Cal AI paid UFC creators thousands of dollars to post, and got no download spike at all

Cal AI co-founder Jake Castillo describes how the calorie-tracking app refined its influencer strategy after expensive partnerships with UFC and mukbang creators produced little impact, revealing that audience context and comment quality matter more than follower counts or views. The company looks for creators whose audiences actively ask questions that Cal AI can answer, while ensuring the product has a visually immediate “magic moment,” such as identifying a meal from a photo, that can fit naturally into short-form content. Castillo says creator payments should remain below the revenue generated per thousand views, with flat-rate agreements offering upside when a post becomes viral, and advocates signing promising creators before they develop large followings. As Cal AI scaled to dozens of daily influencer posts, it developed a renewal score using secondary performance signals to assess partnerships. He attributes the company’s advantage over imitators to continual experimentation and incremental optimization rather than a reproducible formula, noting that its approach depends on fitness creators’ abundance, their existing food-focused content, and Cal AI’s low-price strategy aimed at building mindshare among younger users.

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