How Letterly reached $250K/month by eliminating friction

Executive overview

Most founders add features to compete. Anton did the opposite — he stripped Letterly down to one tap and let simplicity do the selling. After 15 years and six failed startups, he found that UX is a multiplier on every other metric: retention, conversion, referrals.

Simplicity is not a default state — it is the most expensive feature you build.

The Letterly business

• Speech-to-text app; turns spoken words into clean, formatted text
• $250K monthly revenue, 20K paid subscribers, 30K monthly active users
• Launched two years ago; $0 to $250K without a novel technology

Why simplicity wins against free alternatives

• Users chose Letterly over ChatGPT because it "feels easier" — one tap to record, one tap to stop
• Every friction point costs revenue; removing it compounds across onboarding, retention, and referrals
• UX acts as a multiplier: it cannot replace a real problem, but without it, no other effort compensates

How Anton builds for simplicity

• Treat simplicity as a separate, budgeted feature — not a side effect of good design
• Iterate in three passes: prototype, pre-release build, post-release feedback
• At each pass, stop and ask whether the feature is as simple as originally imagined
• Ship later if needed — Anton routinely postpones promised features to spend more weeks simplifying them

Idea selection

• Chose a validated idea (AI speech-to-text) already proven by others, then out-executed on UX
• Avoided building something entirely novel — previous startups failed because they built things people did not need
• Target ideas where execution quality, not uniqueness, is the edge

Unit economics

• Team of 10; salaries ~$30K/month
• AI costs ~$5K/month
• Advertising ~$200K/month — the dominant cost, invested deliberately to sustain growth

Advice for early-stage builders

• Work with co-founders from day one
• Build something launchable in one to two months
• Pick a validated idea, not a speculative one
• Build in monetisation from day one
• Only go all-in (quit job, full focus) once you see real revenue traction