🎤 Wispr Flow: Kill the Keyboard

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In 2008, a fifth-grader, Tanay Kothari, walked out of Iron Man with a mission that would consume the next 17 years of his life. 

He taught himself how to code at 10. By high school, he'd built one of the world's first voice assistants with millions of users, until Google shut it down.

That was just the beginning of a journey that would lead through neural interface hardware, a brutal pivot, and ultimately to Wispr Flow, that's making the 150-year-old keyboard obsolete.

Wispr Flow has completely changed how I work. I spend 10+ hours each week writing and interviewing founders, and the efficiency gains have been game-changing. That’s why I was so excited to sit down with Tanay and unpack the story behind it.

He shared some incredibly tactical lessons on Reddit hacking, pricing, referral strategy, and more. 

Excited to pass them along to you today 👇

Tanay has been coding since age 10 fueled by his Jarvis dream, dominating programming competitions, and showing the kind of technical brilliance that would later land him at Stanford working under AI legends like Andrew Ng. 

Even though his first attempt at building a voice assistant did not work out, the vision remained: making technology interaction feel intuitive and seamless, like talking to a close friend. Everything he ever wanted to build was along those lines.

Fast forward to 2021, and the timing seemed perfect for the second attempt at building Jarvis.

Between GPT-3 and ChatGPT launches, voice interfaces were becoming possible. Tanay spent three years building what seemed like pure magic: headphones that converted neural signals from silent speech into voice.

He raised $20M+ in VC funding, built a 40-person team with top PhDs in neuroscience and machine learning, and created technology that literally read your mind. They connected it to ChatGPT and Siri, but results were poor because thoughts are naturally rambling.

The even more brutal reality was the lack of a consumer market for this hardware yet. Even magical technology would have flopped.

After a board meeting in early 2024, Tanay and his co-founder faced the hard truth about their hardware dreams. The insight that changed everything was deceptively simple:

"For consumer products, you can only change one behavior at a time."

This explains why most hardware products fail. Take the Humane AI Pin—it required users to adopt TWO new behaviors simultaneously:

If Humane had just made an app for contextual AI use, millions would have adopted it. Then they could have introduced hardware as an upgrade.

They were building two companies in parallel. The strategic decision for Tanay and his team became clear: build the software layer first to create a magical voice experience that actually works.

Wispr Flow's single behavior change is to replace your keyboard with voice. Nothing else changes.

He made the incredibly difficult call to downsize the team and built a lean, 8-person special forces unit to bring the new software vision to life.

The product was simple: a free Mac dictation app that worked across all applications. 

For the first 1,000 customers, the growth strategy was to thoughtfully “hack” Reddit. 

The team mapped out every potential use case and user persona, then identified the communities where those people spent time. For Wispr, that included obvious subreddits like r/MacApps and r/ChatGPT, but also less obvious ones like ADHD and student coding communities.

They studied what kinds of posts performed well in each subreddit and then wove their product narrative into those formats. The golden rule on Reddit: never come across as salesy. Posts that did would get banned before reaching 10 views.

One dedicated team member posted every single day. On average, that brought in 5–10 new users daily. Occasionally, a post would take off and bring in 200+ users overnight.

This approach grew Wispr to several thousand users during Beta, with about half coming from word of mouth as satisfied early adopters shared it.

An unexpected problem came up during this early phase. The product was so good despite being free that users felt suspicious, wondering if their data was being sold 😂. The team ultimately decided to spin up a paid plan to ensure the product felt credible.

When Tanay decided to pivot from hardware to software, he wanted to transform the company from deep tech R&D hardware to a fast-moving consumer software company built for growth. 

While he had originally planned a January 2025 public launch, he expedited the timeline to just six weeks, targeting a launch at the end of September. 

His mental model was simple: how quickly can I make this a viral consumer software company?

After talking to mentors and people who’d done successful product launches, he learned that the most important thing for a successful launch is to have every single channel to go live on the exact same day. When you do that, the sum of them is greater than each part individually.

