One Developer Got Thousands of Users Before His App Launched

AI & I

Naveen Naidu built an app that found product-market fit backwards.

Most apps launch first and then try to find users. Monologue, Naveen’s AI voice dictation app that came out of beta yesterday, did the opposite. It built a following of thousands of users during its incubation period at Every—many of them switching over from venture capital-backed competitors—all while the app barely had a landing page.

The growth has continued in the 24 hours since launch, with an average of 1 million words being transcribed weekly, and in this episode of AI & I, we sit down with Naveen to talk about his journey as the single engineer behind a viral app. We get into the false starts and side projects that taught Naveen how to ship fast, the brutal feedback that kept Monologue honest, why Every decided to build in a crowded category, and the AI coding tools that let one developer do the work of a team.

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Timestamps:

00:01:27 – Introduction

00:03:51 – A live demo of Monologue

00:06:27 – Hard lessons from Naveen’s years in the wilderness

00:12:29 – Building a muscle to ship fast

00:21:11 – The spark that became Monologue

00:26:09 – Dogfooding your way to a killer feature

00:29:45 – Why the harshest product feedback is the most valuable

00:31:47 – Every’s strategy for launching an app in a crowded space

00:40:08 – Giving Monologue the Every “smell”

00:45:09 – Naveen’s one-person AI stack to build beautiful apps

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Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
https://www.monologue.to/