Blake Anderson (entrepreneur)

He recalled that friends kept asking in group chats what to say in reply to women, which gave him the idea for an AI assistant that helps users respond to people on dating apps. He said he began learning to code with ChatGPT in May–June 2023, teaching himself within a year; RizzGPT launched in July 2023. The first version, he said, was rough: no notifications, no review prompts, a messy design and a poor paywall, and it initially got only a few hundred downloads.⁠[1][2]

He recalled paying two content creators $50 each for promotional videos, which drew millions of views overnight; the app was downloaded about 45,000 times on its first big day, 200,000 times that week and 500,000 times that month. Monthly recurring revenue, he said, quickly reached about $80,000, later peaked at a little over $250,000 and then settled at roughly $150,000 to $200,000. He said the app was at about $2.5 million in annual revenue. All of these figures are his own account in the interview.⁠[1]

He said that he and one co-founder repeatedly clashed over who should lead the company, so he proposed that one of them run it while the other kept his equity; the co-founder chose to keep running it and he left, after which RizzGPT was run by his other co-founders. “Left because one of my co founders and I were constantly going head to head,” he said.⁠[1]

The page of a September 2024 episode of the Superhuman AI podcast calls the AI dating assistant he built “PlugAI” and links to the App Store app Plug AI: Texting Assistant; as of November 2026 that app’s page lists the developer as Vert Media Partners LLC, gives June 26, 2023 as the earliest version date shown, and includes an in-app purchase named “RizzGPT.”⁠[2][3]

He said the idea for Umax came from noticing that people were spending money on skincare, hair care and gua sha to improve their looks while no software addressed that need. The idea, design and building of the product were his, he said, and he led most of its marketing.⁠[1]

The App Store page of Umax - Become Hot dates version 1.0 to November 30, 2023, and lists the developer as Improvement Tech LLC and the category as Lifestyle; Fortune wrote in July 2024 that the app had launched the previous December. As of November 2026 the page shows about 52,000 ratings averaging 4.6. Umax’s website states that it is owned and operated by Improvement Tech LLC.⁠[4][5][6]

Zach Yadegari met him on X, and the two, together with Henry Langmack and Jake Castillo, launched Cal AI, an app that estimates the calories of food from a photo, in May 2024. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry in March 2025 gave his age as 24 and described him as previously known for the ChatGPT-based dating-advice apps RizzGPT and Umax; it writes that the two of them conceived Cal AI after Zach Yadegari started going to the gym to gain weight. In his own December 2024 interview, he said that the idea for Cal AI was his and that he helped with its design but did not build the app, with two other co-founders running operations.⁠[7][8][1]

CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry described him in September 2025 as a 24-year-old serial entrepreneur; after a positive response to Cal AI, he and Zach Yadegari funded Cal AI’s operating and marketing costs for six months until the app stores’ delayed payments arrived. In October 2025 The Miami Hurricane wrote that he mentored Zach Yadegari on marketing the app; because he had succeeded with two other apps, the team applied his marketing strategy to get Cal AI off the ground.⁠[9][10]

Fortune wrote in September 2025 that Cal AI’s founders were also building App Mafia, a community and brand that teaches people to build apps.⁠[8]

On July 1, 2024, Fortune published a report on the “looksmaxxing” economy that described him as the 23-year-old founder and chief executive of Umax. It called Umax (full name “Umax – Become Hot”) the most popular looksmaxxing app, powered in part by OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s technology, which scores users’ faces weekly on a scale up to 100 from uploaded headshots, rating masculinity, jawlines and cheekbones, and offers tips such as “start a skin care routine”; the subscription costs $3.99 a week.⁠[5]

He said Umax was bringing in about $500,000 a month in subscription revenue (Fortune noted it could not verify this independently), had more than 7 million total downloads and over 1 billion impressions across social media platforms, and that 90% of its users were males aged 16 to 45; the app had reached No. 36 on AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry’s App Store lifestyle chart, above Zillow Rentals and TaskRabbit. He credited its popularity to users showing Umax screenshots in their own social media videos: “Social media, as a whole, is the greatest advertising channel to exist,” he said, adding that he wanted to build a brand that “embodies male self-improvement.”⁠[5]

