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At first I just created it as a fun tool for my father, and when I saw people downloading it without any marketing, I took it on as a side project, and now it brings in $16-20k a month. Meet Koresh. He created an app in one of the most crowded markets. I'm talking about a niche where competitors have made millions, and somehow his simple app is making over $18,000 a month today. So I wanted to find out exactly how. The real secret to its success has nothing to do with the app category itself. It all depends on how he finds his clients. For you and me, these are vitamins. They make us a little better, but for the people I help, it's a painkiller. That is, they need this product to work.
When he told me all this, I was amazed. So I invited Koresh to the channel to lay everything out on the shelves. In this episode, we delve into the app he built that now makes over $18,000 a month in one of the most saturated markets: a client that no one else is building a solution for, and why that makes him successful; and, strangely enough, how he manages to do all this in parallel with his main job as a side project. This will be incredible. They drove. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. Koreshe, welcome to Starter Story. I'm very glad to see you on the channel. Could you tell us who you are, what you've created, and what your story is? Of course. My name is Koresh, I created a speech-to-text app
called Voicy, and it makes somewhere between $16,000 and $20,000 a month. So, I launched it 2 years ago as a Chrome extension. At first, I just created this as a fun tool for my father. And then, when I saw people downloading Chrome extensions without any marketing, I took it on as a side project. And then I created an app for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and now we are absolutely everywhere. And it's really, really, really fun. Not only because it brings in money, but also because we help people in a really cool way, which I can talk about later. Perfectly. Well, I really want to discuss that last part you mentioned, which is that you do things a little differently than everyone else. But before we get to that, let's talk about Voicely itself. Can you
open up your landing page and tell us a little bit about what Voicely is and how it works? So, this is the landing page for Voicely. I don't think I need to explain what a dictation app is. Everyone and their mother has created one, but essentially it allows you to use very high- quality dictation using OpenAI's Whisper API anywhere on your computer, as well as on your phone. We mainly serve the elderly or people with disabilities, those who cannot type normally on a computer without pain. This is my income dashboard. We have $11,000 in regular monthly income, but every month we earn somewhere between $16,000 and $ 20,000. This is because we sell lifetime licenses.
Our monthly plan usually costs around $8.49. We have a lifetime plan for about $260 and it sells pretty well. We have about 2,500 daily active users and about 10,000 monthly. We have 1,400 active subscriptions, and we offer a so- called discount for people with disabilities - we simply give a 20% discount if you write to me by email. And 20% of our users have this discount for people with disabilities. Yes, dude. I think that's one of the reasons I wanted to invite you to the channel, as I've said a few times, you serve a different type of customer than some of the other competitors target. And we'll get to that a little later. But first, let's take a few
steps back. How did you come to this? What did you do before Voicely? Do you have a technical education? I grew up in Iran, in Tehran, and when I turned 18, I moved to London to study. And as a kid who didn't know what he wanted to do, I just studied business. At the same time, I became interested in startups. Then I started experimenting with no-code tools, since I have no technical background. The first app I fully built was a community analytics app called Meet Waves, it grew to $5k in recurring revenue but never took off because I didn't do marketing. But this experience allowed me to become a full-fledged product manager. I worked as a product manager in fintech for about two or three years. I learned to code during COVID, and I studied from a real book.
