Zach Yadegari – 16-year-old founder, CEO, and developer

NOTES

Recorded in a conference room at nomadworks in New York City

Zach Yadegari on LinkedIn

TotallyScience.co

Book Recommendation: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

SUMMARY

The podcast features host Kyle Knowles interviewing Zach Yadegari, a 16-year-old entrepreneur who founded the popular school gaming website TotallyScience.co. Zach started Totally Science in 8th grade when he was 14 years old after noticing his classmates playing games on school-issued laptops. He built a simple website to host unblocked games as a hub so students didn’t need multiple tabs open.

The site attracted over 3 million visitors with 300,000 monthly users. Zach led the development, marketing, and monetization. He posted a TikTok about the site which went viral, bringing thousands of users. Another TikTok promoting a trendy game brought 1 million views and exponential growth.

Zach taught himself to code starting at age 7, taking a summer camp then learning through YouTube videos. He considered a career making video games. The site is built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. He works with his friend Ilan as CTO in a revenue share agreement.

The site is monetized through Google AdSense. After filing paperwork and setting up business accounts, it quickly became profitable. A Discord server helps manage user feedback for adding new games.

Zach wants to sell Totally Science if he gets a good offer in order to work on new projects. He also built a motivational alarm clock app and is working on a gym app. His goal is to build a platform involving user-generated content.

Zach stays up to date by reading TechCrunch and using TikTok to identify youth trends. He believes the internet enables education and success without traditional college. He may attend college briefly for connections.

The site spreads virally once a few students in a school use it. Zach aims to “free the internet” and unblock websites. He connected with the CEO of the major gaming site CoolMathGames.com to learn from their success.

Zach credits his superpower as focus and drive. He works long hours after school, driven by competitors. He considers himself an introvert pushing to be more extroverted. The podcast host believes Zach’s story will inspire other young entrepreneurs.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast, a podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, founders, business owners, and business partnerships from startups to stay-ups to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going, and future entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles, and today’s episode is being recorded at the Nomadworks on Broadway in New York City, New York. It’s a Saturday morning, and I’m in a conference room. Today’s guest is Zach Yadegari, founder and CEO of totallyscience.co, a gaming website that bypasses the security protocols of school-issued Chromebooks. The site has attracted over three million visitors with over 300,000 monthly visitors, and features games including Minecraft, Monkey Mart, and Geometry Dash.
In addition to being the founder and CEO, Zach led the development, go-to market strategy, and Google AdSense website monetization for totallyscience.co. Zach, welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast.

Zach Yadegari:
Happy to be here.

Kyle Knowles:
How old were you when you built totallyscience.co?

Zach Yadegari:
When I first started it, I was in eighth grade. I was 14, and I was just sitting in one of my classes.

Kyle Knowles:
So, what gave you the idea to start Totally Science?

Zach Yadegari:
Well, the idea originally came. I was just looking around my classroom, at everyone. It was the first year in which schools were letting people bring their laptops to school, because of COVID, and people were playing games in school abusing the rules, because it was new. No, the schools didn’t really have many bypassers or ways to block the websites, and so people were going on different game websites. I saw a lot of people had different tabs open with different games on each tab and different websites with each game. So, I decided it would be much better if there was one website that was a hub for all of these games to play on. I thought I could easily make that, just take all the other games that are on these other websites, put it on one, and people are going to use my website.
The reason I wanted to do that was just to get people in my school using my website. I thought it would be pretty cool, and it would be cool to have people in my school using my website.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. So, how long did it take you to build the site?

Zach Yadegari:
The original site took me probably just a few days. It was very simple. It was just a basic layout with games on it. Nothing fancy at all.

Kyle Knowles:
Then so how did you learn how to code to build the site?

Zach Yadegari:
Learning to code, I was just… Well, I started when I was seven years old. I wanted to learn how to make games, and so from there, I spent most of my time just making games. I made an app, and then eventually, I got into website development from there. So, website development is what I did. Learning HTML, JavaScript, CSS, those languages came in, and I used those to build the first version of the gaming website.

Kyle Knowles:
So, what gave you the inspiration to call it Totally Science?

Zach Yadegari:
The reason I call it Totally Science is to get around the school blockers. The school blockers go off filter moderation. If a website has games like coolgames.com, it’s going to see games. It’s going to block the website. So by calling it Totally Science, the school picks it up as an educational website. So because it thinks it’s educational, it’s not going to block it, and people can use it in school.

Kyle Knowles:
But totally sounds just very West Coast.

Zach Yadegari:
Well, it’s supposed to be sarcastic. It’s totally science, definitely science.

Kyle Knowles:
How old are you now?

Zach Yadegari:
Right now, I’m 16.

Kyle Knowles:
Amazing. CEO, founder of totallyscience.com at 16 years old. You build this site, the first version. You’re 14. You’re in… Did you say eighth grade?

Zach Yadegari:
Eighth grade.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. You’re in eighth grade. How do you get the word out that you’ve built this site, and how do you start attracting visitors?