Responding to critics who say Umax may feed users’ negative self-perception, he said: “We never want somebody to feel insecure to the point that it causes anxiety or significantly impacts their mental health,” while calling the advice to “love who you are 100%” “a dangerous mindset” and saying: “Self-improvement is extremely important and pays dividends over the course of one’s life.” Of users’ “glow-up” videos he said: “Umax scores help to quantify that change.”⁠[5]

On September 3, 2024, the podcast Superhuman AI: Decoding the Future, hosted by Zain Kahn and Hassan Bhatti, released an interview with him titled “How Blake Anderson built a $6 Million app with ChatGPT.” The episode description presents him as a serial entrepreneur who has built apps generating millions in revenue with the help of ChatGPT, learning to code with it despite a minimal technical background; the chapters cover his entrepreneurial journey from childhood, Umax and PlugAI, the challenges of scaling, rapid iteration in marketing, advice for aspiring AI entrepreneurs, and an introduction to his new venture, Cal AI.⁠[2]

On December 29, 2024, Starter Story released a video interview with him by Pat Walls titled “He Made $10M with 3 iPhone Apps”; the host introduced his apps as doing almost $20 million a year together. In the interview he said that Umax had taken in almost $5 million in revenue over the previous year with profit consistently a little over $100,000 a month, down from higher levels, and that Cal AI, about six months after launch, was earning more than $1 million a month in revenue with monthly profit of a few hundred thousand dollars. These revenue and profit figures are his own account.⁠[1]

He said he was now focused on a new project, Apex: an all-in-one self-improvement ecosystem that would create content, run a free community, build free mobile apps and sell low-margin, high-quality physical products, which he said had started a little more than a month and a half before the interview. “I've always been so passionate about self improvement,” he said.⁠[1]

He listed his tools: Figma for design, CursorCursorCursor is the trading name of U.S. AI coding software company Anysphere, Inc. and its namesake coding tool. Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, it began as an AI-native development environment forked from VS Code and later shifted toward agent-centered coding. Its November 2025 Series D valued the company at $29.3 billion post-money; on August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition at an implied equity value of $60 billion, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary.Open the full entry with React Native (Expo) and Node.js for coding, CapCut for video, MercuryMercury (fintech company)Mercury is an American fintech company founded in 2017 by Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher; it launched account services for businesses in 2019. Its platform combines financial services provided by partner banks with software for bills, invoices and expense management. Mercury itself remains a fintech company; the proposed Mercury Bank, N.A. should be distinguished from the current partner-bank model.Open the full entry for banking and Upwork for contract work. He advised thinking from first principles rather than following what people say on social media, said that “Arguably the biggest one is creating a sense of urgency,” and cited a line from Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry to the effect that if you want to make the wrong decision, you should ask everybody.⁠[1]

As of November 2026, his YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel description reads “Founder of 10x, Cal AI, and more — over 50m downloads,” and the mentor list on Founders School’s website includes him with the affiliation “10x.”⁠[11][12]

He recalled earning money as a child by mowing lawns, raking leaves and shoveling driveways; in high school, around 2016 or 2017, he built an EthereumEthereumEthereum is an open, general-purpose smart contract blockchain that launched in 2015, and its native asset is ether (ETH). The project was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and advanced jointly by eight co-founders; the network now uses proof of stake and centers on the EVM, the account model, a rollup scaling roadmap, and the open EIP process.Open the full entry mining machine and grew several Instagram meme pages.⁠[1]

He recalled moving back home after graduating from college with nothing, while his friends had six-figure jobs in New York City; his family was struggling financially, the house was going on the market, and his older brother lent him money for groceries. Not wanting a full-time job, he set himself the goal of earning $50,000 on his own within 12 months.⁠[1]

Umax: Official website: https://www.umaxapp.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4][6]

Cal AI: Official website: https://www.calai.app/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

Founders School: Official website: https://founders.school/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

X: Public account: https://x.com/blakeandersonw (opens in a new window).⁠[1][2]

YouTube: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@blakeandersonw (opens in a new window).⁠[1][11]