An 18-year-old American man is making $1 million a month from a personal idea!

Zach Yadgari, Founder of Cal AI  

                                               

An 18-year-old American man is making $1 million a month from a personal idea!

While millions of American students were preparing to enter college this summer, 18-year-old Zach Yadgari was planning a completely different path. The young man, who had started his studies at the University of Miami's College of Business Administration, didn't intend to stay in academia for long after launching a successful calorie-tracking app that generated huge profits.

Zach is the founder and CEO of Cal AI, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze images of food and estimate their calorie count with 90% accuracy, according to what he told CNBC. The app was launched in May 2024 from his parents' home in New York and currently generates a net profit of approximately $274,000 per month, after deducting operating costs.

From a simple idea to a company with 30 employees

The app is available for free on the Apple and Google Play stores, with a monthly subscription of $2.49 or an annual subscription of $29.99. The team currently has 30 employees and generates total revenue of $1.4 million per month, according to documents reviewed by CNBC.

Zach began learning programming at the age of seven with the support of his mother. He was looking to develop a "viral" app. After several failed attempts, he decided to focus on a personal problem: tracking calories while exercising. All available apps required manual entry of food, which he found annoying.

With the help of friends, including programmers he met online, Zach developed an intelligent model that analyzes photos of food and automatically calculates calories. After an initial $2,000 marketing campaign, the app quickly began attracting users, generating more than $28,000 in the first month and $115,000 the following month.

A Lavish Life and Heavy Responsibilities

Despite his young age, Zach lives a life unlike that of a typical college student. In a promotional video he posted on Instagram, he was seen driving a Lamborghini bearing the "CAL AI" license plate, living in an off-campus mansion with his friends, and partying "almost every night," he says. But behind this lavish lifestyle, Zach bears a heavy responsibility: running a company that his employees' families depend on. "I can't just disappear for a few months and ignore work, like I did with my previous projects," he says.

Although the app appears simple, its costs are high. The company spends approximately $770,000 per month on marketing and advertising, in addition to salaries, legal services, and technical support. Zach doesn't plan to stay in college for long, and hopes to sell the app or hand it over to a new CEO within two years so he can focus on his next project in the field of artificial intelligence.

"I want to dedicate most of my life to entrepreneurship... and I hope it will be part of my legacy," he says. Zach is no stranger to the world of entrepreneurship. He first took his first steps in this field while still in high school, when he founded a gaming website called Totally Science, which allowed students to bypass school internet restrictions and play their favorite games.

The website quickly spread among students, and Zach successfully sold it to gaming company Freeze Nova for approximately $100,000 in February 2024, marking his first major financial achievement before turning 18. Despite criticism from some users who have high expectations for artificial intelligence, Zach insists that Cal AI will become the "largest calorie-tracking app," surpassing its popular competitor, MyFitnessPal, which has over 270 million users.