Zach Yadegari:
Originally, I did start just spreading it through my classroom, and then from there, it would spread person to person in my school. With these websites in the school, it’s pretty easy to get it to spread. Just like how rumors spread in high schools, these gaming websites can spread just as fast. So, I showed it to a few of my friends. They showed it to more people, and eventually, a lot of people in the school were using it. Then one day in class, because one school, it’s 200 kids that were using it. That’s not going to be anything crazy. But one day in my coding class, I finished my project early, because I already knew how to code. Everyone else was still learning. They were beginners, but I was just bored in the class. I decided to make a TikTok, so I made a TikTok of just the website.
It was a very simple video. I put just a caption. “I made this website while bored in school. Check it out, Totally Science.” Then that video surprisingly got around 50,000 views right off the bat, and that started getting a few thousand people using the website every month. So, that was pretty good, and I thought it was cool that people were using it, but I didn’t expect it to go much further than that. But then later down the line, a few months after, I posted another TikTok, and that TikTok got a million views. So from there, the website just started growing faster and faster, and to keep up with all the growth, I was improving the website constantly.
That’s when I really started focusing more on making it better, and changing it from just a simple design of just some games that I just scrapped together in my eighth grade classroom to actually a well-designed and more functional website.

Kyle Knowles:
How long after you launched the site was this TikTok and going viral on TikTok with a million views? How long from the first version of the site to that TikTok?

Zach Yadegari:
The first version of the site, it was pretty early in the school year. Then the TikTok, I posted late in the school year, late in the eighth grade school year. Then it was summertime, so I didn’t do anything. But then back in September in ninth grade, there was this game that was really popular called Retro Bull. Retro Bull is a game that it’s like a little football pixel game on phones, but there’s also versions on computers. On TikTok, it was trending, people trying to play it at school. So, one of my friends came up to me and he told me that I should put it on the website. I should make a TikTok. It was like, “I promise it’s going to go viral if you do this.”
So, I did it, and it did go viral. That video got the million views, and that brought people that specific game. Retro Bowl brought so many people to the website. That’s really how it got started being a popular on block games website.

Kyle Knowles:
I know that hosting providers, basically, the more traffic you get, the more they charge you if you’re on AWS or anything like that, Amazon Web Services. Where were you hosting this ,and then did it crash? Did anything happen, or were you with a hosting provider that was able to scale with the growth of the site?

Zach Yadegari:
Yes. The website has crashed multiple times. It’s been down. My account has been almost banned because of so much traffic and using all of their resources in the servers, which it was slowing down their servers for other people. So, I’ve had to upgrade my servers and switch plans. I was using hosting originally, and that it was on a shared server, so with a lot of people. For the database calls, it’s like every time I wanted to make a call, it would take up some of the resources on that server. Since it was shared, if I’m doing a lot of calls, it’s going to slow it down for everyone, so they have to limit the amount for each person. So, implementing certain features in the website like at one point, there was in a real-time user counter, and a chat, both of those.
So, the chat and the real-time user counter, it’s almost every few seconds, it’s going to send a request to the database. So, since there were thousands of people sending requests every second, they had to shut down the website, because it was slowing down other people’s websites, slowing down their servers. So, those days, I would just stay. During my lunch period in school, I would be freaking out calling their customer service and trying to fix the issues. That happened several times.

Kyle Knowles:
So, what happened eventually? Did you have to move hosting providers or…

Zach Yadegari:
For those stuff, we had to slow down the amount of requests we were making. We also… Eventually, we switched over out of hosting her. So temporarily, we had to just stop with the requests, and then we switched over. Now, we’re on… We’re hosting on a virtual private service, so it’s our own private thing now. We’re not using any shared plans.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, so you host your own server?

Zach Yadegari:
No, it’s still with a cloud service, but it’s just upgraded. It’s a dedicated server for us.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. Right. That’s awesome. Going back to being seven years old and learning how to code, how did you go about learning how to code? Do you have someone in the family that’s a programmer? How did you learn?

Zach Yadegari:
The reason I learned was because me and my sister, we were just obsessed with video games, and we wanted to learn how to make video games too. So, we signed up for a camp one summer. Since doing that, I’ve just loved programming ever since. I got really into it that summer, started making games. I loved making games for the next few years. I wanted to be a game developer in my future. I was always thinking I would make a game, and then I was thinking that would be what makes me my… I wanted to be rich for making a game. That was my goal when I was a little kid.

Kyle Knowles:
So, are any of your games on Totally Science?

Zach Yadegari:
No, none of my games are on Totally Science. I never made any games that were that good that I would put it on the website, but I made some that I’ve put on the app store, so that was cool to do when I was younger.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. Does your sister program?

Zach Yadegari:
She stopped after a few years. She wasn’t as into it as I was.

Kyle Knowles:
Do you still have aspirations to be a gamer as far as making games, and going to school for that, and then trying to create a game, and sell that, or do you have different aspirations?

Zach Yadegari:
That’s always what my plan was, but then it’s switched when I started getting into website development, especially this website, because I developed a lot of skills outside just game creation into more of programming, just applications and things that are useful. So, now, I don’t want to make games. Instead, I want to build a platform, some kind of platform that when users are posting content… I forgot what the term for that is, but something like a social media platform, not necessarily social media, but where I build a platform, and then other people post onto it, and the users are driving more user engagement themselves.

Kyle Knowles:
So, UGC, user-generated content.

Zach Yadegari:
I guess that would be the term.

Kyle Knowles:
I think that’s the term. I’m not 100% sure, so just like a social media platform or something where you gain more traffic by other people making content for the site.

Zach Yadegari:
Yes, something like that.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. I want to just geek out just a little bit more on learning how to code. You went to bootcamp, right?

Zach Yadegari:
Sure.

