “Let me see your Strava.” Then you’re like, “Look how fast I am.”

App Mafia panel: Give us a year: “Let me see your Quittr [bleep].” It’s like fourth grade: “I’m second-fastest in the mile. No big deal.” “I can beat all the other kids on the playground.” It’s like, “Look at my Strava. I ran 25 miles last week.”

17:24Turning App Building and Quittr Into Cultural Movements

Ti Morse: Interesting. When you’re thinking about building this into a movement, how are you designing that brand image in people’s minds? What are you aiming for?

App Mafia panel: One of our major theses with respect to App Mafia is that there’s all this content on social media, specifically short-form content, surrounding entrepreneurship and its different domains. On X, we see a lot of tech content, and we’re all familiar with that space. But in short-form content, it’s a completely different subset of entrepreneurship. People are mostly familiar with social media marketing, dropshipping, day trading, meme coins, and copywriting. Those are the popular forms of entrepreneurship, but I don’t think many of them are great industries to work in long term.

App Mafia panel: They’re not great for the world either.

App Mafia panel: They’re zero-sum. Day trading, meme coins, and dropshipping have a ton of competition and low margins.

App Mafia panel: They feel slimy.

App Mafia panel: And they make their money selling courses, not actually doing the business model.

App Mafia panel: We identified this and thought, why is there no hype behind building software? Why isn’t it cool? One major reason is that it’s been inaccessible for decades. Even 10 years ago, if you wanted to build an app like Cal AI, people were trying to build AI calorie trackers, but you had to develop custom machine-learning vision models and train them from the ground up. You needed a ton of data, millions of dollars, and there was still a high probability the product would go nowhere. Even five years ago, if you weren’t deeply technical, you had to hire developers to build a simple mobile app. Agencies were generally a bad strategy, and you needed a lot of capital or a computer-science degree. Now, with AI and tools and infrastructure such as Firebase and Supabase, almost anybody can do it as long as they’re sufficiently intelligent. That’s all of our background. We don’t have master’s degrees in computer science, and we didn’t have to hire multiple developers. We were able to do it in-house because of these technological advances. That’s one of our high-level visions for App Mafia: making building software cool and accessible.

App Mafia panel: Traditional tech guys are painted as nerds. All they do is code. We’re the complete opposite of that. We [bleep] around. We drink. We do stuff. We get girls. We’re good-looking. We drive supercars. Last night, we were on the balcony spinning game with Luke Belmar. Why? Because we studied. But seriously, I’m not sure where this image came from. I think Silicon Valley culture and The Social Network pushed the narrative, along with the show Silicon Valley, that to be a successful founder, you have to sit in an office, sleep there, or work out of a garage. Even when you start making money, people glorify founders like Elon Musk sleeping in their factories. I respect Elon a lot for doing that. You should figure out what you want to optimize for in life and what your mission is. If your mission is to build a company in an industry, or go to Mars like Elon, you should follow that mission wholeheartedly. But if it’s something else, you shouldn’t do it just because that’s what other people say. You can build very successful companies and enjoy your life. You can have a work-hard, play-hard balance. A lot of people make excuses for why they can’t start young: “I have high school,” or “I have college, so I can’t balance both.” I had a 4.0 GPA while building Cal AI. You have the time. People spend hours a day scrolling on TikTok and social media. They have time for things; they just don’t—

App Mafia panel: What’s the source for that stat? Seven hours a day?

App Mafia panel: On average, U.S. teens spend 4.8 hours a day on social media.

App Mafia panel: Okay, go on.

App Mafia panel: That’s five hours. Seventeen-year-olds spend 5.8 hours a day on social media on average, the highest of any age group. Then it goes down; for 18-year-olds, it’s five hours. The average is 4.8 hours a day on social media, which is ridiculous.

App Mafia panel: Do messages count as social media?

App Mafia panel: I don’t believe they do. I’m not reading deeply into this, but even five hours a day on your phone—imagine if you used that time productively.

App Mafia panel: There’s also a narrative online that, if you want to get into software, you have to raise money. Blake and I both went to college, and I can speak for myself: the entrepreneurship programs at Villanova basically taught you a cookie-cutter process to go raise money.

App Mafia panel: It’s this whole thing where you create a pitch deck as the first part of your company. What the [bleep] are you talking about? I took an entrepreneurship class at Tulane where the entire class was essentially doing pitch decks. At the time, I was working on my college marketplace app, which ended up failing. But I thought, “Holy [bleep], with the amount of time we spend doing pitch decks, everyone could just spin up a little business.” The probability of success would be low across the board, but why aren’t these classes oriented around just doing the damn thing?

App Mafia panel: Why do you think?

App Mafia panel: I think culture and society tell you to raise money because it benefits the people funding the schools. All the VCs and big private-equity shops fund these schools, and if they convince students to raise money, they own most of the company.

App Mafia panel: I don’t know if that’s true. I think it’s because those who can’t do, teach. These entrepreneurship professors usually aren’t good.

App Mafia panel: I agree. The majority of systems in society are set up to be risk-averse. We’re trying to preserve the current status quo. Even within massive corporations, they’re trying not to [bleep] up what they have. They have the golden goose, and they’re like, “Let’s just not kill this thing.” Across society, everybody spends the vast majority of their time studying and analyzing, and a very small proportion acting, because acting is dangerous.

App Mafia panel: Protecting the downside.

App Mafia panel: Exactly. It can be wildly inefficient, but there’s some efficiency to it. It makes sure everything doesn’t collapse.

Ti Morse: Would it not be more incentivizing to teach people the right stuff?

App Mafia panel: Within school, I think it’s ridiculous that we don’t spend more time building and doing the thing rather than studying. Society should trend toward that. At the same time, people who are doing it are making money doing it, and often they wait until they retire to teach. That’s why only a small number of schools do this.

27:36How They Evaluate a $500,000 Marketing Bet

Ti Morse: How easy is it to hire a successful entrepreneur to teach entrepreneurship?

App Mafia panel: The truth is, you can’t if they’re actually good.

App Mafia panel: Zach has an entrepreneurship teacher who sold a multibillion-dollar company, right?

App Mafia panel: He sold his company for more than a billion dollars. There’s a very small proportion of founders who are like, “All right, I’m done with this game. I’m going to teach and have a fun time doing it.” If every school could have professors like that, that would be great. But my professor had a dropshipping tea store. Literally, he dropshipped tea, and I think he did $10,000 a month in revenue. He was trying, and that’s great, but he also needed a job. He had to put food on the table, and he wasn’t necessarily the best person to be teaching.

