I built this app for my dad. Now it makes $18K/month

0:00Originally, 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 to 20k per month. Meet Koresh. He built an app in one of the most crowded markets out [music] 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 [music] itself. It's all about how he

0:31finds his customers. These 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. When he told me all about it, I was blown away. So, I invited Koresh to come on to the channel to break everything down for us. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the app that [music] 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 enough, how he does this all alongside

1:01his 9-5 as a side project. This one is going to be awesome. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. Koresh, 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? Sure. My name is Koresh, and I built a speech-to-text app called Voicy, and it makes anywhere from like 16 to 20k per month. So, I launched it 2 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

1:35side 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 like it makes money, but also because like we help people in a really nice way that I can talk about later. Awesome. Well, 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 Voicely itself. Could you pull up your landing page and just tell us a little bit about what Voicely is, how it

2:05works? And so, this is the landing page for Voicely. I don't think I need to explain like 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

2:45plan 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

3:09are on that disability discount. Yeah, dude. I think that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the channel, like I've said a couple times, is you are serving this different kind of customer than maybe some of the other competitors are positioning their product for. And we're going to get into that uh 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 Voicely? Do you have a

3:28technical background? So, 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

3:58product manager. I was like a product manager in fintech for like 2-3 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. [music] And kept building, kept getting better at it, I think. Hey, it's Gus real quick hopping in. I love everything that Kurashes breaking down. Honestly, he's proof that you do not need a unique idea. All you need to do is find proven [music] successful businesses and start building in that category. And that's why we put together this database [music] of over 50

4:28successful 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% free to download. Just head to that link in

4:43the description and grab it right there. All right, let's get back to Kurashes. 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

4:58Voicy? Tell me about that. So like 2 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 2 weeks. And my dad was sitting next to me all day, every day, just like typing on his computer [music] like click, click, click. I drove me insane. I swear to God, to write an email, he took it 2 to 3 business days. And at the same time, like I started using ChatGPT's dictation functionality. And back in the day, like

5:32it just blew me away. So at some point, I was so annoyed, and I was just like, I wish I could just give him this dictation absolutely everywhere. And that's where the idea of Voicy came from. That's funny. Yeah, kind of like old guy coded, right? That's how my mom and my dad still like when you use a computer to this day. That's really funny. Okay, 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

5:56you to build the MVP? So, Voicy was the first product I ever shipped fully in code, and back in the day, it was literally just like prompting in ChatGPT. I think it was like 3.5 or 4 at that point, and then copy-pasting the code into an ID 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

6:20got from like idea to MVP in 2 weeks. And when I say MVP, like truly MVP. So, once it was live and I pushed it out there, I finally then discovered Cursor, which like blew up my productivity truly 10x. Then after about like 6 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, but like the entire business world is on Windows, guys. So, I built the Electron

6:49app, which took around like 3 months. And then after that, I could just build the Mac app with another month's worth 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 2 weeks. iOS app came just like 6 months ago. The Android app, I swear to God,

7:09was one-shotted with Claude Opus 4.8. I 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 IDE, and then when Cursor came out, it was like, "Wow, this is awesome." All the way to, you know,

7:24Claude being able to one-shot apps. That's really awesome. What's the tech stack behind Voicy? My biggest expense, apart from like API costs, is my website, which is on Framer, and that's like at around like $200 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 Post Hog. 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 Tella, which is

8:01super similar to Loom or like Screen Studio. They're amazing. My VPSs are on Ionos for around like $40 per month. And my growth engine, it's called romeoseo.com, which is actually my own product. I use that for SEO. Cool. Thanks for sharing how you built it and the tech stack. Before we get into the type of customer that uses Voicely, let's just talk a little bit about the growth. How did you take it from zero to $18,000 a month where it's

8:25at today? Yeah. 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

8:45to 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. So, I posted that like five, six times until I got blocked. That got us to like two or 300 people. And the true growth of Voicely 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

9:24like 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 1,000 subs to like 12,000 subscribers on YouTube in like a month. Crazy. Thanks for walking through some of that. I feel like I've seen online people talking about SEO is dead or kind of, you know, it's it's old news, but at least for you or in this space, maybe it

9:44still 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 landed on

10:00your specific type of customer. So, 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 to 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

10:30and couldn't use their computer as much. Those guys loved 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 are vitamins. They make us a little bit better. But, to the people

11:01that I'm serving, it's a painkiller. Like, they need that product to work. That'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

11:23stand out or still successful? So, 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 like the market feels super crowded for people like you and me. But when we

11:59go into the market that I'm serving, these older folks, like they're not talking about Whisper Flow. They're talking about a dictation tool that was created like 15 years ago. Even with the new tool I'm building, Romeo SEO, it's an SEO tool. Like usually we'd market it to Indie Hackers like you and me, but what I'm figuring out is that like it's local traders that want local SEO more than Indie Hackers want it. So I can just go to them and like that market is

12:26less crowded. So keep an open mind. Something that I always hate when people say is that like I'm going after my ideal customer profile, but I always say like 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

12:48Hackers. Very cool. Wow, I 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 Whisper Flow, but you put your parents on Voicy? Well, right now I'm on Whisper Flow, but no hate on Whisper Flow. I think [laughter] it's kind of just where I

13:03landed first. Oh, it's a great product. Yeah. All right, final question we ask all founders come on to Starter Story. If you could stand on your shoulders from before you started Voicy or for people watching who are just getting started, what advice, you know, would you give to yourself or to them? I 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 it by doing a YouTube video, do five videos. Like, turn off your brain, don't strategize, don't find the perfect marketing channel or the

13:35perfect 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

13:57content. Yeah, 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, Korash. Thank you so much for sharing about Voicy, breaking it down for us here today. For those watching who made it here, leave a comment or a question down in the comments. Korash, maybe we'll have you back when you're making 50k or 100k per month. But Matt,

14:17congrats on the success. This was fun. It was super. Honestly, I'm still stunned that you guys actually wanted to hear me talk. So, thank you for [laughter] having me. [gasps] For sure. Awesome, man. All right, I just wrapped up with Korash. Really enjoyed everything he broke down. Couple takeaways. One, the customer that buys Voicy. 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

14:47problem 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, well, 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,

15:12people are still going to buy something that's a true pain killer. And again, for his customers, Voicy is. So, if you're still looking for an app idea, at the link in the description, they 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

15:29next one. Peace.