独立开发者靠AI语音转文字App月入$18K的定价与获客策略

Originally, 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 Kurash. He built an app in one of the most crowded markets [music] 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 [music] itself. It's all about how he finds 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 Karash 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 his 9to-5 as a side project.

This one is going to be awesome. Let's dive in. I'm Gus and this is Starter Story. Kurash, 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 Kurush 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 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 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 Voicy itself. Could you pull up your landing page and just tell us a little bit about what Voicy is, how it works?

So, this is the landing page for Voicy. 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 MR, 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 $849. 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.

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 products 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? Do you have a technical 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 nontechnical background. And the first app that I properly built was a community analytics app called Meet Waves.

And that one grew to 5K MR, 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 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 Kurash is breaking down. Honestly, he is 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 successful AI app ideas. Inside, you're going to find everything that you need in order to validate your idea. stuff like revenue, cost, 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 the description and grab it right there. All right, let's get back to Karash. 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 gified 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. So, 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 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 like drove me insane. I swear to God, to write an email, he took a two to three business days. And at the same time like I started using Chad Chip's 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 voice came from.

That's funny. Yeah. Kind of like old guy coded, right? That's how my mom and my dad still like even 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 you 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 chat GPT. 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 that 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 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 10xed. And 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 is like the entire business world is on Windows, guys. So I built the Electron app, which took around like 3 months.

And then after that I could just build the Mac app with another month 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 2 weeks. iOS app came just like 6 months ago. The Android app I swear to God was oneshotted with Claude Opus 4.8.