Ti Morse: The way I always thought about it was that the people who have actually done it probably know the most. If you want to become a great investor, study Warren Buffett. If you want to become a great businessperson, study Jeff Bezos or whoever. On the risk side, a $500,000 investment might seem like a lot of risk to spend on one ad, but it’s relative to total revenue. If you’re doing $30 million-plus a year, that’s about 15 days of revenue on one ad. How do you figure out what risks make sense to take? What is risk to you?

App Mafia panel: It would be more like five days of revenue. We currently do a little over $100,000 a day.

Ti Morse: Okay. Insane. How do you think about risk?

App Mafia panel: There are a few frameworks we looked toward in this case specifically. The way we assessed it involved a few factors. We scaled Cal AI almost entirely through influencers. Only recently have we started running paid ads, such as Facebook pay-per-click ads. We’ve been working our way up to more famous influencers with more followers. MrBeast is the epitome of an influencer. He’s arguably the biggest influencer on the planet, or at least in the top three. He was always the end goal, the North Star. This video made perfect sense for us to fit into because it was about a weight-loss journey. When we had the opportunity to sponsor it, we knew it was a lot of money to spend on a video. Even though it was five days of revenue, Apple’s payout cycles are 45 days delayed, so most apps are somewhat strapped for cash. It also wasn’t five days of profit; it was five days of revenue.

App Mafia panel: So it was probably more like 15 days.

App Mafia panel: We decided to take the risk because we knew we wanted to do it at some point, and it wasn’t going to kill us. It was really just delaying us paying ourselves. That $500,000 was either put toward a video or paid to ourselves immediately. We’re all young, and we don’t necessarily need the money on hand instantly. None of us are super materialistic or trying to buy anything that crazy.

App Mafia panel: Why are you laughing?

App Mafia panel: He bought a [bleep] Lambo. He just bought a house.

App Mafia panel: Disclaimer: there’s a Lamborghini and Ferrari outside. We’re not super materialistic—a $10 million house, a $300,000 car. To be clear, that’s a few days of revenue. Outside of that, I don’t think there’s much any of us want. I broke it down a while ago: there were three things I wanted. One was a car, so I got one; a house, which I don’t need for many years; and a girl.

App Mafia panel: Well, you can’t buy that.

App Mafia panel: Glad you know that.

App Mafia panel: Ultimately, we decided it was worth doing.

App Mafia panel: I’d add that “not materialistic” may not be the right phrase. We’re very risk-tolerant. Worst-case scenario, everything burns to the ground and we’re fine locking ourselves in a room for six months and grinding to get it all back.

App Mafia panel: If everything burned, we’d get it back in a month or two. Easy.

Ti Morse: I think most people view risk as getting on a plane or booking a ticket to meet someone in person. There’s no real risk to that—it’s a few hundred bucks—but loss preservation is so high for people that they can’t get themselves over that hump.

App Mafia panel: Most risks we take in business are power laws. We assess them by saying, “At minimum, we think we’ll get $300,000 back from this $500,000 spend,” accounting for direct response and word of mouth. The upside is in the millions. The probability distribution is somewhat uniform in nature, though definitely weighted toward losing in the short term on cash return. When we get these opportunities, we take them 10 times out of 10. That took us a while to learn. Alex Eubank was the first example. We spent $100,000 per month on him when we were at $500,000 per month, and within the next few months we skyrocketed to over $2 million per month—largely because of him, the influencers he helped us get, and other factors. You guys are employing that with Bryce now.

App Mafia panel: Alex and I haven’t even had this conversation yet, so we’re having it publicly: Alex was a bit uncomfortable with signing Bryce Crawford to a podcast deal. But he’s having the Island Boys on his podcast, who are known for incest and a bunch of other fucked-up shit. It’s going to rip views. He’s also the largest Christian creator in the short-form social-media space. If we can get him, we can get George Janko, and it will kick off the snowball of getting more creators. It was a $20,000 deal, so even if we get $10,000 or $15,000 back, there’s the word of mouth, other creators, and larger deals with him. It was also foundational because our biggest competitor only markets through churches. How can we target that same audience on social media, which is what we’re good at?

33:31Reinvestment, Ownership, and Operating Without Outside Capital

Ti Morse: If you’re doing $1 million a month in revenue, I imagine you have fixed expenses—this house, that car—and outside of that, you can put nearly everything back into the business with an expected higher ROI and a relatively short payback period. At any given time, how much of your top-line gross revenue are you willing to risk on a single bet?

App Mafia panel: A single bet is interesting. It would be difficult to deploy multiple millions on an individual play. The Super Bowl is probably the only clear example. The downside to bootstrapping is that it’s your money: every dollar you spend comes out of your pocket. When you’re VC-backed, you can take those risks. But I think I speak for all of us when I say we would YOLO everything we have into a play if we believed in it. That’s how we started Quittr. I had $3,000 while living with my parents.

App Mafia panel: I had $2,000—the same exact thing.

App Mafia panel: Alex and I met up in San Francisco. He said, “I built this last week.” I said, “I have an idea to help men quit porn.” We partnered up, started doing Reddit and X marketing, and Alex is a little genius at rage-baiting people online. He was making a couple hundred dollars a day and getting on me about marketing: “You’re not doing X, Y, and Z.” I said, “Wait for influencers,” and trusted my gut. I leveraged the $3,000 into about $15,000 because we paid 20% upfront on all the deals. We got a bunch of religious creators, and that’s when we started doing $1,000 a day. It was like, “Holy shit, this is working.” But it could have failed. Trust in yourself.

35:40Quittr's Technical Stack and Its No-Code Prototype

Ti Morse: Connor, what is the technical stack for Quittr?

App Mafia panel: Not gonna lie, man: I drank 25 beers last night, and I have never written a line of code in my entire life.

App Mafia panel: About what I expected.

App Mafia panel: We’ve got the Cookie Monster over here—the one you can ask about code.

App Mafia panel: There was a cookie that looked like this, with a flat line down the middle. Zach called our videographer over and tried to expose our chef, JC. Zach said, “JC, did you take a bite out of the cookie before serving it?” JC said, “Zach, do you think he’s taking a fucking bite straight down the center?”