Kyle Knowles:
Then what other… Tell me… Pretend that I want to learn how to code. Where would I go and what would I do to learn how to code?

Zach Yadegari:
Well, for me personally, after the summer camp, the summer camp mostly just drove the interest, but where I really learned how to code, most of what I know was just from YouTube. I would just watch YouTube videos all day on how to program different things. When I was really into game development, I would be watching all these different YouTubers who were programming games. Then when I got into other stuff, you could always find videos like how to make a website for beginners? How to do this effect in HTML, JavaScript? Anything you want to learn, there’s always YouTube videos. So, it’s a free resource that I’ve always used.

Kyle Knowles:
If you were going to learn how to code, you’re brand new to learning how to code, what language would you choose?

Zach Yadegari:
If I was completely brand new, I would start with Python. I think Python is one of the easiest languages to understand how to read the code, and it’s something that is pretty powerful. NASA uses Python.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. It’s used for a lot, especially machine learning and things like that as well.

Zach Yadegari:
With AI.

Kyle Knowles:
With AI. You’ve created this website. It’s version one. From day one, did you monetize it, or did that come later?

Zach Yadegari:
Day one, it was not monetized. Even when I started getting hundreds of thousands of people every day using the website, that’s when I realized I should monetize it, but I had no idea what to expect, because I never monetized a website before, but I applied for Google AdSense in about January. It was after I got all the traffic. I applied, and it took a week for me to get everything set up. I had to… There’s a big process involved with it. I had to file for an LLC, which I had no idea what that meant at the time. So now, I have one, and I had to set up business accounts, bank accounts. But then after getting everything set up, I was actually very surprised to find out that you could actually make good money from websites.

Kyle Knowles:
Did it initially pay back all the costs that you had going into it, or how soon were you in the black?

Zach Yadegari:
The initial cost for this website, it was about, if I remember correctly, only maybe a few hundred dollars for the beginning, just hosting the website. I think we did… There was at one point, we went in $1,000 just buying a bunch of different domains for the website, and getting a bunch of different stuff experimenting, but we basically… It was paid back pretty soon after just monetizing.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. I’ve gone through your site. I haven’t signed up to be a user yet, but when you talk about numbers, you have 300,000 visitors per month visiting totallyscience.co. So, how many registered users are visiting?

Zach Yadegari:
There are about 100,000 accounts or 150,000 accounts that have been created on Totally Science.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s incredible. Can people play games without registering?

Zach Yadegari:
Yes. Anyone can play games without registering. The only thing you need that comes with registering, it lets you like games, pin games, do stuff like submit high scores, and just other features that are small, but you could still play games, and access the website without one.

Kyle Knowles:
I noticed you have a shop.

Zach Yadegari:
Yes.

Kyle Knowles:
What percentage of your revenues comes from the shop compared to AdSense, in the ads?

Zach Yadegari:
The shop doesn’t actually make any real money. What it does, the users can earn points from playing on the website. Every day they come back, they get more points, and they could spend those points in the shop. You could unlock different avatars. The avatars, right now, that’s something we’re working on, making them have more functionality. But currently, we just added last week a chat feature with all of the games. So, the avatar shows up next to your name in the chat.

Kyle Knowles:
So if you’re playing a game, there is a chat feature for every game that you’re playing on the site.

Zach Yadegari:
Yes. Yes.

Kyle Knowles:
How many games are on totallyscience.co?

Zach Yadegari:
I haven’t counted in a while, but there’s definitely a few hundred games.

Kyle Knowles:
I noticed because I’ve seen your TikToks and awesome… I was just astounded at the numbers, because I’m seeing some of them that say 300 or whatever views. Then you get to the one that’s 50,000, and then there’s one that’s 1.3 million or whatever. That’s the one you were talking about that went viral early on. I think it was your second. I think it was only your second TikTok.

Zach Yadegari:
Yeah, second TikTok.

Kyle Knowles:
Looking through the comments, I’m seeing a lot of people say, “Hey, add this game. Do this. Do that,” giving you voice of customer product feedback. How do you then… When you were… Basically, you’re building it. You’re building it what you want and what you like. What was that transition like taking user feedback, and how do you manage that feedback, and prioritize a list of features to work on next?

Zach Yadegari:
Yeah, so that was actually a challenge. Originally, we posted on the website. We had a place where users can submit games too besides the TikTok comments, and it was a Google form. But the Google form, it broke the limit of how many responses you can have, and have them displayed in Google, because we had hundreds of thousands of responses. So, it was all put in an Excel sheet from Google. They wouldn’t display their data themselves, and we had no idea what to do with that data. Also, there were so many typos in it, so we just started over. We scrapped that, and what we’ve been doing is reading TikTok comments going through.
Another way we try to market is by looking at the comments, finding a game, and then replying to that comment with a video saying, “We just added this game,” and then everyone interested in that game will see it, and see that it was added, but it’s hard to get all the games people want, because a lot of games, people will comment, “Add Fortnite,” but you can’t add Fortnite to a website. So, we try to get just as many games as we can. So as much as we would like to get all the games that people are suggesting, it’s hard because the games that we put on the website, we find them online, open source. So, we find the code out there already.
I guess whether it’s… However the way other people are getting the code, I don’t know, but I find the code that other people are posting online, and I take it. So, a lot of them are replications of games made by professional companies. It’s a little, I guess, sketchy the way we’re getting the games, but it all works out it seems. I haven’t had any problems. I have a DMCA take down thing on the website, so if any companies aren’t happy that we have their games, they could always reach out, but no one ever has. So, no problems yet.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s just in your terms of use on the website?

