🎧 He Got Thousands of Users Before His AI App Even Launched

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper sits down with our entrepreneur in residence Naveen Naidu and COO Brandon Gell to talk about how Naveen built Monologue, an AI voice dictation app for Mac that writes the way you talk so you can work faster without breaking flow. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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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, Dan Shipper and COO Brandon Gell sit down with Naveen to talk about his journey as the single engineer behind a viral app. They 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.