App Mafia panel: Blake has said that three times now. Really overused.

App Mafia panel: That was actually the first time I made that joke.

37:03Reducing Cognitive Load to Protect Creative Work

Ti Morse: How do you think about reducing cognitive load and hiring away the roles and responsibilities you don’t need to do yourself? I imagine you want to go as hard as possible on the companies and eliminate anything that doesn’t contribute to successful marketing, product improvement, and output.

App Mafia panel: The more you reduce cognitive load, the more creative you can be daily. Getting a chef for the house has great ROI. You don’t need to think about what food you want, ordering it, or making it. It saves hours a week. If a chef prepares healthy meals, you have more energy throughout the day because you’re eating higher-quality food. The energy that gives you for the business will definitely be profitable. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t have a private chef.

App Mafia panel: If you’ve raised a seed round.

App Mafia panel: No, you need a $10 million house and supercars.

App Mafia panel: I don’t get why everyone doesn’t just get a private chef, a Lambo, and a $10 million house.

App Mafia panel: Should we tell them that you got, like, $5 million in pre-seed investment for Mafia?

App Mafia panel: We’re using investor money and blowing it on parties.

App Mafia panel: Roy Lee just bought a Ferrari, right?

App Mafia panel: It must be rented or something.

App Mafia panel: I also just bought a Ferrari. I just want to put that out there.

App Mafia panel: I bought a Ferrari 296 GTS—$430,000, all cash.

App Mafia panel: Does it actually help you get girls? I’ve read that online.

App Mafia panel: Yeah, dude. We had a party, and I brought a girl out to the Ferrari and revved the engine. She left. I did do that, I swear to God.

App Mafia panel: Zach and Alex decided to go on a two-man the other night. Alex is sourcing his Lambo, so he doesn’t have a supercar in the fleet. Blake has his Ferrari, and Zach just got his Lambo a few days ago.

App Mafia panel: What do you drive again?

App Mafia panel: A Raptor R.

App Mafia panel: He drives a truck.

App Mafia panel: My truck does zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds.

App Mafia panel: Zach is a super-safe driver, but he’s not willing to take risks.

App Mafia panel: I’m the safest driver.

App Mafia panel: You’re going to have good insurance.

App Mafia panel: I probably have the most expensive insurance: $3,000 a month.

App Mafia panel: They were sitting outside with Blake and their buddy Luke. Alex gets a little smirk when he needs something from you, and you can tell. These kids walked up acting like everything was normal, with little grins on their faces: “What’s up, guys? How’s your night going?” I told Jude to record this. Two minutes later, Alex asked to borrow my Ferrari so he and Zach could pick up two girls and drive side by side.

App Mafia panel: The cherry on top: the girls had boyfriends.

App Mafia panel: They didn’t tell us they had boyfriends until later in the night.

App Mafia panel: It’s crazy how many girls text them, then you find out, “My boyfriend doesn’t like that I’m texting you,” or, “No calls, screen text, X, Y, Z.” You’re just young, rich, and sexy.

App Mafia panel: Connor, who was at breakfast with us this morning?

App Mafia panel: A very pretty friend of mine joined us for breakfast.

App Mafia panel: What does she do?

App Mafia panel: She doesn’t work. She doesn’t need a job.

App Mafia panel: Why?

App Mafia panel: She wants to be a housewife.

App Mafia panel: Every girl wants to be an entrepreneur.

Ti Morse: Let’s get back to the topic at hand.

43:24Why Bootstrapped Consumer Apps Can Reach High Margins

Ti Morse: Because you’re bootstrapping your companies, it seems to allow you to do things most entrepreneurs can’t do: have a longer time horizon and think in multi-step futures about what comes after the company. How do you think about that?

App Mafia panel: Within App Mafia, we have a clear vision for making software more popular and accessible to the masses. I don’t anticipate that all of us will work on this for a decade, but we have a lot of optionality. Every one of us intends to build massive companies in the future. There’s a classic trope in tech that you should work on the really hard problem immediately. That applies to some people, but not everybody. Even Elon Musk had Zip2 and PayPal before Tesla and SpaceX. Sam Altman did Loopt and Y Combinator before OpenAI. Steve Jobs sold blue boxes—piggybacking on the AT&T network for free—before Apple. That’s how we approach entrepreneurship: you can pursue a stepping-stone path, working on progressively harder things as you mature and build your skills and knowledge. Bootstrapping is very conducive to that. When you raise venture capital, there’s an implicit agreement that you’re going to pursue a decacorn outcome. I’m not knocking anyone for pursuing that; there are a ton of upsides. But that’s how we view it.

App Mafia panel: I honestly think it’s bad that raising money is the default, because most people think the only way to get started in entrepreneurship is to raise money. That’s a fallacy. Even within bootstrapping, people often think the only way to do it is as an indie hacker: without building teams, and usually as a technical founder. When Quittr launched, everyone thought it was just Alex. When Cal AI launched, people thought it was just Zach. People do not realize there are teams behind us. A few months ago, I saw a post saying we had four employees. We have more than 30 people. About half are virtual assistants, and the other half are in more specialized roles.

App Mafia panel: Before I hired someone full-time, I bought into the idea of a one-person billion-dollar company. Then I hired someone and watched our productivity and the scope of what we could do skyrocket overnight. The whole solo-founder idea is a complete scam for most businesses. It may work for some people, but most businesses should find exceptional individuals and hire them. One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Richard Branson, is essentially: find really talented people, give them the resources to succeed, and get out of their way. Your own bias about how something should be run can stunt growth and prevent people from doing what you hired them to do.

48:09The Dispute Over Cal AI's Revenue Claims

Ti Morse: You embody that. You are very good at identifying the right person and recognizing when something is not your domain. Individually, you understand that you will not be the best at every facet of the business. What have you learned from growing these businesses over the past few years about what is not your strength, what you should outsource, and what decisions you should retain?

App Mafia panel: I believe in knowing how to do almost everything, though not necessarily being the best at it. Most of us here can generally code, design, and market, which makes it much easier to hire and identify the right people. People with zero technical knowledge consistently hire terrible engineers because they cannot tell the difference between a bad, good, and great engineer. The same applies to marketing.