Zach Yadegari:
Yes.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. I had the impression that you were just framing in these games. You’re actually running these games on your server.

Zach Yadegari:
We originally were just eye framing the games, but the problem with that is that if the website you iframe it from is blocked, then it will be blocked on the website. So now, all we do is we only add games that we get the code for, and so we are running them on the server. Yes.

Kyle Knowles:
Now, you keep saying we. How many employees do you have?

Zach Yadegari:
Originally, it’s a longer story than that, but when we first start… Well, after TikTok went or got started, the first one that blew up and got a million views, it was right before winter break. I told two of my friends that are also programmers about it, and they wanted to help out with the website. So, we spent that winter break developing it. This was a year after I had already started, which was in eighth grade. This was ninth grade in winter break in December or February, one of those. So, we worked on it a lot, and at the end of that week, we weren’t monetized yet, so there was nothing, no incentive for money.
But one of my friends who helped, he was concerned about college problems. His name’s Henry. Shout out to Henry. He stopped working on the site, but he did leave a good impact. We still use some of his… Some of the code he wrote, I think, is still in place today. But my other friend who helped out, he… Ilan, shout out to you. He’s still working with me on Totally Science. So, he does a lot of the development with me, and we’ve been doing this together for over a year and a half now.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s Ilan. He’s the CTO listed on the website.

Zach Yadegari:
Yes, he’s the CTO.

Kyle Knowles:
So, is he an employee? Is he a business partner? What’s that arrangement like?

Zach Yadegari:
We have a revenue share between us. That’s how our relationship is.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. Do you want to expand it to more employees, or are you happy where it’s at?

Zach Yadegari:
The more employees we have, the more people we need to be paying. So, we try to keep it just between us, because we really don’t need that much more help on the development side unless we want to really expand into all these different ideas, which we have a lot of ideas like going into different languages, and trying to really focus on specific regions. But for now, as the website stands, just maintaining it and keeping it up, it’s something where we could just do it ourselves. We’re really going to look into… There’s something, a turning point that’s going to be coming up very soon. There’s someone that reached out to me about potentially buying the website.
Right now, they’re doing… I guess they’re testing out certain ads, and seeing the effect it has on the website. From there, they’re going to see the potential for growth. So if they make an offer that’s a good offer and I sell, then we’re going to sell the website. But if they don’t, then we are going to work with this ad company advertising agency that I found on TikTok posting ads, and it was pretty effective marketing finding me. So, I think they’ll do a good job. So with them, we’re going to try to scale the website a lot more, and potentially go into the different regions, like I said, languages, but also with a lot of different features too that we’ve been thinking about implementing. So, we might need another person, another developer for that.

Kyle Knowles:
You talked about languages. Do you have any language sites right now, or you’re just looking into it?

Zach Yadegari:
Right now, no, but we’re thinking about Spanish and some other popular languages.

Kyle Knowles:
Would you just use G Translate, or what technology would you use?

Zach Yadegari:
Probably Google Translate, yes, or just find a friend that speaks the language.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s really awesome, because you’re not running on WordPress. Are you running on… What content management system are you using, or are you just using Apache servers or…

Zach Yadegari:
Well, we just host everything on a VPS, a virtual private server, and so that’s… A lot of people for their websites, they’ll use frameworks for building it like React, which is a very popular one. But for us, we just use the very bare bones, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is good for speed, but it also makes it a lot slower if we were to restart the project slower in terms of development. But if we were to restart, we would definitely do it in a framework, but we’ve been… The code, it’s very long now, so to rewrite everything, it probably wouldn’t be worth it.

Kyle Knowles:
Do you have technical debt with your code?

Zach Yadegari:
I guess we do have some that because of how we started out, we could have used much better principles. We have rewritten all of the code on the backend and the front end already a few times. So, maybe we would do it again very soon in the near future. Usually, over the summer, we will rewrite a big part of the code.

Kyle Knowles:
So, do you ever look at your old code and go, “What was I thinking?”

Zach Yadegari:
Yes. It’s a very common thing with programmers.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. I was just going to mention with G Translate, and I don’t know how it would work with your setup, but on WordPress, it’s simply a plugin. I just launched Spanish and French on mmmpod.net just yesterday, basically using G Translate. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I mean, Google Translate’s getting better and better, and so it’s probably, I would guess, 95% accurate. There would just be some terms that might be weird, but that’s really cool that you could go into other languages. I know Mr. Beast launched all these Spanish channels and different languages, and it’s just huge opportunity, because basically, less than 50% of internet users are in the United States.
It’s a really low number. It used to be super high. I think we’re even down as low as 25% now globally. So, opening up other languages would probably drive a lot of traffic.

Zach Yadegari:
I actually got the idea from watching a podcast with Mr. Beast, where he was saying how he made Mr. Beast in Espanol, and Mr. Beast in all these other languages, and that’s giving so much more viewership to his channel.

Kyle Knowles:
Oh, that’s great. So, speaking of listening to podcasts and TikToks, you learn some things from TikTok and everything. What’s your number one channel to learn things and stay current as a developer and as a CEO and founder of a website that’s monetized?

