When the tax year ends on the 5th of April, valuable tax allowances may be lost simply because people left things too late. Thankfully, Vanguard is here to help you make well-considered decisions, not rushed ones. Their tax year-end hub is full of clear guidance, helpful tools and timely reminders to help you understand your allowances and give your investments the best chance to grow. Search Vanguard Investor to learn more. When investing, your capital is at risk. Tax rules apply. My name is Anton and my app makes $250,000 a month. This is Anton. He spent years on failed apps until he finally figured it out. What did he change? Well, it's not what you'd expect. Our secret is, and let me show you why. Most founders think more features equals more value, but Anton proved the opposite. And the proof is in his app that makes millions. Every point of friction heals your revenue. I brought Anton onto the channel to break down his entire approach. And in this video, we'll dive into how he makes millions from something you can do for free, how every feature you add to your app is actually killing your sales, and the number one thing you should focus on if you're building an app today. All right, let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. All right, guys, Black Friday is in just a couple days. And as you might already know, we are doing something huge at Starter Story. I do not want you to miss out on one of the best deals we've ever done because last year, our Black Friday deal sold out in just two hours. And once people hear about this year's deal, I'm positive it's going to sell out even faster. So if you don't want to miss out on that, just go to StarterStory.com slash Black Friday or hit the first link in the description and we'll notify you as soon as the deal is live. Spots are going to be very limited for this. So what are you waiting for? All right, let's get into the interview. All right, Anton. Welcome to the channel. How about who you are, what you built and what's your story? My name is Anton and I built Lettally. Lettally makes $250,000 a month. And actually, we have launched two years ago. And before that, for 15 years, I was trying to create the startups and all of them failed. And I've tried like maybe six or seven of them and this one actually worked. Okay, before we get into the interview, I just want to understand a little bit more. How big is this app and what does it do? Lettally is a very simple app idea. It turns your speech into well written text. The main thing that we are obsessed is about simplicity and about how easy it is to use and about user experience. And it's actually paid application. We do have a free trial in terms of numbers. We're doing $250,000 in revenue, 30K monthly active users. We have 20K paid subscribers and overall it's $150,000 downloads for two years. All right, I love what you mentioned there is how much you guys focus on keeping this app simple and we're going to get into that. But what I want to understand first is how do you even come across an idea like this, an idea that eventually makes over $200,000 a month. So this idea came to us while we were actually building something else. Two years ago, a little bit more, there were apps that took charge.pt and open eye transcription that you can talk and then transform it to everything. But all of them were prototypes and we thought, wow, this is so powerful and simple idea. This is something I need a lot, but I can't use them myself because they're not implemented well enough. And back then we did another startup and we had a team and we kind of stopped that startup and decided that, okay, now it's time to focus on this idea. Okay, cool. So you come up with the idea, but honestly, I think a lot of people watching this might be wondering and I'm wondering this too is how does this app make $200,000 a month, a ton of free alternatives and you could potentially do it for free with chat GPT. This seems kind of crazy and this is why I wanted to bring you on the channel is that you have an interesting philosophy about this. Can you explain to me why your app is crushing it when there's tons of others that aren't? The number one goal with Lettaly is to make it really simple. It's all about making it more simple, eliminate friction. Every screen that we are doing, every interaction that we are doing is about this. This is our competitive advantage. We think that this is the main reason we are succeeding right now. Everyone can build a product, but there are really few that are very simple and easy to use. And that's why we are here. That's why we want to build a product that is very simple, easy to use and we thought about the user and eliminate any friction possible. I think Anton's approach to building is spot on. Build something that's easy for people to use and forget everything else. This is exactly the approach that we teach in Starter Story Build, which is our program where we will show you how to find, build and launch your idea using only AI coding tools. The best part is you'll learn how to use AI to make your app simple and easy to use, just like Anton's. So if you're ready to get off the sidelines and start building, we'll head to the first link in the description to check out Starter Story Build. Our next cohort is opening up this week right now. So click that link and save your spot. All right, let's get back to the video. Okay. So as I understand simplicity is what made you win here in the elimination of friction, any sort of friction point that your users experience. A lot of the founders we talked to have some sort of secret sauce. Often it's some sort of marketing channel or what tool they use to build the app in, but you have something different. What is the secret sauce to literally? So I think that it's user experience because it's like a multiplier to everything you do. It helps you to onboard users. It helps you to retain them because your app is much easier to use. It helps you to convert to sales and it helps you to attract more people because others start recommending you. And of course, I'm not saying that focus on user experience and everything will work out. You also have a good problem to solve, but if you don't optimize for user experience, then you wouldn't win how much you will try to do in other areas. And the early days of Lettally, we were like asking our customers like crazy, like why you are using us for this and not charge GPT. And everyone was told, I don't know. It's like feels much easier to start recording with a Lettally, like a click of a button on the widget and you can click it, click stop and the text is ready. Even now we kind of always thinking, especially now, how it's easier, like what should we do? We should build a new feature that lots of people asking us, or we need to make the already built feature easier. And also another thing from my past startups. I was always trying to make something unique, something you know well