App Mafia panel: I cannot code at all, but after we launch and I have more bandwidth, I want to spend a week diving into it. I am confident I can learn enough to build MVPs. You could probably get a job at Meta in a week. If you watch the course, you will learn a lot about development and design. We should all buy it. We can gift it to team members and make them proud.

App Mafia panel: We could give people credits to purchase the course and claim it as revenue. I love that idea. You do not even have investors, so it is just signing yourselves up. This is a joke. We are not actually recycling the same $5,000 back and forth or generating Cal AI revenue through credits and consulting transactions. Cal AI is a real app. Pause the podcast and try downloading Cal AI if you do not believe us. We will wait.

51:12Prioritization: Letting Small Fires Burn

Ti Morse: Going back to the point about Elon sleeping on the factory floor: this is not a hardware company, but there are always fires. One day there is one random fire, and the next day there is another. How do you move between those fires and systematically eliminate them?

App Mafia panel: At App Mafia and Cal AI, simplicity is key. There are really only three things that matter for hard-paywalled apps: getting people to download, converting those downloads, and getting them to stay. That means marketing, conversion, and retention. There will always be fires: broken features, UI bugs, and account data-syncing bugs. Sometimes you have to let the small fires burn so you can attack the bigger problems. The small fires are easy to address, and you may think they are adding up and will destroy the business, but you need to identify the two or three things that matter most for your business model.

App Mafia panel: Use the Pareto principle. Spend roughly 80% of your time on the 20% that matters, and 20% on everything else. On Tech Twitter and in the indie-hacker world, people obsess over ASO and tiny design tweaks while making $400 in monthly recurring revenue. When we launched RizzGPT, our first successful app, it was a mess. We had no reviews, no notifications, and the app’s downloaded name was “RizzGPT-Production.” The API keys were in the front end. Yet we hit $80,000 in monthly recurring revenue within three days. People did case studies and freaked out, saying there was no way we were actually doing it. But the point is to identify the core components of the business: getting people to download, converting them, and making sure they have a good experience and stay. Everything outside of that can wait. The same applies to life. Living together, plenty of things come up around the house. Everyone has a mental priority list, and you trust each other to get things done. At Quittr, we are hiring and trying to find the right talent. It helps to have a good team that can handle fires while you focus on the larger things. Generally, I am a big believer in doing it now.

App Mafia panel: The whole house has realized this over the past week: get it done now. Do not put it off for a week and let it remain a small issue.

Ti Morse: Bias toward action. When you first build an app, you might have API keys in the front end and many small things that are clearly bad. But shipping faster means having a product that generates revenue. The critical path changes over time. You can probably ship faster and tolerate more bugs at the beginning than when you have three million or 300 million users. How has that shifted from simply shipping to making sure everything is locked in?

App Mafia panel: Many of the principles you apply as a small, scrappy team—such as not hyper-fixating on small issues—become real concerns as you scale. It is similar to growing up. As a teenager, people may demonize their parents and their rules. As they get older, they begin to understand them. The same applies to scaling a business. Early on, you demonize big-business principles; as your company grows, you understand more of their importance and the need to run a tight ship.

56:31App Mafia's Current Critical Path

Ti Morse: What is the critical path for your different companies right now?

App Mafia panel: For App Mafia, it has been getting the course done: the back end and the front end. Right now, we are laying the groundwork and setting up systems. Long term, the vision is to be able to live our lives while people around us film and make the content happen. We will still help with ideation and improving and optimizing everything, but if the systems are built properly, we will not need to think constantly about operations. We can focus on being entertaining. Our lives are naturally entertaining: we are young, making millions of dollars, driving supercars, living in a mansion, and throwing parties. Those are things people like watching.

App Mafia panel: We have the ability to inspire people and change the online narrative that you have to raise millions of dollars, pursue e-commerce or dropshipping, or buy a course. You can bootstrap software, build a business doing $10,000 a month, quit your nine-to-five, gain the freedom to think of bigger and better ideas, and meet the right people while doing it. App Mafia’s goal is to build a giant community, inspire people, and help men and women build better lives for themselves. A core principle we followed at Cal AI, that Quittr follows, and that we are following at App Mafia is speed. Everything needs to be done incredibly quickly. Otherwise, you slowly fall behind and fail to build the momentum needed to reach escape velocity.

Ti Morse: You said you were launching tomorrow, and immediately decided to film this today, edit it, and have it up tomorrow. I initially assumed it would just be one or two cameras, but seeing the quality of your production, it will take a long time. That dedication is required to build anything great.

App Mafia panel: We are not sleeping tonight. We are going straight home to edit, and I will watch it to make sure every frame is locked in.

59:00Artificial Deadlines, Urgency, and Faster Execution

Ti Morse: I am constantly running through three things in my mind: I want to ship more, faster; I want to improve quality; and I ask, “Why can’t we do it today?” When someone asks to schedule a call for next week, I think, “Why not call me right now, or do not call me at all?” How do you think about constantly forcing timelines to move faster so iteration loops become shorter?

App Mafia panel: We went through this in the first two weeks here. We got caught up in moving in, the Miami lifestyle, and having fun. We did not have deadlines. We had to sit down and ask ourselves whether we wanted to build this thing to the best of our ability, lock in, and work quickly, or get distracted by Miami and potentially ruin it. We had to put deadlines on finishing the course material, completing the back end, and making sure the launch video was done.

App Mafia panel: We are also perfectionists. Another thing is shipping fast. We spent a lot of money on a launch video, and it did not work out the way we wanted. We scrapped it—$25,000 or $35,000, probably $30,000 down the drain. We saw the video and said, “That sucks.” We bounced back, and now we have another one cooking for tomorrow that we are happy with.

App Mafia panel: I have had that situation more recently. If something is not absolutely insane and way better than anything I have done before, I do not care how much money we put into it. If it is not good, we kill it. In line with the question about speed, one reason people do not move quickly enough is a lack of confidence. They constantly deliberate, worry about how something will be perceived, and wonder whether it will go well. Taking life less seriously, doing things, seeing what sticks, and accepting that you will sometimes embarrass yourself or break things in your business is important. The more decisions you make, the more data you get, and the stronger your intuition grows. If you do nothing, your intuition and mental models never form.

1:02:20Alex Slater's False Thiel Fellowship Claim and the Fallout

App Mafia panel: This is the first podcast we have done this casually. We are bouncing between scaling businesses, photosynthesis, partying, girls, and technical ability.

