Tanay Kothari

my dad recently asked me what he should actually use an ai assistant for. i’ve spent years building in the ai space, and i honestly couldn’t answer him.

he recently started trying out ai assistants like instinct, muse, dots, etc.

for most of them, you can send a text, and they'll go off and do different tasks for you. the catch is you have to tell them exactly what you want.

my dad doesn’t really have a list of jobs waiting to be handed to an assistant. he also doesn't know what they're capable of, so he doesn't know the right place to start.

people in tech don't have this problem, because we use these tools every day. we connect them to fifty apps and hand them half our tasks.

but people like us are maybe 1% of the world. most people just want something that can solve one clear problem for them, not fifty.

i’ve seen this problem before. when we started wispr, some of the early dictation tools in the market worked decently well, but they were complicated to setup and use. anyone like my dad was never going to do that.

flow took all the setup away and made it something you never have to think about. that’s what made it usable for people like my dad.

before you build technical products, you should be confident that a parent, grandparent, or someone non-technical can understand the problem it solves.

that's how you build tools for the other 99% of people.

- written with @WisprFlow

these are the 4 most important questions to ask when deciding on a co-founder:

(these have worked wonders for @SahajGarg6 and i)

>do you care about working on the same problems?
if not, you pull the company in different directions. disaster waiting to happen.

>do you share the same values?
ours were integrity and being customer first. that meant no ads inside our products, and making product experience the #1 thing.

>do you want to work with the same kind of people?
we chose a small, extremely capable team of people who inspire us professionally, and are a joy to be around.

>do you complement each other?
if you make decisions fast, you might want a co-founder who decides more slowly. if you're shy and don't like talking to a lot of people, that's fine, but you probably need a co-founder who's more extroverted.

these will help you pick a person that you can build a massive company with, and enjoy it along the way.

— written with @WisprFlow

i'm often asked, "do you think i have pmf?"

my answer is always the same:

"if you're asking that question, you probably don't."

when you hit pmf, you won't have to ask. people will love your product so much that you'll hear it directly from them.

we found this out firsthand at wispr when we heard that people were buying macbooks just to be able to use flow.

you can't fake pmf or people loving your product, and it will be obvious when that happens. until then, keep building.

ship, collect feedback, ship again

— written with @WisprFlow

when we raised our seed round years ago, i actually told investors exactly how we *could* fail.

i'm generally a no bs person, so i wanted to lay all the cards out. the pitch had 3 parts:

-here's what we think this could become
-here's what we know so far
-here are all the risks for how this company could fail

i told them in a meeting, "you could tell me 5 risks you see. i'll tell you 100, because we've done the work to understand all 100."

we raised $4.5m a couple of weeks later, and the journey started.

investors aren't stupid. they hear pitches all day, and they can tell when a founder is hiding the downside.

so if you're looking to raise: don't oversell the upside, and definitely don't hide the downside. honesty wins.

— written with @WisprFlow

2 years ago, i had done zero marketing. i'd been an engineer my entire life.

when i told a founder friend we were building a consumer product, he told me, "tanay, you don't have that consumer dna. you don't know how to build a brand. you shouldn't do this."

it sounded like a fun challenge. game on.

2 months after we pivoted Wispr from hardware to Flow, our first launch did millions of views and hit #1 on product hunt for the day and the week.

what i've learned about marketing since:

1/ take almost no inspiration from others. standing out means doing things your own way. be unique and bold in your decisions.

2/ pick your first users by who will cause PLG. hundreds of avatars of people loved wispr flow. we focused on 2. developers, because they post about tools they love everywhere. founders, because they roll them out to their whole team.

3/ make every user feel it was built for people like them. most tools assume american english. in wispr you can pick british english, swiss german, or simplified vs traditional chinese

4/ build small moments that make people feel seen. in india, after you've spoken 1,000 words in an indian language, a banner says congratulations in that language, with the flag

5/ do pr even if you can't measure it. if i put its roi in a spreadsheet, the column would be empty. but asking what i'd pitch a journalist about every new feature gives us a lot of our ad ideas

6/ make the message something you can see, touch, feel. have fun with it. we said we'd kill the keyboard, so i sawed one in half in our office for a launch video

7/ treat word of mouth as a science, not an art. after we hit product-market fit, the first thing we optimized for was getting every user to tell their friends

turns out you don't need consumer dna or to be the most creative. you just need to treat marketing like a science.