Zach Yadegari:
Recently, something I’ve been reading a lot is TechCrunch. So, I have a membership there. They have a lot of articles about all the latest stuff in tech, AI, pretty much all things startups. So, it’s really cool. I recommend it.

Kyle Knowles:
How many 16-year-olds are reading TechCrunch? Just give me a ballpark guess.

Zach Yadegari:
I have no idea. I don’t know any, but also, I don’t really have many friends that are into business and this tech stuff like I am. I have friends that are programmers, but people that are into all this other stuff, I’m trying to find other people. Hopefully that’s something out of this podcast. I’m like, “16-year-olds will reach out to me.”

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. You said with totallyscience.co, that potentially someone could buy it, and potentially, you could just expand it and work with an ad agency, and monetize it even better or further or faster or whatever. That sounds like a fork in the road. Which road do you feel in your heart of hearts that you want to do?

Zach Yadegari:
Honestly, I would want to sell the website if a good price is offered, and then focus on other projects. I have a lot of different things that I’m actually working on right now. I’m working on a gym app with one of my friends, the friend that, Henry, who originally helped with Totally Science but then left. I have a lot of different ideas that I would want to just go into, and Totally Science, it’s something… It’s good right now. It’s a good source of passive income, but it does require maintenance, adding new games, fixing any problems that come along, and keeping up with the community. So, it would be good, especially after this podcast, to just have the Totally Science legacy just go on its own now, but we’ll see what happens.

Kyle Knowles:
Are there any other projects you’re working on besides the gym app?

Zach Yadegari:
Well, I just released an app a few weeks ago. It’s called Grind Clock. It’s in a motivational alarm clock app that wakes you up with people like David Goggins screaming at you that you need to go and work. It’s an app me and my friend Henry put together in a few weeks just mostly to… Well, we saw something on TikTok. We saw a trend. A lot of people were commenting on these motivational video posts. I want to set this as my alarm clock. So, we made an app for all these people that were commenting it. We got a few thousand downloads from that, and that was okay, but what we really took away was learning how to make these apps in language flutter, which it’s good for iOS and Android development. With that, we’re going to be building other projects, so it was good to learn the language.

Kyle Knowles:
So, it was a good project just from a learning standpoint. Did you monetize it? Did you sell it, or did you just make it available for people?

Zach Yadegari:
We did monetize it, and we have a membership in it.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, and you put it on the app store and Click store.

Zach Yadegari:
Google.

Kyle Knowles:
So, people can go get it. Tell me what it is again.

Zach Yadegari:
Yes.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s Grind-

Zach Yadegari:
It’s called Grind clock, Grind Clock.

Kyle Knowles:
Grind Clock.

Zach Yadegari:
Yes.

Kyle Knowles:
I think I’ve seen some of the TikToks that might be the inspiration for that, because they compile David Goggins and other motivational speakers. That’s really cool. As far as business goes, you have something going on where you’ve got requests coming in. You got to fix this. You got to fix that. What are the tools you use to basically project manage Totally Science?

Zach Yadegari:
We did have a lot of stuff on the website for requests. Originally, we had a button, a report button that was for reporting if a game wasn’t working. But we learned very quickly that if a game was just taking long to load, people would click the report button. So, that wasn’t really effective at all for figuring out problems in games. So currently, we have a Discord server, and that’s usually what we rely on. They’ll usually spam me. I have some people that are moderating the Discord server, so anyone that has a problem, they’ll just start texting in the Discord channel complaining about the issue, and eventually, we will get it fixed for them.

Kyle Knowles:
So, explain to me, because I’m new to Discord, just barely got on it two weeks ago. So, explain to the audience what Discord is.

Zach Yadegari:
Discord is a… It’s a communications app where you could join different groups. There’s different channels. It’s very similar to Slack if you know what that is. It’s just a very good way to build communities around different things.

Kyle Knowles:
So, how does Discord make money?

Zach Yadegari:
Discord, I was looking this up before. Discord actually makes majority of their money from subscriptions. They have a subscription model called Discord Nitro, where there, people have access to just different features like sending different emojis, sending longer messages, I guess different perks with channels too, a lot of different ways.

Kyle Knowles:
Do you feel like it’s a younger generation that’s using Discord instead of Slack, or why would someone choose Discord over Slack?

Zach Yadegari:
Yeah, I think the younger generation definitely is choosing Discord over Slack. I haven’t used Slack. I’ve used it maybe once. So to know the feature differences, I’m not entirely sure, but Discord was originally based around the gaming community, and so I think that’s why it has more of the youth audience, but now it’s converting away from only gaming and more into just general communities.

Kyle Knowles:
If I remember correctly, Midjourney’s connected to Discord somehow.

Zach Yadegari:
Yes. Yes, the AI image generation tool, they have a Discord channel that they use in order. It’s connected to their API, so if you want to generate images, you go in their Discord channel. You say slash generate unicorn flying on a cloud, and it comes out.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. I know… Your mom mentioned to me, and I hate to bring your mom into the podcast, because my son would be embarrassed if I brought his mom into the podcast, but she mentioned to me that you have your finger on the pulse of what the youth want, what kids want. How do you keep your finger on that pulse? What are you doing to keep your finger on that pulse besides being young yourself?

