Dictation apps might be the most crowded corner of AI right now. Wispr Flow raised millions. Every indie hacker on X has shipped one. Post "I'm building a speech-to-text app" in any founder community and you'll get laughed out of the thread.
Kourosh Ghaffari built one anyway.
Two years later, Voicy makes $16,000 to $20,000 a month. As a side project. Next to his 9-5.
This is the best saturated market story I've heard in a while, because his edge has nothing to do with the product. Everyone else in dictation is chasing tech-savvy power users. Kourosh built for the customer nobody wants: seniors and people with disabilities.
He broke the whole thing down with Gus on Starter Story. Watch the episode, then I'll walk you through the numbers and the playbook.
The Numbers Behind Voicy
Voicy is a speech-to-text app that works everywhere: Chrome, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android. It runs on OpenAI's Whisper API and turns your voice into text in any field on your computer or phone.
The numbers Kourosh shared on camera:
- $16,000 to $20,000 a month in revenue
- $11K MRR on the dashboard (the gap comes from lifetime deals)
- 2,500 daily active users, around 10,000 monthly actives
- 1,400 active subscriptions
- Pricing: $8.49 a month, or a $260 lifetime plan
One detail I love: Voicy has a disability discount. Email Kourosh, get 20% off. A full 20% of his users are on it.
That discount is the whole strategy in miniature. More on that in a minute.
It Started With His Dad's Typing
Two years ago, Kourosh's dad came to visit him in London. Kourosh got sick and spent two weeks stuck in a hospital bed. His dad, a self-described workaholic, sat next to him all day, typing. Click, click, click.
"To write an email, it took him 2 to 3 business days," Kourosh says.
At the same time, Kourosh had started using ChatGPT's dictation feature, and it blew him away. The idea landed right there in the hospital: give his dad that dictation everywhere, not just inside one app.
There was no market research and no competitor spreadsheet. Just an annoyed son in a hospital bed.
Quick background, because it matters. Kourosh grew up in Tehran, moved to London at 18, studied business. Non-technical. His first product was Meetwaves, a community analytics tool that hit $5K MRR and stalled because he did zero marketing (his words). That project got him hired as a product manager in fintech, where he spent 2-3 years. He learned to code during COVID. From an actual book.
The Build: 2 Weeks to MVP, Then One Platform at a Time
Voicy was the first product Kourosh ever shipped fully in code. The first version was prompting ChatGPT (3.5 or 4 back then), pasting the code into an IDE, "and praying to God that it will work."
The timeline:
- Chrome extension MVP: 2 weeks
- Windows app (Electron): 3 months, started about 6 months after the extension
- Mac app: 1 more month
- Linux app: 2 weeks
- iOS app: shipped about 6 months ago
- Android app: "I swear to God, was one-shotted with Claude Opus 4.8"
Two things worth stealing here.
He went Windows before Mac. Indie hackers build Mac apps because indie hackers use Macs. Kourosh's take: "The entire business world is on Windows, guys."
Look at the compounding too: 3 months for the first desktop app, 1 month for the second, 2 weeks for the third. Every platform made the next one cheaper to ship.
The stack stays lean on purpose: Framer for the site (around $200 a month, his biggest cost after the Whisper API), Cursor and Codex for coding, PostHog's free tier for analytics, Loops for email, Tella for his videos, and a $40 a month Ionos VPS. That's how you run a real product next to a 9-5: a small stack, plus business automations handling the boring parts so your evenings go into shipping.
Growth: Free Traffic First, Then 200 Blog Posts
Day one distribution was the Chrome Web Store itself. Free traffic for basically zero work. Kourosh asked five friends to leave reviews and instantly started seeing 10-20 page views a day. That got him his first 100 users.
Then Reddit. He had one content angle he knew would travel, and he posted it five or six times until he got blocked. That took him to 200-300 users.
The real engine is SEO:
- 200 blog posts
- 30 landing pages
- The site localized into 4-5 languages
- A YouTube series called "AI for Seniors" that took his channel from 1,000 to 12,000 subscribers in about a month
People keep announcing that SEO is dead. Kourosh built an $18K a month business on it, running it with his own tool (romeoseo.com). If you want the version of this playbook for your own product, I broke it down in my SaaS SEO guide.
His line on why content wins in a crowded category is the best quote in the episode:
"It's not the best product that wins. It's the product that your customer sees first."
One article ranking above your competitor beats a better product. Most buyers click the first link in Google (or in AI search), try that tool, and never run a comparison.
The Customer Nobody Else Wants
Kourosh is a product manager at heart, so he lives on user calls. If he could sit on user calls 24/7, he says, that's all he would do.
On those calls he noticed a split. 60-70% of Voicy users were professionals like you and me: fast typers who wanted to be 10% more productive. The other 20-30% were seniors and people with physical disabilities who couldn't type without pain.
The professionals wanted improvements. The second group loved the product exactly as it was. One told him: "This MVP, I could live with forever."
So he stopped fighting for the first group. He knew he couldn't out-build Wispr Flow and their funding. But Wispr Flow doesn't want the senior market. Nobody does. It's not sexy.
"Dictation tools 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. They need that product to work."
Same product, different customer, zero direct competition. I've written before about how much money hides in underserved markets, and Voicy might be the cleanest example yet.
His advice for finding your version of this: "Your ideal customer profile picks you." Post everywhere early. Watch who actually loves the product instead of who you imagined would. Then go where the barrier is lowest, not where the market is biggest.
He's already running the same play again with Romeo SEO. Everyone markets SEO tools to indie hackers. He's finding that local tradespeople want local SEO far more than indie hackers do.
Kourosh's Rules for Winning a Saturated Market
What I'd steal from this episode:
→ A saturated market means proven demand. You don't need a unique idea, you need a segment the leaders ignore.
→ Get seen first. Distribution beats product quality for the first click. Kourosh did it with SEO and a YouTube series aimed at his exact customer.
→ Sell painkillers. Find the user who needs your product, not the one your product mildly improves.
→ Quantity over strategy. "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."
→ Turn off your brain and ship. Kourosh quotes a line I keep thinking about: "An idiot in motion goes farther than a genius at rest."
A dictation app built for his dad now clears $18K a month in a market where competitors raised millions. His edge was picking the customer those competitors won't build for.
FAQ
Is a saturated market bad for a new product?
No. A saturated market proves people pay for the category, which removes your biggest risk. Voicy launched two years after well-funded dictation apps and still reached $16-20K a month by serving seniors and people with disabilities, a segment the big players ignore. Crowded categories punish copycats, not founders with a different customer.
How much money does Voicy make?
Voicy makes between $16,000 and $20,000 a month. The subscription dashboard shows $11K MRR, and lifetime deals ($260 one-time) make up the rest. The app has around 2,500 daily active users and 1,400 active subscriptions, with plans at $8.49 a month.
How did Voicy get its first users?
Through the Chrome Web Store's built-in traffic. Kourosh published the extension, asked five friends for reviews, and the store's organic discovery brought the first 100 users. Reddit posts added a couple hundred more. After that, SEO took over: 200 blog posts, 30 landing pages, and a localized site now drive most signups.
What does "sell painkillers, not vitamins" mean?
A vitamin makes someone's life slightly better, so they can skip it. A painkiller solves a problem they can't live with, so they buy and stay. For fast typers, dictation is a vitamin (10% productivity). For Voicy's seniors and users with disabilities, typing hurts or barely works, so dictation is a painkiller they depend on daily.
I interview bootstrapped founders with numbers like these every week.
Real revenue and real playbooks from founders a few steps ahead of you.
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