Speaker 1Originally, I just built it as a fun tool for my dad. And then when I saw that people were downloading without any marketing, I just picked it up as my side project. And now it makes $16,000 to $20,000 per month. Meet Karash. He
Speaker 2built an app in one of the most crowded markets out there. I'm talking about a space where competitors have raised millions. And somehow, his simple app today makes over $18,000 a month. So I wanted to know how. The real secret behind his success has nothing to do with the app category itself. It's all about how he finds his customers.
Speaker 1These, to you and me, are vitamins. They make us a little bit better. But to the people that I'm serving, it's a painkiller. Like, they need that product to work.
Speaker 2When he told me all about it, I was blown away. So I invited Karash to come onto the channel to break everything down for us. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the app that he built that now makes over $18,000 a month in one of the most saturated markets out there. The customer that nobody else is building for and why that makes him successful. And crazy. And funny enough, how he does this all alongside his 9 to 5 as a side project. This one is going to be awesome. Let's dive in. I'm Gus. And this is Starter Story. Karash, welcome to Starter Story. So excited to have you on the channel. Could you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
Speaker 1Sure. My name is Karash and I built a speech to text app called Voicy. And it makes anywhere from like $16,000 to $20,000 a month. So I launched it two years ago as a Chrome extension. Originally, I just built it as a fun tool. For my dad. And then when I saw that people were downloading the Chrome extension without any marketing, I just picked it up as my side project. And then I built the Windows app, the Mac app, Linux, iOS, Android. And now we're absolutely everywhere. And it's really, really, really fun. Not just because it makes money, but also because we help people in a really nice way that I can talk about later.
Speaker 2Awesome. I'm so excited to talk about that last piece that you just said, what you do a little bit differently from everybody else. But before we get into that, let's talk about Voicy itself. Could you pull up your landing page and just tell us a little bit about what Voicy is, how it works?
Speaker 1So this is the landing page for Voicy. I don't think I need to explain what a dictation app is. Everyone and their mom has built one, but it essentially allows you to use really, really good dictation with OpenAI's Whisper API. Absolutely anywhere on your computer and also on your phone. So we primarily serve people who are older or people with disabilities. People who can't really type normally on their computers without any pain. This is my revenue dashboard. We're at 11K MRR, but on a monthly basis, we make anywhere from like 16 to 20K. That's because we sell lifetime deals. So usually our monthly plan is like $8.49. We have a lifetime plan for like $260 and that has been doing quite well. So we have around like 2,500 daily active users, around 10,000 monthly active users. We have 1,400 active subscriptions and we offer this thing called the disability discount where we just give you 20% off if you email me and 20% of our users are on that disability discount.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the channel. Like I've said a couple of times is you are serving this different kind of customer than maybe some of the other competitors are positioning their products for. And we're going to get into that here in a little bit. But first, let's take just a few steps back. How did you get into this? What were you doing before Voicy? Do you have a technical background?
Speaker 1So I grew up in Iran and Tehran. And when I turned 18, I moved to London to study. And like as a kid who doesn't know what they want to do, I just studied business. And at the same time, like I just started being interested in startups. So I started playing around with no code tools back then because I'm from a non-technical background. And the first app that I properly built was a community analytics app called Meet Waves. And that one grew to 5K MRR, but it never really took off because I just didn't do marketing. But that experience allowed me to just become a full time product manager. I was like a product manager and fintech for like two or three years. I learned how to code during COVID and I learned it from like an actual book. So that was all my coding experience, but never like good enough to like build my own stuff and kept building. Kept getting better at it, I think.
Speaker 2Hey, it's Gus real quick. Hopping in. I love everything that Kourash is breaking down. Honestly, he's proof that you do not need a unique idea. All you need to do is find proven, successful businesses and start building in that category. And that's why we put together this database of over 50 successful AI app ideas. Inside, you're going to find everything that you need in order to validate your idea. Stuff like revenue, costs, tech stack, growth strategies, everything that you need to figure out whether this is an idea you want to go build or not. It's 100 percent free to download. Just head to that link in the description and grab it right there. All right, let's get back to Kourash. Yeah, that's the old days of learning to code from a book. I remember I learned a little bit of code from schools that gamified like how to learn how to code. Even that feels like ancient now. Yeah. So how do you come up with the idea for Voicy? Tell me about that.