September 30, 2024, 9AM sharp:

The challenging part was that they had to schedule many of these initiatives weeks in advance. Once they had set all these things up, there was no going back. They had to get the product and everything else ready in six weeks. 

The entire team worked 7 days a week to make this happen and build scalability into the product.

It was well worth it!

They hit #1 on Product Hunt for both the day and the week, generated millions of views, and 10x'd their user base to tens of thousands of users. 

Most founders treat their referral program like a copy and paste. 

They copy what other companies have done and spend too much time evaluating what referral software to use, rather than spending time thinking through why your users would refer in the first place. 

Tanay and his team also experimented with the standard “give $x get $x” program but they quickly learned something shocking: only 5% of their referrals actually used the referral link. 🤯

Tanay started studying how Wispr Flow’s biggest fans were referring the app and noticed it mirrored how people recommend great restaurants. You go, have an amazing experience, then tell a friend, because you want them to enjoy it too. But beneath that, there’s also a subtle desire for credit: ‘I’m the one who introduced you to this place.’ That’s why a cold referral link feels less authentic.

This discovery was completely counterintuitive, but it led to a strategic change. When they realized this sharing psychology, they actually completely ignored the whole referral flow because it was pretty much unused. 

Instead, they focused on a different question: how do we get in front of all these people who love talking about us on social media?

They started identifying natural advocates, people who are already referring other products. You can usually spot them as people who are vocal on Twitter and LinkedIn, who join groups and are the ones others are listening to. 

They grew >60% month over month in the first half of this year by amplifying this organic referral effort.

When it came time to price the product, Tanay had to figure out how users described the value they were getting from it. This was crucial for understanding not just the pricing but also the features and messaging for launch.

He rejected the popular Van Westendorp pricing analysis that many founders use, especially for early-stage startups. That method tries to figure out per feature what benefit is being added and how much people would pay for that specific feature, then does a lot of complicated analysis. But for early-stage companies, it's not very helpful and overly complicated.

Instead, they used four simple pricing questions with range sliders:

From those responses, the two numbers you're really looking for are where people say it feels fair and where people say it feels borderline too expensive but they'd likely pay for it. 

Then you have to decide if you want to be a consumer product or a prosumer product.

Wispr leaned into the consumer approach, prioritizing broad adoption over immediate revenue. As part of their pricing research, they spoke with dozens of users to pinpoint the product’s true value, what messaging resonated, and which features mattered most.

This clarity of thinking has paid off. Wispr Flow boasts a ~20% paid conversion rate, far above the typical 3–4% industry benchmark.

The market for this dictation tool is massive. Tanay sees every single internet user to be a potential user of Wispr Flow. That’s 5B around the world. 

The product has already hit PMF with 25 different personas, from engineers prompting AI tools to managers blasting through messages on Slack. 

This attractive opportunity has attracted many new competitors in the market, including Willow and Aqua. However, the biggest competitors are the existing incumbents with an insane amount of distribution advantage like OpenAI and Apple. They pose a real existential threat.

Think David vs. Goliath, but Goliath has an App Store and a billion users. 😬

The key for Wispr is to run fast enough to reach escape velocity with the app in the hands of hundreds of millions if not billions of people where that existential risk doesn’t become that big.

A couple of months ago, Tanay and his team announced a $30M Series A to accelerate their growth. 

As an avid user of the product, I am rooting for them.

1/ The one behavior change principle. Focus on changing just one user behavior at a time. Map ambitious visions through incremental, single behavior changes. Multiple habit changes = product death.

2/ The coordinated launch strategy. Consider hitting multiple channels simultaneously rather than spreading efforts. But this requires significant upfront planning. Make sure you set up the infrastructure in advance.

3/ The authentic community growth. Study what resonates in each community first, then naturally weave your story into working formats. Requires patience and genuine participation.

4/ The referral psychology framework. Understand why users actually refer before building your referral program. Most referrals happen organically without formal systems. Amplifying natural sharing behaviors is the key.

5/ The simple pricing research. Complex pricing analysis may be overkill for early-stage startups. Use simpler frameworks but validate extensively with user conversations.

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See you next Tuesday,

Leo

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