Zach Yadegari:
Yes. So, being young definitely helps. Talking to people that are teenagers, I get the ins and outs of what they want, but something specifically is just being on the social media apps that people my age are using. So, Snapchat, it’s a very good tool just looking at people’s Snapchat stories. I get to see what people are up to my age, but something more specific is actually TikTok. This is something that I think it’s problematic, but it’s also something that’s helpful. I’ve always wanted to delete TikTok, because I hate the app because of how addictive it is, and how much time you could just waste on it. You don’t even remember what you watch.
YouTube, I’m okay with, because you could watch a 10-minute video. You could watch three of those in a row, 30 minutes, but you’ll remember what you watched. It was a long form video. But a 32nd TikTok, you could watch hundreds of those in the 30 minutes, probably thousands, and you won’t remember. Maybe you’ll remember one of them at most. But in two days time, you’ll forget everything. Nothing is meaningful on it. So, the only thing that I still have TikTok for on my phone is to see the trends that are going on like how I saw in the comment section of one of the videos of the motivational videos that people wanted an alarm clock out of the motivational content. That’s how I got the idea for that.
So, TikTok, it’s a very good way to identify trends in the youth, seeing what people are doing, seeing what people want, just reading the comments there, seeing the videos, the videos people are making, especially if you look at the influencers that are making content for people. I think that’s one of the best ways to keep up with the youth.

Kyle Knowles:
Just to ask your opinion of your generation, what is the opinion of your generation on the older generations, and what’s some advice you would give the older generations?

Zach Yadegari:
I think that the younger generation is… Well, there’s something interesting I heard in a book that the younger generation will always go against what the older generation is doing in a way that it kind of is a pattern that repeats itself, where the older generation will do something. The younger generation will do the opposite of what the older generation does, and then the generation after the younger generation, they’ll do the opposite of what the younger generation does, which will be what the older generation originally did. So, it kind of is a cycle going back and forth. I think it’s just something like people like to rebel against their parents. People like to prove them wrong.
Right now with the youth, a lot of parents, they’re pushing their kids towards stuff like college saying, “This is the only way you can be successful in the world. You have to go get a stable job.” But especially with the internet, a lot of kids now, they’re trying to make internet money, trying to get rich off social media, doing things on that just influencers. They show you that you can make a very good living fortune from doing it. Just posting dances on TikTok, people are just these kids making millions of dollars. So, I think that’s something that people are just… They’re very skeptical of the older generation’s ways of just work hard, go through the path of college that’s laid out for you. Go get a job. Work your way up the ranks, and make a good living.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s exactly what I’ve done, so thank you for the advice. I am seeing that a lot. I’ve interviewed a lot of entrepreneurs on the podcast actually, one of them specifically who had an MBA basically said, “Doing the work, that project that’s right in front of you, and starting a business is the best way to learn how to run a business, not an MBA.” Even he’s telling his kids, “You can learn on YouTube. You can learn these different ways,” and he’s not advising them to go to the traditional path through college. So with that said, and with you learning on YouTube, and you’re already a CEO and founder of a successful website, what are your plans as far as college goes?
I know you’re taking AP classes. You’re doing extremely well in school. What are your plans in the future for college?

Zach Yadegari:
For the longest time, I’ve been totally against college. I still am against it. I don’t like the idea that people push you down this path with no other way. There’s always these motivational quotes like pave your own path. Go your own way. If everyone goes the same way, the person that goes a different way, that’s the person that’s probably going to be more successful. As long as they make it through, it’s going to be the harder path. But if they can get through it, they will likely be more successful. College, I think, is taking the path that everyone is going. You’re not swimming against the tide. You’re swimming with it.
However, the one thing I do see in college that’s good, I don’t believe that education there is going to be that helpful. We were discussing YouTube. You could learn a lot. Just online on the internet, I think that’s the best educational resource, especially, colleges are posting a lot of their courses. MIT, all of their courses are online. I could take any of those right now, and learn anything from MIT, one of the best colleges. So, the one thing that I think makes college valuable is the connections you can make there. So, that’s why I do want to go to a business school, and make a lot of connections there that I could use in the future, maybe go into business with someone I meet there.
I do think I might drop out of college after a couple years, but college is honestly my plan B for what I want to do. My first choice is the Peter Thiel Foundation, which is created by Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and some other projects. He founded this foundation where anyone who hasn’t graduated from college can apply with an idea, and they grant you $100,000, and give you a bunch of different connections. Everyone else that signed up, you get to meet them. So, I would make connections of my age, and make connections with people well established in business already to get advice from, and they help you start a business with whatever idea you have. That would be ideal. That’s my plan A if I could get accepted there, but the acceptance rate is 0.001 or something.

Kyle Knowles:
All right, good luck with that. That sounds awesome. I haven’t heard about that before, so thanks for mentioning that. Zach, did your parents go to college?

Zach Yadegari:
My parents did go to college.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Is there anyone in your family who’s an entrepreneur?

Zach Yadegari:
Both of my parents are entrepreneurs. They both own their own businesses. My dad started his… It’s called FiSolve. He started it over a year ago now. My mom started her company a few years ago. It was called Mama Work. Now, it’s called Village. They’re both just doing their own things. I think my mom is doing something more where I am because hers is a tech platform, and she is always doing things like looking for investors, and watching Y Combinator, which is something I’ve been watching a lot on YouTube and learning from.
My dad, he’s just used all the years he had in his space. He was working for a different company for over 10 years, and so he used everything he learned there to start his own company. So, he didn’t take the traditional startup route just with an idea. He pretty much just jumped right into success after all his years, because of all the connections he built up over time in his industry.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. Do you feel like your parents being entrepreneurs, that inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

Zach Yadegari:
I actually wanted to be an entrepreneur before my parents ever started their businesses. As long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I think it started from when I wanted to make money from making games. I think being a game developer, that was my first goal of why I wanted to be an entrepreneur, just making games, because I was like… Every kid’s dream is just to… I think a lot of kids just want to be rich. So, that was my dream too as a kid, but I thought the way I could do that was by making games. So, that’s entrepreneurial.

