Letterly · B2C · voice-to-text notes app
Simplify every screen, and delay promised features until they're simple
Founder credits it as the main reason for $250K/month despite free alternatives
Workedproduct-activationfeature-development
What they did
Every screen and interaction is judged on removing friction. Simplicity is treated as a separate, expensive feature and revisited as the product grows. Three iteration loops: (1) draw prototypes, discuss, simplify; (2) during the build, stop before release and ask if it's as simple as intended, postponing features promised to users by a few weeks if needed; (3) after release, watch usage and questions and simplify again. When choosing work, weighs building a requested feature vs making an existing one easier. 'Thousands of hours' of rebuilds and prototypes went into the UX.
What happened
Guest calls UX the competitive advantage and main reason for success: it helps onboarding, retention, conversion and referrals. Users say it 'feels much easier' than ChatGPT.
- Stage
- product
- Effort
- Thousands of hours of prototypes and rebuilds
“As the product grows, you should assess and try to simplify the product more and more. The truth is, you'll have to iterate and iterate a lot, and iterate on different uh levels. So the first iteration is on prototypes.”
“On this step, we always kind of struggle that we kind of we promise some users a feature and uh we kind of uh have to postpone it because we need few more weeks to to make it better.”
“It uh helps you to onboard users, it helps you to retain them because your app is much easier to use. It help you to convert to sales, and it helps you to attract more people because others start recommending you.”
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More from this episode
- Letterly: Pick an idea others already proved, and build a much simpler versionWorked after six or seven novel-idea startups failed; now $250K/month
- Letterly: Ask early customers why they pay you instead of using ChatGPT for freeEveryone said it just 'feels much easier', confirming ease as the edge
- Letterly: Let people start recording from a widget and copy the text in one tapOne-tap copy is one of the most used features; no numbers
- Letterly: Put a large share of monthly revenue back into adsSpends roughly $100K-200K a month on ads; results not shared