From Prom to Profit

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

🌟 Editor's Note:

Welcome to Behind the Books! A 3-minute read with stories, tools, and lessons from real companies—what worked, what didn’t, and what founders can learn.

📸 The Story:

Most teenagers worry about prom. This one worried about… calories.

At 17, Zach Yadegari, a high school student was frustrated by how painful food tracking was:

→ Typing everything into an app? Slow. → Looking up calories by hand? Painful. → Existing tools? Clunky and outdated.

So he did what most people don’t. He taught himself AI.

The result?

𝗖𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗜 : 𝘀𝗻𝗮𝗽 𝗮 𝗽𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗺𝗲𝗮𝗹, 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆.

Less than a year later, his one-person company hit:

→ $1M+ in revenue → 500K monthly active users → $12M projected ARR

All built by a teenager who refused to wait.

The Lesson:

This story isn’t about age. It’s about approach.

1. Start with your own pain. He fixed what frustrated him and millions followed.

2. Stack compounding skills. Coding, AI, design. The right mix made him unstoppable.

3. Distribution beats invention. Food tracking wasn’t new. But making it faster, simpler, and viral? That crushed incumbents.

From Behind the Books:

Your million-dollar idea doesn’t need to be revolutionary. It just has to solve a problem better than what exists today.

Your weekly prompt:

What’s one daily annoyance you’d pay to solve instantly?

Write it down. That might be your business.

See you next Friday,

– Yan

P.S. Sometimes the “big idea” is just today’s friction, halved.