App Mafia panel: You have to hear Alex’s “fake it till you make it” story. I tried to raise $100 million pre-seed to build a super app that would take on WeChat in the United States. This was before Elon bought Twitter. I had screenshots in my phone of Elon talking about buying Twitter, with notes saying, “I need to compete with this guy.” I was 16.

App Mafia panel: Fast-forward to Miami. We met randomly at a hotel. He had snuck in, by the way. He told me, “I’m a Thiel Fellow.” I was impressed because it has about a 1% acceptance rate, and I asked what he was doing with the money. He said he was traveling and living off it. At the time, he had maybe $250 in his bank account. He had lied about being a Thiel Fellow to impress Zach. I had built an unblocked gaming website that was making around $60,000 a year. We met at a resort hotel pool in Miami. I was with friends and invited this random kid to dinner. We went to Smith & Wollensky, a steakhouse in Miami.

App Mafia panel: In the Uber, I told him about my project, and he said he was building apps too. I had never met anyone else in the entrepreneurial world. This was before I got on Twitter, so I thought I was isolated in a bubble and was the only entrepreneur doing this. He told me he was a Thiel Fellow because I asked whether he was in college. I wanted to apply, so I was impressed and asked him all these questions about his life. He gave vague, non-answers, but I thought he was some mysterious international man of mystery. We went to dinner, talked the whole night, and stayed in touch.

App Mafia panel: A couple of months later, he was going to San Francisco for a startup accelerator called On Deck. He told me to apply, so I did, got in, and we flew out together. We stayed in the same hacker house. The whole time, I thought he was a Thiel Fellow. I introduced him to people that way. Eventually, I started piecing together that he was not. That was also when Cal AI started. We launched it the same weekend as the accelerator. Luckily, he was a cool guy, so I did not block him for being a liar.

App Mafia panel: He never admitted it. I found out because I had posted one of my earliest tweets: a picture of us at the hotel saying, “Everything happens for a reason. I just met this guy. He’s a Thiel Fellow. He builds apps.” A few weeks later, I asked him about the Thiel Fellowship. He sent me a fake email saying he had been removed from the fellowship because something had been posted publicly online. I felt terrible. I thought I had gotten him kicked out of the Thiel Fellowship.

App Mafia panel: The moral of the story is that you need to manipulate people to become friends with them. That is why I am here today. If I had not lied, who knows where I would be. Do you believe in “fake it till you make it”? I think some level of delusion is an important prerequisite to greatness, because every vision is just a delusion. Be delusional. If you convince yourself that you are a Thiel Fellow, you will become a Thiel Fellow. Zach sent me his Thiel Fellowship application for review. One of the questions was about what motivated him or what tangible thing he wanted. He wrote that he wanted to drive a supercar. I told him it was terrible and that they would not accept it.

1:08:50Nik Shevchenko's Prank and Peter Thiel's Institutional Response

App Mafia panel: You can spend the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship stipend on anything. Now it is $200,000, so you can buy an entire supercar. We know someone who used the money to hire gay strippers. You know who you are: Nik Shevchenko.

1:09:33Roy Lee, Attention Strategy, and the Limits of Pure Virality

App Mafia panel: Nik was talking badly about Zach when I first met him. I told him, “That’s my co-founder.” Roy Lee has said he wants to have many children—an armada. He wants to marry a “rice farm wife” and find the purest woman ever. He is Korean, though he wants to be Genghis Khan, so he is Mongolian, right?

App Mafia panel: We recorded another podcast three or four days ago and thought we needed to cut one section because it was too off the chain. We are probably going to put it back in. You have to leave it all in. Someone called me and said, “Leave it in, coward.” I was on a podcast two days ago talking about doing cocaine. It can always get worse.

App Mafia panel: I do not advocate for drugs. I rarely do drugs, and I would never encourage people to do them. But call a spade a spade. Something important for viewers to understand is that I used to hear a lot of online advice about how successful people made their money, built their fortunes, and built their businesses. Meeting these people in person taught me that everyone’s story contradicts someone else’s. For every example of what worked, there is a counterexample of someone doing the complete opposite and succeeding. “Fake it till you make it” worked for Alex, but there are plenty of stories where people faked it until they ended up in jail.

1:12:10Complex Systems, Second-Order Effects, and Studying Beyond Business

App Mafia panel: There are no universal rules that work in every space or industry. The only universal rules are the laws of physics. Generally, lean into your attributes: who you are, what you are good at, and what you are not good at. We are all here because we leaned into who we are. We have different stories, but we are sitting at the same table. Everyone should study the principles of complex systems. Even an elementary understanding leads you to the conclusion that humans are complex systems. We do not exist on single-dimension optimization curves where you can choose the correct actions and achieve the highest outcome. Given the unique nature of every individual, different actions produce different emergent behavior. Two people can take the exact same actions and have vastly different results.

App Mafia panel: There are stories of companies that were on the brink of death, made it through, and succeeded. People glorify those stories and think that almost dying is what makes a great startup. But many startups reached the exact same point, were in the same position, and actually died. It is not necessarily that they did anything wrong. Multiple factors were at play. If the environment around them had been slightly different, they could have gone from the brink of death to massive success, but the factors were not in their favor.

App Mafia panel: People think of Elon as a god-tier business builder who never makes mistakes, but he has said Tesla and SpaceX nearly went bankrupt multiple times. In 2008, Tesla could not make payroll. At an investor meeting, everyone said they did not want to invest. Elon said he would do the entire round, even though he had no money in his bank account. He bluffed, and the dynamic in the room shifted. People suddenly decided they did want to invest because the company was going to survive.

App Mafia panel: Walter Isaacson wrote biographies of both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and spent years shadowing them. He was a mentor and professor of mine at Tulane. One of the best pieces of advice he gave me was essentially that most advice is bullshit: do things, lean into what works, and take risks. It is high-level and basic, but true. Founders with completely different archetypes can achieve insane levels of success. Online, it is easy to remove nuance and take three founders with similar archetypes as proof of what is needed to succeed, while ignoring everyone outside that group—whether in personality traits, business decisions, life orientation, or any other factor.

1:15:39Retention as a Relationship Analogy and Why Consumer Apps Churn

App Mafia panel: What happened to your eye, by the way?

App Mafia panel: I stepped on glass.

App Mafia panel: Really?

App Mafia panel: There was glass everywhere. You said you cleaned it up.

