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Blake Anderson has been an entrepreneur all his life. When he was seven he searched for a book on how seven year olds could make money. There wasn’t one. So he wrote it. 

Then he sold candy, mowed lawns, manipulated video game marketplaces (ran the feather market in Runescape), sold counterfeit NBA jerseys and built ethereum miners when he turned 16. 

Recently, he’s out of college and making a name for himself in the consumer app space. 

The first idea came from his roommate asking for advice on what he should text back in dating apps. This was a few months after ChatGPT was launched and Blake thought he could use it to build an app to help come up with responses. 

With only a bit of python programming experience and no money Blake used ChatGPT to slowly build the app. He called it RizzGPT, now called Plug AI. 

Blake partnered with two cofounders that had social media experience and launched on TikTok. It did reasonably well and then they tapped into the Rizz niche (short for charisma). The niche focuses on helping people talk to girls. It was untapped. They advertised on two faceless YouTube channels for $50 each and hit 200k downloads in 5 days. They were at $80K MRR. 

The App has positive reviews, but the $40 per week price seems to be an issue. But it did lead to $2.5 million ARR for the app. 

But it wasn’t all high fives. The cofounders were fighting about where they should take the business and Blake decided to leave (still retains equity). 

He was looking for his next idea when he noticed looks maxing was taking off. Looks maxing is all about men trying to become more attractive. 

The ChatGPT vision API had just been released. Blake put two and two together and used ChatGPT to program Umax. 

Umax would rate your attractiveness and give you a score and ways to improve. 

The reviews are positive, but again the pricing seems to be a bit of an issue. 

To launch the app he partnered with Sam Zia who is well know in the looks maxing community. 

Sam had 200k followers back then and with a launch video he generated a few hundred thousand views, few thousand downloads and $100k in revenue in the first month. 

Blake made it into the HF Zero start up accelerator program and spent the next three months with 20 other people in a house working on his start up. 

Then came the copycat. Everything was copied, the marketing, the metrics, everything. And they were growing quicker. 

Blake put it all on the table and spent $200k on influencer partnerships. More than they had made at that point. It explodes. They hit $500k MRR. 

But Blake was already onto the next app. He had found two 17 year old killer coders, or stallions as I would prefer to call them. 

Blake knew calorie tracking was one of the biggest categories in the app store but he thought they could use AI to make it easier and more accurate. 

The three of them start Cal AI. Blake provided the playbook, guidance and capital. His stallions… The code. 

And it’s another winner. It made $300k in the past month and just hit $3 million in ARR. 

Next? Blake is starting a media company focused on self-actualization. The plan is to launch free tools and maybe one day make a profit with a product. It’s called Apex. 

I’m interested to see what Blake does after Apex. He seems to love the start and ramp up, but then continues onto the next project. 

Sources:

Brett Malinowski interview

Omar Waseem interview

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