Kyle Knowles:
Yes, it is. When you started Totally Science in eighth grade, and you weren’t initially monetizing it, what was your motivation to start it?

Zach Yadegari:
My motivation to start it was just to be popular in my school, just having the website be something used by everyone in my school.

Kyle Knowles:
How did that work out then for you?

Zach Yadegari:
It worked out well, actually. After it was spread through my school, I put my name at the top corner of the website. It said Zach Yadegari Production. So, I had some people coming up to me saying, “Thanks for making the website.”

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome, and it’s in the footer right now.

Zach Yadegari:
Yeah. Now ,it’s in the footer of the website.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. Anything else besides money and fame that’s come your way? Have you met some interesting people? What’s happened because of the success of the site?

Zach Yadegari:
Something pretty cool. Are you familiar with Cool Math Games?

Kyle Knowles:
I’ve heard of it before.

Zach Yadegari:
It was around since the 1900s. It was one of the first websites on the internet. It’s also a games website, and it is also a popular Unblocked Games website. I don’t know if that was their original intention to be unblocked games or not, but it turned out to be that way. It’s called Cool Math Games. So just like Totally Science, it does bypass a lot of blocking systems, because it thinks it’s educational. I was able to meet the CEO of that website, and it’s a very big website. They’re making millions of dollars every year, and it’s very, very popular. They get tens of millions of different users every year using the website, probably more, maybe hundreds of millions. I don’t even know.
But it was really cool just meeting the CEO of that website, talking to him about our websites, different ways, asking him questions about how he’s doing things, getting feedback on my site. That was pretty cool.

Kyle Knowles:
How did you meet him then?

Zach Yadegari:
I reached out to him through email. I just wanted to see if there was some partnership originally we could do with our websites. Honestly, I wasn’t really expecting a reply from them. I was reaching out to some other unblocked games websites too. Surprisingly, the smaller ones didn’t respond, but the biggest one I reached out to did respond. So, that was pretty surprising, but it worked out well.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. I’ve found in life that people who’ve done it who’ve actually had success and actually done the work are actually more helpful, and the people who haven’t done it are usually the naysayers. You know what I mean?

Zach Yadegari:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
People that haven’t put the work in, they’re usually jealous, those kinds of things. So, that’s really awesome that Cool Math Games, the CEO connected with you. I think I’ve gone through most of the things I wanted to talk about. One of the things I wanted to ask is just traffic sources. Is it mostly organic, or do you have other places like TikTok or whatever? What’s the majority of traffic to your website? What’s the source of that?

Zach Yadegari:
I’ve tried a lot of different ways to drive traffic like just Google ads, making it so that when people look up unblocked games, it’s one of the sponsored things that come up, but always the top thing was organic TikTok videos. Those drive the original traffic to the site, like those viral videos, and then having those people there once. A few people have it in a school. Just like in my school, it spreads like wildfire to the other students. They’ll see someone will just be playing a game in class, and then the kid behind them sees their screen. They see it says Totally Science. I have the name Totally Science.
It’s printed in the top of the website purposefully so that people will see it. Then someone next to them might see, “Oh, Totally Science, what’s that? They’re playing games.” Then they go on it on their computer, and so it’s spreads really fast in a school. So, getting an original just one person in every school just from the organic TikTok videos, and then from there, it spreads organically to everyone else in the district.

Kyle Knowles:
What would you say to the maybe older generations that are scared of TikTok? I know there’s marketing people that don’t go on there, or don’t think that it’s a good source of traffic or a good thing to do.

Zach Yadegari:
Well, TikTok, I would say, is the best way to market anything, anything into any age group. TikTok has over a billion users on it, so if you have one out of seven people in the entire world on it, you’re going to have a very diverse group of people. It’s not just kids, what a lot of people think, but it’s also adults, old people. So basically, anything or anyone that you want to market to, you could use TikTok for.

Kyle Knowles:
I agree. I agree. I wanted to hear it from you though. It gives me some ammunition for certain people that are against TikTok. Just looking at your site just real quickly, you have games. You have leaderboard. What is leaderboard on the website?

Zach Yadegari:
Leaderboard, so that shows all the high scores, who has the high score in each game.

Kyle Knowles:
Then proxy?

Zach Yadegari:
Proxy, so that is our way of allowing kids to use YouTube or other websites unblocked in school. So, they could come on our website and play our games, but they could also use our proxy feature where they can browse the internet freely.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. Then you have a quick key or something to go back to classroom.

Zach Yadegari:
Yes. Yes. So if your teachers coming, you could click the tilde button on your keyboard, and it will bring up Google Classroom.

Kyle Knowles:
Then you have some settings that it sounds like you could change to what you quickly [inaudible 00:47:32].

Zach Yadegari:
Yeah. You could change it to your school’s website or whatever it is.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Do you worry about competitors at all?

