Voicy: 15 Questions Answered From the Starter Story Interview, With Timestamps
Voicy is a dictation app that types wherever your cursor is, built first for the founder's father and now sold mainly to older people and people with disabilities. In the Starter Story interview, founder Kourosh reports $11,000 in monthly recurring revenue and $16,000 to $20,000 a month once lifetime deals are counted. Growth came from a browser extension store, then Reddit, then search content, with almost no money spent.
We transcribed the interview with transcribe.so and asked it the same questions we ask every episode. Each answer below is written in our own words and points to who said it and the exact second, so you can check it in the video. All figures are self-reported by the founder and we have not audited them. We are not affiliated with Starter Story, and we sell a transcription service.
| Who is speaking | Role |
|---|---|
| Kourosh, founder of Voicy | Answers the questions |
| Starter Story host | Asks the questions, adds his own takeaways at the end |
What does Voicy do and how does it make money?
Voicy turns speech into text in any app on a computer or phone. It launched two years ago as a browser extension (Founder, 01:24) and now runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android (Founder, 01:27). It makes money from subscriptions: a monthly plan and a lifetime plan, covered in the pricing answer below.
What numbers does the founder share?
$11,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and $16,000 to $20,000 in a typical month because of lifetime deals (Founder, 02:36). He gives about 2,500 daily and 10,000 monthly active users (Founder, 02:52) and 1,400 active subscriptions (Founder, 02:58). The host's intro rounds it to over $18,000 a month (Host, 00:11).
Who is the founder?
He grew up in Tehran and moved to London at 18 to study (Founder, 03:29). He then worked as a product manager in fintech for two or three years and taught himself to code from a book (Founder, 03:58). Voicy was the first product he shipped fully in code, written at first by asking a chatbot for code and pasting it into an editor (Founder, 05:57). He calls himself an SEO person at heart (Founder, 09:07), which matters later.
Where did the idea come from?
When the founder was stuck in a London hospital bed, his father, a heavy worker and a very slow typist, sat beside him typing all day.
"to write an email, he took two to three business days" (Founder, 05:20)
He wanted to give his dad dictation everywhere. The first sign of demand: strangers installed the extension without any marketing, so he kept going (Founder, 01:27).
How long did it take to build, and with what?
Two weeks from idea to a very rough first version, a browser extension (Founder, 06:15). The interview names no stack beyond AI-assisted coding.
Who is the customer?
On user calls, 60 to 70% of users were professionals after a small productivity gain (Founder, 10:08), while 20 to 30% were seniors or people with a physical disability who could not use a computer easily (Founder, 10:20).
Why build for the customers other dictation apps ignore?
He concluded he could not out-build the well-funded dictation apps (Founder, 10:39), and noticed they do not go after the senior market at all (Founder, 10:45). The seniors and disabled users he met on calls loved even the first version and did not ask for improvements (Founder, 10:32), so the group nobody chased was also the group that needed him most.
Why is it a painkiller for some users and only a vitamin for others?
For fast typers like the founder and the host, dictation is a small boost. For his customers it is the only comfortable way to write.
"to the people that I'm serving, it's a painkiller" (Founder, 10:59)
How did it get from zero to $11,000 in MRR?
In this order:
-
Browser extension store. Listing the extension brought free traffic for almost no work (Founder, 08:26). He asked five friends for reviews (Founder, 08:36), which got him to roughly his first 100 users (Founder, 08:45).
"gives you like free traffic for basically zero work" (Founder, 08:26)
-
Reddit. He posted daily with one angle he knew worked (Founder, 08:49), five or six times per community until blocked (Founder, 08:58), which took him to 200 or 300 users (Founder, 09:00).
-
Search content, the main engine (Founder, 09:03). About 200 blog posts (Founder, 09:11), about 30 landing pages (Founder, 09:13) and a site localized into a handful of languages (Founder, 09:15).
-
YouTube. How-to videos plus a series for seniors (Founder, 09:26) took the channel from about 1,000 to 12,000 subscribers in roughly a month (Founder, 09:30).
Why does it win?
He argues being seen first beats being best:
"it's not the best product that wins. It's the product that your customer sees first." (Founder, 11:24)
His customers compare Voicy with dictation software from 15 years ago, not with the newest tools (Founder, 12:04).
How is it priced, and why?
About $8.49 a month (Founder, 02:44), or a lifetime plan at about $260 that he says sells well (Founder, 02:47). The lifetime deals are why monthly revenue runs above MRR (Founder, 02:36). Anyone with a disability who emails him gets 20% off, and about one in five users is on that discount (Founder, 02:58). The interview does not say how he chose these prices or whether a price change mattered.
What does it cost to run?
Beyond speech API usage, the biggest bill is the website builder at about $200 a month (Founder, 07:30), then servers at about $40 a month (Founder, 08:04); analytics is on a free plan (Founder, 07:47). The interview does not discuss ad spend, team costs or margins.
What went wrong?
No failed launch of Voicy comes up. The mistake he names is perfectionism: he says he should have posted simple content sooner and more often (Founder, 13:52).
What is the founder's advice?
"turn off your brain. It's really not that serious, and just do things." (Founder, 13:16)
Do each thing five times more than feels right (Founder, 13:37), and pick the easiest market with the lowest barrier to entry, not the biggest one (Founder, 12:44).
What did the host take away?
Three points, all his own: most people are far less into AI than builders are, so there is plenty of room for very simple products (Host, 14:43); talk to customers, which is how the founder found his 20% (Host, 14:53); and no market is too saturated for a real painkiller (Host, 15:04).
What to copy
- Read your user calls by need, not by volume. The minority who need the product can be a better market than the majority who like it.
- Stack free channels in order of effort: a store listing with a few reviews, then community posts, then search content at volume.
- Price for the customer you chose. A lifetime plan and a disability discount fit buyers who dislike subscriptions and cannot type easily.
More from this series: the voice app founders playbook, YouTube search as a SaaS growth channel, every Starter Story episode answered, and our free YouTube transcript tool if you want to run the same questions on any interview.
Ask this interview
Ask anything about the Voicy interview. Answers come only from the transcript, with the exact second each point is said.