05 — App Business Desk
Simplicity Is a Feature. It Costs $250K a Month.
Anton spent 15 years and six failed startups learning one thing: everyone can build a product. Letterly — a speech-to-well-written-text app — wins by being obsessively simple, and prints $250K a month doing it.
Letterly does one thing: you talk, it writes it well. Two years in: 150,000 downloads, 30,000 monthly actives, 20,000 paying subscribers, a team of ten — and a $200K/month ad budget that only works because the product converts. The moat isn't the transcription; it's the thousands of iteration hours spent deleting friction.
Everyone can build a product. There are really few that are very simple and easy to use.
— Anton, Letterly
His closing advice list is refreshingly unglamorous: find a co-founder, ship in one to two months, build validated ideas only, charge from day one, and commit fully. Fifteen years of failure compressed into five bullet points — cheaper to read than to relearn.