App Mafia panel: All right, I’ll tell the story. I’ve got two stories here.

App Mafia panel: Zach’s trying to be cool, guys.

App Mafia panel: I slipped and hit my face on the floor.

App Mafia panel: We threw a party. It was wet outside, and he slipped on the granite.

App Mafia panel: The second one: I accidentally broke a glass right in front of me.

App Mafia panel: He threw it in the air.

App Mafia panel: This is being taken out of context. There was an objective: flip it. The objective failed, it landed on the granite, and I picked up most of it last night.

App Mafia panel: You guys should see the damage.

App Mafia panel: You should see how much of it I picked up.

App Mafia panel: Why are you attacking me, bro?

Ti Morse: Go back to Chickpea. What’s going on with that? What was your thought process? You were with a girl last night at the bar, it was going great, and then you were like, “I’m going to drop her off at home,” or, “She’s coming tomorrow for the pregame.”

App Mafia panel: Being a kind individual, you know.

App Mafia panel: She’s long-term.

App Mafia panel: Oh, she’s long-term. She’s Chickpea.

App Mafia panel: I don’t think she has a boyfriend.

App Mafia panel: Are you sure?

App Mafia panel: I didn’t ask. Wait, did I ask? We’re fine.

App Mafia panel: It is crazy that this is something you guys have to do. I told Zach this morning, “Wait until next week. The distance is going to start causing friction.”

App Mafia panel: It’s true. Think about it: they’re living completely separate lives.

App Mafia panel: Guys, I just want to make this clear: as much as we make jokes, we are very kind people and respect everybody. Alex is winking at me right now. I don’t know why he’s doing that.

App Mafia panel: We’re very kind individuals. We take care of everyone around us. We mess around, but at the end of the day, we want to make sure everyone—

App Mafia panel: What do you mean by “we mess around”?

App Mafia panel: We like to have a good time, joke, and be lighthearted. I’ll bust Blake’s balls, and he’ll bust my balls.

App Mafia panel: Just as we look at consumer apps through retention, conversion rate, and churn, you can apply that to anything. What Alex was saying about friction is that these girls and their boyfriends are going to have pretty bad retention because of the distance.

App Mafia panel: That’s true.

App Mafia panel: During onboarding, you answer very personal questions, so you feel like the app is tailored to you. Then we build you a custom plan.

App Mafia panel: Why are you air-quoting “custom plan”?

App Mafia panel: We give them a calorie plan.

App Mafia panel: There is no custom plan.

App Mafia panel: Anyway, because they’re answering questions, it feels like the app is for them: “This is what’s happening in my life. These are my goals. The app is being built around me.” When it comes to a partner, if you ask a girl the right questions, you can build a custom boyfriend plan. The questions make the app relate to your life, and you think, “This is the perfect app for me.”

App Mafia panel: But give it two weeks, and the custom plan is going to be different because your boyfriend is no longer aligned with it. Since it’s less relatable and personal, you’re like, “I don’t think I’m going to buy this subscription anymore. I might cancel it or refund it and find another app.”

App Mafia panel: Some people have subscriptions to multiple apps at once. They might do a free trial while they’re subscribed to a competitor.

App Mafia panel: See? I tied it up.

App Mafia panel: Anyone who’s still watching this, please rate that out.

App Mafia panel: I think the retention on this is actually going to be really good.

App Mafia panel: Ty, I’m curious: what led you to ask us questions about women and drugs? This has been pretty unprofessional.

Ti Morse: I’m looking down my list of questions. I don’t see that many questions about women and drugs. Initially, I did about 40 hours of research for a podcast. But I heard the same stories so many times. I’d listen to 20 different podcasts for one interview, and by the time I was interviewing someone, I’d think, “Everyone already knows this stuff, so it doesn’t make for a good podcast.”

Ti Morse: Now I do less research and focus more on what I’m personally interested in, rather than whatever is normal or supposedly should be asked. I go all in. Any time you guys start talking, I think, “That’s a thread. Go there.” My notes are about App Mafia creating a super-tight-knit community of killers, making a ton of money in apps, and self-funding future businesses.

App Mafia panel: I’m reading them right now. He’s lying. “How many girls have you slept with this week?” “What’s the free trial like for women who try to date Alex Slater?” “What is Only Mafia?” “What is Calorie Boy on Yik Yak?”

App Mafia panel: Can I show you this? I’m getting flamed.

App Mafia panel: They’re just talking about you. They look up to you.

App Mafia panel: Yik Yak is an anonymous platform where you can make comments about people on college campuses. People are saying some crazy stuff about you.

App Mafia panel: They posted this picture: “Calorie guy looking for calories.” “Average calorie tracker guy party,” and it’s an Eyes Wide Shut cult party. “Wait, did you guys see that the 18-year-old boy got a Lambo delivered to campus? Heard the guy in the passenger seat blows him.”

App Mafia panel: We support homosexuality.

App Mafia panel: We went from hard tech, nuclear reactors, and cloud seeding to whatever this is.

App Mafia panel: This is not Mafia.

1:22:58The Companies They Want to Build After Consumer Apps

App Mafia panel: We should do this weekly, honestly. We need a setup where we just riff on a podcast. That would be fun.

Ti Morse: Let’s actually talk about this. The short-term goal is building businesses that you can hyper-scale with your own cash by reinvesting the dollars you make. At some point, you want to build much larger businesses that can scale to hundreds of billions in revenue or whatever. How do you get there? What will those businesses be?

App Mafia panel: Personally, I want to build something like a Whoop competitor with local-inference AI. I’m really excited about the future of AI hardware. I don’t think I’m going to compete in glasses, but I would love to build AR software. It’s very exciting to me. I think there will be a massive amount of opportunity if and when glasses replace phones as the primary device we use. Probably something in one of those domains.

App Mafia panel: We could all drop everything right now and build a billion-dollar company. On paper, all of these companies are already billion-dollar companies. If someone is trading a company at 100 times revenue, $30 million equals $3 billion.

App Mafia panel: We are billionaires.

App Mafia panel: I think App Mafia will grow to more than a billion-dollar valuation. We could do this right now, but it’s more fun and exciting to enjoy the present, be young, be YouTubers for a bit, and live off that. Then, 10 or 15 years from now, when we’re done with this side hustle, it’ll be time to build the billion-dollar company.