That was all my programming experience, but never enough to create my own stuff. And kept creating, kept getting better at it, I think. Hi, this is Gus, I'll just jump in for a minute. I like everything that Kurash analyzes. Honestly, he's proof that you don't 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 created this database of over 50 successful AI application ideas. Inside you will find everything you need to test your idea. For example: revenues, expenses, technology stack, growth strategies-everything you need to understand whether
you want to take on this idea. You can download it absolutely free. Just follow the link in the description and pick it up. Therefore. Let's go back to Kurash. Yes, these are the old days when we learned to program from books. I remember learning a little bit of coding in schools where they Even this now seems like something very ancient. So, how did you come up with the idea for Voicey? Tell me about it. Well, about two years ago my father came to visit me in London. And my father is an incredible workaholic. Sits at the computer 24/7. And while he was visiting me, I became very ill. So I ended up in
the hospital. I was bedridden for about two weeks. And my father would sit next to me for days and just type on the computer: click, click, click. It just drove me crazy. I swear it took him two to three business days to write an email . And at the same time, I started using the dictation feature in ChatGPT. And then it just hit me. So at some point I was annoyed that I thought: I wish I could give him the ability to use this dictation everywhere. That's where the idea for Voicey came from. This is funny. Yeah, it's like old people's coding style", right? My mom and dad still use the computer like that. This is really funny. Okay, tell me how you created it. You said you learned to code from a book, and I'm sure you learned a little
more in the process. What was the development timeline? How long did it take you to create the MVP? Voicy was the first product I released completely with code, and before that it was literally just a prompt in ChatGPT. I think it was 3.5 or 4, then I would copy the code into the IDE and pray to God that it would work. But the version I started with was a Chrome extension, because everyone used to say that it was the easiest to create. I went from idea to MVP in 2 weeks. And when I say MVP, I mean a true minimum viable product. So, once everything was working, I finally discovered Cursor, which really increased my productivity 10x. Then, after about 6 months of working on the extension,
I decided to sit down and create a Windows application. There's a strange idea that only Mac users pay for apps, but the entire business world runs on Windows, guys. So I built an app in Electron, which took about 3 months. After that, I was able to create a Mac app in just one month of work. So, by the time the Mac app came out, I was already feeling very confident with the code. Therefore, creating a program for Linux was very easy, it took about 2 weeks. The iOS app appeared only 6 months ago. The Android app, I swear to God, was made with one request via Claude Opus 4.8.
I like what you're saying, it reminds me a bit of-I'm not much of a developer, but the original version of ChatGPT, where you would create a query and then paste it into your IDE. And then when Cursor came out, it was like, "Wow, this is cool." And to the point that Claude can now create applications in one go. This is truly impressive. What is My biggest expense, besides the API fee, is my website on Framer, which costs about $200 per month. Then I pay for Cursor and Codex. I pay for Codex because it's a beast that's worth every penny invested. But when I need Opus models, I go to Cursor. For analytics, I use PostHog. I'm not crying for him. I use Loops for newsletters. And for YouTube videos and all the marketing content I create, I
use the Tella platform, which is very similar to Loom or Screen Studio. They are simply incredible. My VPS is hosted on Ionos, it costs about $40 per month. And my growth tool is called romeoseo.com, it's actually my own product. I use it for SEO. Steeply. Thanks for sharing how you built it and the technology stack. Before we get into the types of customers who use Voicely, let's talk a little about growth. How did you go from zero to the $18,000 a month you have today? Yes. So, from day zero to just getting this up and running, the Chrome Web Store, where I put my Chrome extension, gives free traffic with almost no effort.
It seems like the first day we uploaded it and I asked five friends to leave reviews, we immediately got 10 or 20 page views just from that. This got me to the first, say, 100 users. But at the same time, I was also posting furiously on Reddit every day. We had this content angle that I knew would go viral on every subreddit. So I posted this five or six times until I got blocked. This gave us about two or three hundred people. And the real growth of Voicely is SEO. I have always been an SEO guy. I love SEO. We have about 200 blog posts. We have about 30 different landing pages.