Speaker 1So like two years ago, my dad came to visit me in London and my dad's like an insane workaholic, like on his computer 24/7. And while he was visiting me, I got super sick. So I went to the hospital. I was stuck in bed for like two weeks and my dad was sitting next to me all day, every day, just like typing on his computer, like click, click, click. It drove me insane. I swear to God, to write an email, he took it two to three business days. And at the same time, like I started using chat with his dictation functionality and back in the day, like it just blew me away. So at some point I was so annoyed and I was just like, I wish I could just give them this dictation absolutely everywhere. And that's where the idea of Voicy came from.
Speaker 2That's funny. Kind of like old guy coded, right? That's how my mom and my dad still use a computer to this day. That's really funny. OK, so tell me about how you built this. You said you learned how to code by reading a book, and I'm sure you learned a little bit more along the way. What's the build timeline? How long did it take you to build the MVP?
Speaker 1So Voicy was the first product I ever shipped fully in code and back in the day it was literally just like prompting in chat GPT, I think it was like three point five or four at that point. And then copy pasting the code into an IDD and praying to God that it will work. But the version I started out with was like a Chrome extension because back in the day everyone was like the easiest thing to build is a Chrome extension I got from like idea to MVP in two weeks. And when I say MVP, like truly MVP, so once it was live and I push it out there, I finally then discovered Cursor, which like blew up my productivity, truly 10x. And after about like six months of having the extension, I decided to sit down and build the Windows app. And there's this like weird conception that only Mac people pay for like apps is like the entire business world is on Windows guys. So I built the electronic app, which took around like three months. And then after that, I could just build the Mac app with another month's work of time. So at this point, once the Mac app was released, I was super comfortable with code, so building the Linux app super easy took like two weeks. iOS app came just like six months ago. The Android app, I swear to God, was one shot it with Cloud Opus 4.8.
Speaker 2I love what you're saying there about like it reminds me a little bit of I'm not like a big developer by any means, but the initial version of ChatGPT where you would kind of like prompt it and then put it into your ID. And then when Cursor came out, it was like, wow, this is awesome. All the way to, you know, Cloud being able to one shot apps. That's really awesome.
Speaker 1What's the text? What's the feedback behind voice team? My biggest expense, apart from like API costs, is my website, which is on Framer. And that's like at around like two hundred dollars per month. Then I pay for Cursor and for Codex. I pay for Codex because it's a beast and it's a lot of bang for your buck. But whenever I need Opus models, I go to Cursor. Then for analytics, I use PostHog. I don't pay for it. I use Loops for emails. Then for like YouTube videos and all of the marketing stuff that I create, I use this platform called Tela, which is super similar to Loom or like Screen Studio. They're amazing. My VPSs are on IONOS for around like forty dollars per month and my growth engine. It's called RomeoSEO.com, which is actually my own product. I use that for SEO.
Speaker 2Cool. Thanks for sharing how you built it in the tech stack. Before we get into the type of customer that uses Voicy, let's just talk a little bit about the growth. How did you take it from zero to eighteen thousand dollars a month where it's at today?
Speaker 1Yeah. So from day zero, just to get it off the ground, the Chrome Web Store where I posted a Chrome extension gives you like free traffic for basically zero work, I think from like day one when we uploaded it and I asked like five friends to leave reviews, we instantly got like 10 or 20 page views just from that in the beginning. So that got me to like my first, let's say, 100 users. But at the same time, I was also posting on Reddit like absolute crazy every day. We had this like content angle that I knew would go viral in every subreddit. I posted that like five, six times until I got blocked. That got us to like two or three hundred people. And the true growth of Voicy is from SEO. Like I've always been an SEO guy, love SEO. We have like 200 blog posts. We have like 30 different landing pages. Our website is localized in like four or five different languages. Recently, we started with YouTube, too. So standard videos around like how to do speech to text. We started like a YouTube series called AI for Seniors. And that one is taking off. We went from like a thousand subs to like twelve thousand subscribers on YouTube in like a month.
Speaker 2Crazy. Thanks for walking through some of that. I feel like I've seen online people talking about SEO is dead or kind of it's old news, but at least for you or in this space, maybe it still works. So that's really cool. Your YouTube series, AI for Seniors, really leads me into what I really want to talk about with you, which is kind of the type of customer that you work with. Your main customers are older folks or people with disabilities. So let's talk a little bit about how you land it on your specific type of customer?
