How Cal AI got its users
Hundreds of micro fitness creators paid a few dozen dollars each, on a product that demonstrates itself in five seconds.
Read from signals. Consistent with what is publicly observable, but nobody confirmed it. Check before you quote it.
You could start this on Monday. No budget, no audience, no permission needed.
- A volume of social proof in weeks
- A creative library to recycle into paid
- A paywall that converts before you spend
- A process to run 200 conversations at once
Creators and UGC in 2026
The most effective channel in consumer mobile today, and the most saturated at the top end.
Everything on this channel →The play
5 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Pick a function that demonstrates visually in under five seconds
- 2
Contact 200 micro fitness creators between 5k and 50k followers
- 3
Pay $50 to $150 per video and demand paid usage rights
- 4
Turn anything above 100k organic views into spark ads
- 5
Let ASO run behind it to capture the search demand you just created
The product itself
read from calai.app, live“Meet Cal AI Track your calories with just a picture”
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
Monthly revenue published openly by the teenage founders
What else they ran
The evidence1 checkable
- Volume of creator videos on TikTok
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.