This simple app makes $250K per month | Starter Story

Anton built Letterly, an app that turns speech into well-written text, and it now generates $250,000 a month in revenue. The app has 30,000 monthly active users, 20,000 paid subscribers, and 150,000 total downloads over two years. Before this success, Anton spent 15 years trying to build startups—six or seven of them—and all failed. The difference with Letterly was not a novel technology or a clever marketing channel. It was a relentless focus on simplicity and user experience, treating those as the product's core competitive advantage rather than as polish applied after the fact.

The competitive advantage is user experience, not novelty

Anton's previous startups failed because he tried to build something unique and novel that did not exist. He ended up making products people did not actually need. With Letterly, he deliberately chose an idea that was already validated by others. There were apps using ChatGPT and OpenAI transcription to convert speech to text, but they all felt like prototypes. They worked in principle but were not implemented well enough for Anton to want to use them himself. His insight was that the business model was already proven; the opportunity was to make it much better and much simpler. "For the majority of people," he says, "it's better to find something that is already working and that can be done better." This approach flips the typical founde