that just doesn't exist. And I always ended up building something that people doesn't really need that much. There we intentionally get something that is a little bit tested. That's why we said, okay, this is validated business model. We want just to make it much better and much simpler that the way that we want to use it. For majority of people, it's better to find something that is already working and that can be done better. Okay, cool. So simplicity, user experience. I think a lot of people watching this have built something or are planning to build something. So my question for you is, if you were to start over and come up with a new app idea, how would you think about building it as simple as possible? What would be your playbook to get something to be as simple and usable as letterly? Yeah, so I think that the number one thing that everyone should understand is that like simplicity, user experience is quite expensive. You should treat it as a separate feature. As a product grows, you should assess and try to simplify the product more and more. The truth is you have to iterate and iterate a lot and iterate on different levels. So the first iteration is on prototypes. So you draw something and you begin to discuss it, to try it out and you simplify, you change. Then you begin building and as you build it, you see it, you didn't yet release it and you kind of have to stop a little bit and think, is it really simple and user friendly as you dreamed of before? On this step, we always kind of struggle that we kind of, we promise some users a feature and we kind of have to postpone it because we need a few more weeks to make it better. And then there is a release and after release, you get some feedback. You see people using it, you see people asking some questions and now you understand that you already also miss something and begin to make it again. So that's the approach, that's the steps. I'm remembering the Steve Jobs quote about that simple is actually harder than complexity and how hard you have to work to actually make a product simple. I love you. You could actually show me your app. Can you show me what your app actually does and how simple it is and sort of show what you mean by this? This is Lettaly and it turns your words into written text and this text can be used for notes, messages, emails, social media posts. It can also record your meetings and then create a note of this meeting. And the app is created for people for whom speaking is easier than typing for different reasons, either speed or they think that way or maybe there are some difficulties with typing. So now you see the recording screen. You can choose multi-speaker or not. Then you click stop and you get the text. And by the way, it's transcribing and it's pretty fast, but now we're doing it like real time so you get text instantly. We have a lot of ways to rewrite your text and you can create your own. If you add something to favorite, you see it on the bottom of the note. So it's much, much easier to trigger this rewrite. And also you can understand that you need more than one rewrite. For example, you need takeaways from what you've pasted and you can click on this as well. And by that you can actually scroll between the screens. You can choose what you prefer. Also we know that sometimes we have a share button. We understand that sometimes it's much easier just to copy in one click and we put it and this is like one of the most usable feature right now. You can also trigger actions like share it with Google Docs or Notion. It's really on the click of a button, everything on the screen. And also another magic thing that we are building right now. So you can add something to the note. You just click here and you record something and it's transcribed here in this recording. So yeah, it looks pretty simple, but actually we've put a lot of effort, a lot of hours, like thousands of hours to this app. Rebuilding, doing a lot of prototypes, doing a lot of versions. That's how we come up to this simple UX. Okay, cool. Thank you for sharing that. I want to change topics just a little bit and talk about TechStack. What is this app built on? Yeah, so in terms of my biolabs, we started from React Native, but sometimes we changed React Native on Apple, on Swift, back and on Python. And yeah, so this is kind of basic technologies we're using for our app. Okay, cool. And on the same note, what does the cost and margins look like for an app like this? So we are a team of 10 right now, so we have a salaries and it's about 30k a month. We are using charge.gpt and other technologies, so it's AI costs like 5k a month. And yeah, and in terms of advertising, it's about $200,000 a month. It's quite a lot of investments, but we do it because we want to continue to make the best possible user experience and also we want to grow and that's why we invest in advertising. All right, well, thank you for sharing that, being transparent about the numbers. The last question that we ask everyone who comes on Starter Story is for anyone watching this right now who wants to build an app, who wants to build an online business, from everything you've learned from all your previous failed startups and now this very successful one, what would be your advice? Yeah, so I can't give advice because I'm not sure if they will work for someone or not, but what works for us and I want to share it. So number one is work with co-founders from day one. Build something you can launch in one, two months, but as you know, it will take a little bit more time because of user experience. Choose an idea that is quite novel. It's a new idea, but it's validated by someone else. Don't spend a lot of money and time to validate a completely new idea. When you see that there is attraction, that you see some revenue, just go for it. Leave your jobs and focus 100% on that one. Also build something that can generate money from day one so you can go from there. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing all that. Thank you for coming on the channel. Anton, what you built is awesome, literally is super cool. It's crushing it. Congratulations. And thanks for coming on and sharing everything. Thanks a lot. I wanted to thank Anton again for coming on to the channel and sharing this. I do truly believe that simplicity is the secret sauce for letterly. So I love this conversation. And even though it seems a bit counterintuitive, keep it simple, stupid. I love that quote K-I-S-S. And I think there's a lot that we can learn from Anton's app that's making $250,000 a month. This is also why we launched Starter Story Build, where we will help you take your idea and turn it into a real app using only AI tools. So if you're ready to launch your project, build something simple like Anton, we'll head to the first link in the description to check out Starter Story Build. All right. Thank you guys for watching. That's it for this episode. We'll see you in the next one.