App Mafia panel: We also have a movement. We have the ability to build a really strong movement.

App Mafia panel: Ten or 15 years from now?

App Mafia panel: You’re going to be old.

App Mafia panel: Maybe 20 or 30 years from now, I’ll start taking life seriously.

Ti Morse: No. When do you expect it—five years?

App Mafia panel: Two years.

Connor McLaren: My biggest personal goal is that my last name is McLaren. My entire life, I’ve been asked whether I’m part of it, and I say, “One day,” because I genuinely want to buy the company and turn it around.

App Mafia panel: They don’t need turning around. They seem like they’re doing fine.

App Mafia panel: They went bankrupt. Saudi Arabia bought them.

App Mafia panel: The Saudis are turning them around.

Connor McLaren: Then I’ll get involved. McLarens are notorious for always being in the shop. They’re fast cars and they’re sexy, but I want to be a part of it and blow them up.

App Mafia panel: The cool thing about App Mafia is that we can build a community. We could potentially keep a Mafia house and bring up young founders to almost replace us.

App Mafia panel: Like FaZe Clan.

App Mafia panel: In a few months, we can put in a bid for McLaren and do Mafia McLaren.

App Mafia panel: Debt financing.

App Mafia panel: How much would that even cost?

App Mafia panel: A few thousand times leverage. Maybe 5,000 or 50,000 times leverage. You might want to put a million down.

App Mafia panel: We could do it.

App Mafia panel: We’ll put Jude’s name on it. Jude will co-sign the loan.

1:26:51Zach's Three-Year Nuclear Startup Thought Experiment

Ti Morse: Unironically, you guys would probably crush running a car company.

App Mafia panel: That would be sick.

App Mafia panel: All traditional industries can be revolutionized by anyone who really understands the trends. Every industry has alpha where you can leverage social media and AI to make it better. If we bought a car company, we would make more lifestyle content and send cars to—

App Mafia panel: I do not buy any of that. Running a multinational corporation with tens of thousands of employees is very different from running 20.

App Mafia panel: Totally. I’m talking about the marketing side.

App Mafia panel: Zach could build a nuclear weapon. Zach said earlier that if he devoted himself to it, he could build a nuclear weapon within three years.

App Mafia panel: If that were my only goal—

App Mafia panel: North Korea needs to get this guy right now.

App Mafia panel: North Korea’s only goal is to have an arsenal.

App Mafia panel: I have a question for the table. Obviously, we didn’t start with millions of dollars. Did you expect it to be this easy once you had this momentum?

App Mafia panel: Three years ago, I thought this was achievable. But from where I stand now, I don’t think a nuclear weapon is achievable in three years.

App Mafia panel: Zach, what is your comment?

Zach Yadegari: Limiting beliefs.

App Mafia panel: Self-limiting beliefs.

Zach Yadegari: Definitely self-limiting beliefs. I think we could do it. I think Alex and I could do it together. I haven’t looked into it enough to create a plan on the spot.

App Mafia panel: Entire countries with tens of millions of people have been trying to build nukes for decades.

Zach Yadegari: Here’s the counter: SpaceX outcompeted NASA like crazy over decades.

App Mafia panel: Sure, not in three years.

App Mafia panel: But this is just a nuclear warhead.

App Mafia panel: I think you have something up your sleeve. Are you part of some secret society?

Zach Yadegari: All we need to do is hire a couple of nuclear engineers, get some enriched uranium, and figure it out.

App Mafia panel: I think the bottleneck is the materials necessary.

App Mafia panel: The mindset.

App Mafia panel: We have the mindset. You don’t have the mindset.

App Mafia panel: Were you trying to go to Russia and buy a retrofitted rocket with $30 million of revenue?

Zach Yadegari: Am I trying to right now? No. But if I needed to, if I wanted to, I could. My plan would probably start by raising money—raising as much as I physically could in the form of venture capital.

App Mafia panel: To build a nuclear warhead in three years?

Zach Yadegari: Yes. My pitch would be that we’ll take over a country together and split the jackpot.

App Mafia panel: My God.

App Mafia panel: You could actually become dictator of a country with tens of millions of people. Many countries would immediately install you.

Zach Yadegari: No, but seriously, I believe we could do it. It would take finding the materials, getting enough funding, and being able to network.

App Mafia panel: You can’t bootstrap this.

App Mafia panel: If you could, it would just be difficult.

App Mafia panel: That’s why you use VC connections. They have connections.

Ti Morse: By the way, I want everyone to document this. We should clip this moment. There’s a split at the table: the extremely delusional and, I don’t know, maybe the too-realistic pessimists. We’ll see how this plays out long term. Personally, I know which half of the table I’m backing on this idea.

App Mafia panel: You're back.

App Mafia panel: I want to back the delusional guys.

App Mafia panel: Blake and I have won every game in this house—every argument, every one-on-one, every two-on-two. We have won. So, see where we're at.

App Mafia panel: Let's break it down. How much older are you guys? Twenty-five percent older?

App Mafia panel: Yeah.

App Mafia panel: Let's see whether we're on track to overtake you.

App Mafia panel: We're 18 and 19. It doesn't matter. We're ahead of you right now, and we always will be. Compound interest—we'll always stay ahead.

App Mafia panel: You guys haven't realized that you need to learn more from us and listen to what we say. You nod your heads like, “Okay, I get it,” and then you go mess up exactly what we told you that you were going to mess up. If you listen, you can overtake us.

App Mafia panel: We'll put it to the test.

App Mafia panel: We are your bosses.

App Mafia panel: How is that the case?

App Mafia panel: He's the CEO of Cal AI.

App Mafia panel: I do not exist within the structure. I am the grandmaster.

App Mafia panel: We're going to put App Mafia on pause for three years, devote the rest of our time to building a nuclear warhead, and see who's laughing. Then we're going to leverage that nuclear warhead to take over App Mafia again.

Ti Morse: All right. Final question: What's the hardest thing you've overcome?

1:31:39Their Hardest Setbacks and Lessons From Failed Products

App Mafia panel: There's a Quittr competitor—a Quittr clone—called Overcomer.

App Mafia panel: Who made it?

App Mafia panel: Landon and another kid. I hate those guys.

App Mafia panel: They cloned Cal AI too. The reason I hate them is that he applied to work for me and then built a Cal AI clone.

App Mafia panel: Did he pull the whole thing where he went into the meeting to learn?