Our website is localized in four or five different languages. We recently started working with YouTube. These are standard videos on how to convert speech to text. We launched a series on YouTube called "AI for Seniors," and it's rapidly gaining popularity. We grew from 1,000 to 12,000 subscribers on YouTube in about a month. Madness. Thank you for telling me about this. I think I've seen people online saying that SEO is dead or that it's old news, but at least for you or in this niche, it might still work. So that's really cool. Your YouTube series "AI for Seniors" brings me to what I really wanted to talk to you about, which is the type of clients you work with. Your main customers are the elderly or people with disabilities. So let's talk
a little bit about how you reached your specific audience manager. I participate in calls with users. If I could be on calls with users 24/7, that's all I would do. And with Voicely, I realized that 60-70% of people were professionals like you and me. We were already typing fast and wanted Voicely to make us 10% more productive. And in about 20-30% of cases, I spoke with people who had physical disabilities or were simply older, not very tech-savvy, and couldn't work much on a computer. These people really liked the product. They were not interested in any improvements. They said, "With this basic version, I could live forever." Over time, it became obvious to me that I couldn't compete with WhisperFlow and similar players. But WhisperFlow
and other similar companies don't want to serve the senior market. They just don't do it because it's probably not that attractive. You know, there's this quote: "Don't sell vitamins, sell painkillers." I think for you and me, dictation tools are vitamins. They make us a little more productive. But for the people I serve, it's a painkiller. It is critical for them that This is very smart. And I believe that this is the secret to success-in communicating with customers about your product. This brings me to my last question: when I was thinking about inviting you to the channel, I was thinking
about the fact that WhisperFlow and other companies that have raised a lot of money are operating in a supposedly oversaturated market. Why do you think you stand out or are still successful? I think Voicy taught me that in a crowded market, or in any market, it's not the best product that wins. The product that the customer sees first wins. One article is enough to appear above a competitor, even if they have a better product. Most people will click on the first link on Google or in AI search and try your product. There is no reason why you should have a better product. And the second
part is that for people like you and me, the market seems crowded. But when we move to the market I serve, to older people, they don't talk about WhisperFlow at all. They use a dictation tool created about 15 years ago. Even with the new tool I'm creating, Romeo SEO, it's an SEO tool. We usually market it to indie hackers like us, but I've found that local entrepreneurs need local SEO more than indie hackers. So I can go to them, and this market is less competitive. Therefore, keep an open mind. I always hate when people say, "I'm looking for my ideal client profile," but I always say that your ideal client profile chooses you. In the beginning, just publish
everything online everywhere. You don't always need to chase the biggest market. Choose the easiest market with the lowest barrier to entry, I think, especially for indie hackers. Very cool. Wow, I like it. It's really simple. I'll probably have to get my mom and dad on this app because I'm also annoyed by the way they text with just one finger on the screen. And you stay with Whisper Flow, but transfer your parents to Voicy? Well, I'm in Whisper Flow now, but I have nothing against Whisper Flow. I think it's just where I ended up first. Oh, this is a great product.
Yes. Okay, the last question we ask all founders who come to Starter Story. If you could turn to yourself before you founded Voicy, or to people who are watching us and are just starting out, what advice would you give yourself or them? I think, turn off your brain. It's really not that serious, just do things. If you think you can develop an app by writing a blog post, write 10. If you think you can develop it by making a video for YouTube, make five videos. Like, turn off your brain, don't build strategies, don't look for the perfect marketing channel or the perfect product to create. Just do it, and do five times more than you think you should. Quantity will lead you to quality, but it will also give you much, much more knowledge much
faster than if you just tried to create quality content, I think. I have always been a perfectionist. Dawdle. I should have just posted stupid content. Yes, I recently saw this thing on the internet: "an idiot in motion goes further than a genius at rest." I think that's really cool. Excellent, Korash. Thank you for sharing the Voicy story and breaking it all down for us today. For those who have watched this far, leave a comment or question below the video.
Korash, maybe we'll invite you again when you earn 50k or 100k a month. But Matt, congratulations on your success. It was fun. It was great. Honestly, I'm still stunned that you actually wanted to listen to me. So, thank you for inviting me. Of course. Great, dude. Okay, I just finished talking to Korash. I really liked everything he said. A few conclusions. The first is the customers who buy Voicy. If you're watching this video or sitting on Twitter, you're totally into AI. But there are so many people who are
completely out of touch. Think of my mom, my parents, even some of my friends my age. There is a huge opportunity to create something really simple. All they care about is that it solves their problem. So this is one of the conclusions. And the second, probably the most important-I know Pat has talked about this a lot over the years. He learned about these 20% of people who used his product because he talked to customers. And this is something that I personally don't do very well. But if you're looking at this, you need to talk to people who could become your users. And finally: there is no such thing as a saturated market.
I think we've said this a million times on this channel. Even with big competitors or open source tools, people will buy something that actually saves them from pain. And again, for its Voicy customers, that's exactly what it is. So if you're still looking for an app idea, the link in the description has a list of over 50 successful AI services. Just go and pick it up for free. Well, leave comments with feedback or thoughts for me as the new host of Starter Story. Thank you for watching. See you in the next issue. Peace be upon you.