Speaker 1So I'm a product manager. I get on user calls like if I could just be on user calls 24-7, that's all I would do. And with Voicy, what I would realize is that like 60-70% of the people were like professionals like you and me. We were already fast typers and we wanted Voicy to make us like 10% more productive. And then like 20-30% of the time, I would speak to someone who had a physical disability or someone who was just a senior person who wasn't as tech savvy and couldn't use their computer as much. Those guys love the product. They didn't care about any improvements. They were like this MVP I could live with forever. Over time, it just became obvious to me that I can't compete with Whisperflow and all of those guys. But Whisperflow and those people, they don't want to go after the senior market. They just don't do it. And it's not as sexy, I suppose. Like there's this quote that says like, don't sell vitamins, sell painkillers. I think dictation tools to you and me, our vitamins, they make us a little bit better. Like they need that product to work.
Speaker 2That's really smart. And I think that's real secret sauce there too, of like when you're talking to people about your product, those customer conversations. That takes me to my last question here is when I was thinking about bringing you on the channel, I was thinking about how Whisperflow and all these other companies that have raised tons of money, it's kind of a quote, crowded or saturated market. Why do you think you stand out or are still successful?
Speaker 1So I think something that Voicy taught me is that, within a crowded market, or to be honest, within any market, it's not the best product that wins. It's the product that your customer sees first. You just have one article that shows up above your competitor, even if your competitor has a better product. Most people will click on that first link in Google or within the AI search, and they will try out your product. There's no reason why you have to have the better product. And the second part of it is that the market feels super crowded for people like you and me. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. But when we go into the market that I'm serving, these older folks, they're not talking about Whisperflow. They're talking about a dictation tool that was created 15 years ago. Even with the new tool I'm building, Romeo SEO, it's an SEO tool. Usually we'd market it to indie hackers like you and me. But what I'm figuring out is that it's local traders that want local SEO more than indie hackers want it. So I can just go to them, and that market is less crowded. So keep an open mind. Something that I always hate when people say is that I'm going after my ideal customer profile, but I always say your ideal customer profile picks you. In the early days, just post stuff online everywhere. You don't always have to go after the biggest market. Go after the easiest market. Lowest barrier to entry, I think, especially for indie hackers. Very cool. Wow.
Speaker 2I love it. That's really simple. I might have to put my mom and my dad onto this app because I also get annoyed with how they text. Just one finger on the phone. And you stay on Whisperflow, but you put your parents on VoiceSea. Right now I'm on Whisperflow, but no hate on Whisperflow. I think it's kind of just where I landed first. Oh, it's a great product. Yeah. All right. Final question we ask all founders to come on to Starter Story. If you could stand on your shoulders from before you started VoiceSea or for people watching who are just getting started, what advice would you give to yourself or to them?
Speaker 1I think turn off your brain. It's really not that serious. And just do things. If you think you can grow your app by writing a blog post, write 10. If you think you can grow a video by doing a YouTube video, do five videos. Turn off your brain. Don't strategize. Don't find the perfect marketing channel or the perfect product to build. Just do the thing and do it five times more than you think you should. And quantity will get you to quality, but it'll also get you way, way more learnings way quicker than if you just try to create quality content, I think. I was always a perfectionist. Waste of time. I should just post stupid content.
Speaker 2Yeah. I've seen that. I've seen this thing online recently that's like an idiot in motion goes farther than a genius at rest. I think that's really cool. Awesome. Kharash, thank you so much for sharing about VoiceSea, breaking it down for us here today. For those watching or who made it here, leave a comment or a question down in the comments. Kharash, maybe we'll have you back when you're making 50K or 100K per month. But man, congrats on the success. This was fun.
Speaker 1It was super fun. Honestly, I'm still stunned that you guys actually wanted to hear me talk. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2For sure. Awesome, man. All right. I just wrapped up with Kharash. Really enjoyed everything he broke down. Couple of takeaways. One, the customer that buys VoiceSea. If you're watching this video or if you're on Twitter, you're totally in the AI space. There's so many people out there that are not. I think about my mom, my parents, even some of my friends who are my age. There's so much opportunity to build stuff that's really simple. They just care that it solves a problem for them. So that's kind of one takeaway. And the second one, probably the most important one is, I know Pat has talked about this a lot over the years. He learned about this 20% of people that were using his product because he was talking to customers. And that's something that personally I'm not really good at. And if you're watching this, you need to talk to people that you want to potentially use your product. And then maybe the last thing is no such thing as saturated market. I feel like we've said that a million times on this channel. Even when there's huge competitors or open source tools, people are still going to buy something that's a true painkiller. And again, for his customers, VoiceSea is. So if you're still looking for an app idea at the link in the description, we have a list of over 50 successful AI apps. Just go ahead and grab that for free. All right. Leave a comment with any feedback or any thoughts for me as a new kind of host here at Starter Story. Thanks again for watching. We will see you in the next one. Peace.
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