Zach Yadegari:
I don’t really worry about competitors, because there are a few different big websites in the unblocked game space. One of which, it’s a website that I’m currently working out with me and Ilan or my partner in Totally Science that I said. We are working with these guys who started a different unblocked games website of a similar size, and joining forces to create a new one to together. I wouldn’t say they’re competitors now. They’re more like friends. Since we’re working together on a project, I think it’s going to benefit both of us, and it’s a pretty big space out there. I wouldn’t say competition is really a problem, because what usually happens if one unblocked games website gets blocked, they’ll go to the other one.
So, it’s usually not competing over either playing one or the other, and both are unblocked. Usually, one will be blocked, and they’ll just go to whatever one isn’t blocked. So, together, we’re just, I guess, working to free the internet, and unblock all the websites.

Kyle Knowles:
So, it’s more collaboration then. That’s great. Do you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert?

Zach Yadegari:
I consider myself a natural-born introvert, but I’m trying to become more extroverted.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. Being on this podcast is one thing you’re doing to be extroverted, I think. What’s your superpower?

Zach Yadegari:
My superpower, that’s an interesting question. I think my superpower is probably my focus and my drive. If I want to do something, then I will really focus and spend all of the time I can put to it just trying to accomplish what I want to do. With Totally Science, at one point, because there was a competitor actually that at one point was driving me to try to make the website really good, and now they’re a fraction of what Totally Science is. But what I was doing just every day after school, I would just work the whole night into the night. I work really late, and be really tired the next day in school, but just basically, all my free time, I would be working on it.
In school too, in the classes that I’m just listening to lectures of teachers, I’ll be working on the site too, different stuff just in life. This gym app and the Grind Clock app that I was working on, we got it done so quick, because we were just developing it all day. We’d spend six hours a day just spending all our nights just working on the app. So, it’s pretty crazy to, I guess, work this much, but I enjoy it. I think it’s fun.

Kyle Knowles:
I think that’s an incredible superpower to have. What’s something that most people don’t know about you?

Zach Yadegari:
Anything I do with business, most people don’t know, and I don’t really talk about it with people that much. So, like this podcast, no one knows I’m going on it today, except my mom.

Kyle Knowles:
Is there any worry about Totally Science getting blocked if you are promoting it?

Zach Yadegari:
Well, Totally Science has gotten blocked with a lot of different big companies like GoGuardian. It’s one of the biggest blockers, and it’s on their global blacklist. So, I guess one thing that’s cool to say that we got picked up by this big company, and how they globally have blacklisted us. But going public and talking about this, I don’t really think it’s a big deal, because the only people that really block the website are the school’s admin who are, I guess, the tech people of the school. They would only really block the websites that they notice their students are using the most. Totally Science has gotten blocked a lot in different schools.
That’s a big thing. Especially on TikTok, I notice a lot of people, instead of commenting to add more games, now, they’re commenting like, “The website’s blocked. Make new links.” So, that’s what we have done. We’ve made different links that you could access the website on to get around that, and we just constantly adapt different strategies to try to keep it unblocked.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. I have a lightning round of questions and then one last question before we end. So, favorite candy bar?

Zach Yadegari:
My favorite candy bar is it’s very recently the Mr. Beast Chocolate Bar.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite musical artist?

Zach Yadegari:
I’m going to have to say probably Billy Joel.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s incredible. Is that based on your parents playing Billy Joel for you, or how did you find Billy Joel?

Zach Yadegari:
My dad showed me Billy Joel, I guess, when I was young, but a lot of his music that I like, I just found just on Spotify. I really like music. I listen to a lot of different stuff.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. He’s a New Yorker too, right? Billy Joel. Favorite cereal?

Zach Yadegari:
Favorite cereal, it’s the one with the marshmallows and the squares. I don’t know what it’s called.

Kyle Knowles:
The Lucky Charms?

Zach Yadegari:
Yeah, Lucky Charms, but my mom, she never buys that cereal. I don’t know what it’s called. Whenever I go on vacations at a buffet, I’ll always get that one.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. Mac or PC?

Zach Yadegari:
PC.

Kyle Knowles:
Google or Microsoft?

Zach Yadegari:
Google.

Kyle Knowles:
Dogs or cats?

Zach Yadegari:
Dogs.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Les Mis?

Zach Yadegari:
I don’t know any of those.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, that’s awesome. That’s exactly what my son would say. I don’t do musicals. What’s the book that you recommend the most to people?

Zach Yadegari:
The book that I recommend the most to People is the book Zero to One by Peter Thiel. It’s a book that I read this summer, and then I reread it again just last week. I finished it, and it’s all about startups. It’s very good. It’s very interesting.

Kyle Knowles:
All right, well, thank you, Zach, for being on the podcast, and thanks to your mom, Debbie, for setting this episode up. I really hope that it inspires anyone of any age to learn how to code or to go into business for themselves, and I hope it inspires young people really to start their own businesses, because we need more of that, especially here in the United States. So, thank you so much for being here today.

Zach Yadegari:
Thank you for having me. Prime’s good. I like Prime.

Kyle Knowles:
Cool. It’s the first time I had it here in New York City. Awesome.

Zach Yadegari:
Also, it’s 300,000 monthly users on average.

Kyle Knowles:
What did I say?

Zach Yadegari:
3,000.

Kyle Knowles:
Oh my gosh. I’m going to just put the word thousand after 300 instead of the zeros. That’s amazing.