App Mafia panel: No, not that. He didn't even attempt to innovate on anything. It was literally the exact same product.

App Mafia panel: Building a competitor is cool, but being a copycat isn't.

App Mafia panel: There was an entire company called Rocket Internet that, for a long time, cloned companies like Groupon and Airbnb. They would go overseas, clone an American company that was succeeding, and force the company to buy it.

Ti Morse: We should answer this question, though: hardest thing you've overcome. Let's try to make these short.

App Mafia panel: Getting rejected from the Thiel Fellowship.

Connor McLaren: As I said previously, I had a lot of delusion and a lot of visions, and for many years they just didn't come true. I got to a point where I thought I was crazy, but I wasn't actually putting the work in. As soon as I started using that delusion to build instead of just thinking about things, everything changed. I'm very happy I overcame that. It was very difficult for many years.

Zach Yadegari: The hardest thing I've overcome was probably more mental than physical—although it was very physical. I got jumped last Halloween and completely broke my nose. I had to get surgery and was in pain for two weeks straight, in bed. At the same time, we were taking acquisition calls with companies, so there was a lot of agony. I had to overcome it because I wasn't just going to sit there and die. That was definitely the hardest week or two weeks of my life.

Ti Morse: Why did you get jumped?

Zach Yadegari: Honestly, I don't blame anyone. I went to a party that a girl invited me and a few friends to. She knew the host, but apparently we weren't actually wanted there. The guys were from a different town and wanted us to leave. We were walking out, but a riot formed around us. These kids were rowdy and drunk. I write it off as the behavior of drunk high school kids: when you're with your boys and guys from another town show up, there's a natural tendency to try to get into a fight. It wasn't personal.

App Mafia panel: They smashed your nose, son.

Zach Yadegari: It was a big brawl—seven of my friends and about 50 other guys.

Ti Morse: Did you win?

Zach Yadegari: We got out of there. I got a good hit in, but I got really messed up.

Ti Morse: Okay, Blake.

Blake Anderson: Honestly, I would say doubt. The hardest thing I've ever overcome was doubt. From when I was a child, I always felt like I had massive potential. But as time goes on and you don't actualize that, you start asking yourself, “Why isn't this happening? Why am I not living the life I always dreamed of?” I think the sad thing is that most people never get out of that state. Especially nowadays, with social media and the internet, we romanticize achievement. Until I was 22, I had graduated college and had literally nothing to show for myself. The only jobs I'd worked were DoorDash, tutoring, taking tests for other kids, and mowing lawns. I hadn't had an internship, never had a W-2, and never even got a second-round interview. I knew I was smart and a high achiever internally, but there was no external data. The external indicators were lacking. There was zero data. The longer it goes on, the more that doubt grows. Accepting that state and continuing to push forward is difficult, but if you do it over a long enough time horizon, it usually pays off.

Ti Morse: Was there a moment during those first 22 years, or closer to the end, when you could see an inflection point happening?

Blake Anderson: There were different individual turning points, but no. It was failure after failure after failure. People always told me I was smart, and I always worked hard. I was thinking, “What am I doing wrong? I'm smart, I work hard, and I take risks. What else do I have to do?” It was years and years of that. These guys are lucky—they got to hit it early, at 18 and 19. For Connor and me, it was probably something similar.

Ti Morse: A lot of people are going through the same thing. What makes you different in overcoming that, rather than getting defeated, submitting to society, and doing what everyone else tells you to do?

Blake Anderson: All of us here, and most successful founders I know, embody perseverance, risk tolerance, and sacrifice. It's getting up, getting knocked down, getting up, getting knocked down. Most people take a shot or two—sometimes they half-ass it, give it an attempt—and the second it doesn't work out, they're like, “All right, back to the standard path.”

App Mafia panel: Do we all have a vision for our future? Are we all in agreement that we will not accept any reality that isn't that? We're not stopping until we achieve the things that we want.

Zach Yadegari: I reject that framing. It's a dangerous mindset, because what I want for myself isn't materialistic. There are material things, like having enough cash that I never have to worry about money and making sure my family is taken care of. But my future is freedom—the ability to do what I want, whenever I want.

App Mafia panel: Step one to getting there is achieving freedom. It's like a narrow tunnel: you achieve freedom, and then there's this massive range of directions you can choose.

Zach Yadegari: My goal was always to make a million dollars before graduating high school. We did that.

Ti Morse: For anyone listening or watching, Zach has a YouTube video from when he was 14: “How I'm Going to Make a Million Dollars Before I Graduate High School.” He's walking around his house, talking to the camera.

Zach Yadegari: I didn't have a plan. I just knew that was my goal. I felt destined for it. Everything with Cal AI was moving so fast that it took time for me to realize we'd made it happen. One day, I looked up and thought, “We actually did it.” Even though I had achieved my furthest-out goal at that point, I wasn't done. I knew there was more to life. Life wasn't just accomplishing that goal. You need goals that are always shifting and not set in stone. You should have a multitude of goals you're chasing, but they shouldn't all be truly achievable. If you don't have goals to chase, I think that's where depression comes from.

Blake Anderson: At least for me, it took a long time to figure out what journey I actually enjoy beating the pavement on. The goal isn't getting a supercar. It's keeping on grinding and getting more people to start awesome companies.

App Mafia panel: I've learned a lot from Blake about this. Freedom is the elimination of noise and having more bandwidth to do what you want. It depends on what season of life you're in. That could be building a product, reading, learning, or exploring. As long as you eliminate the noise distracting you from that journey, I think that's where happiness lives.

Connor McLaren: For me, similar to Blake's sense of doubt, it was building self-confidence. In high school, I lived in this middle zone of not taking much accountability, even when playing sports, because I didn't want to get in trouble. I was afraid of being yelled at and having the pressure. Then my friend Clay and I started practicing after every practice. I finally got my shot to play in a game. We were a top-five team in the nation at the time, and then COVID hit and the whole season was cut. But it gave me confidence: putting in the work, getting it done, and seeing something come from it. That rolled into college, civil engineering, and wanting to build homes. I think that's exactly why I'm where I am today. As funny as it sounds, I told Blake, “If you can do it, I can do it,” because I genuinely believe you can do whatever you want in life if you put in the work. That confidence came from being told by my coach that I was going to play against our rival.

Ti Morse: Amazing. Okay, boys: stay relentless.