Learn How Founders Built SaaS Startups

I still remember those early days in Pune, India, when a flood of emails, proposals, and documents made me realize that writing was both my passion and my biggest challenge. I used to write a lot of notes for my team members. I used to write a lot of emails to a lot of clients. Running Team Codesign, our design and development agency, meant I was often buried under an ever-growing backlog of notes and client briefs. I knew there had to be a smarter way to capture my ideas without spending hours typing everything out. That’s when the spark for Speech to Note was born. One afternoon, as I experimented with GPT to structure my scattered thoughts, an idea struck me: what if I could simply speak my ideas aloud and have them neatly transcribed and formatted into a polished document? I shared my vision with Kundan, one of my trusted developers. I asked him like, hey, why don't we just build a small prototype where I can just speak something out loud and then give it like one of the predefined formats. And I will take the transcript, understand what that format needs to do and will give me a summarized version according to the format that I've selected.

With capabilities of OpenAI available, we just ran a quick POC. It was a very, very, you can say, very nascent POC where it was not even designed properly. It was just an HTML page No designs whatsoever So he developed that based on that simple idea for me in like two days. I didn't have a lot of formats to choose from but it was just summarizing whatever I said into a small concise summary but it was possible to choose like you know one of the formats and then do it further. But before developing any further, I just gave this to a few of my friends. They really liked it. A few of my agency friends, they really liked it. And then I decided, okay, let's create something tangible out of this.

I created a landing page with the help of my team. It had just one mic button. When users visited speechtonote.com, they clicked the mic button to record. Before receiving their summary, we asked for their email. They provided their email, and we sent the summary in return. We launched this landing page on Twitter and PeerList. People recorded their thoughts, received summaries, and shared their feedback. They confirmed that formats were useful and suggested new ones. They also asked for customization options, the ability to add multiple transcripts, and offline recording capabilities. This feedback shaped our sprints and features, which we delivered step by step. For the first 6–8 months, Speech to Note was available only on the web. Later, in 2024, we launched versions on Google Play Store and App Store. These weren’t announced widely on platforms like Product Hunt but were released to our existing web users. They started using the apps, pointed out flaws, and we fixed them one by one. Today, we are continuously improving our web and mobile applications, building a desktop companion app, and planning to expand to wearables as well.

We first launched the landing page on platforms like Twitter and PeerList. Later, we launched on Product Hunt and AppSumo, and that’s where things really took off. We gained around 2,000–2,500 customers, with 700–800 of them becoming paid users. Another major driver of growth was our community. They were highly responsive, actively giving feedback and ideas, and were deeply involved in the development process. Their input helped us plan and deliver features in clear, consistent cycles. Even though competitor products existed, we chose to focus on listening to our users and building according to their needs. This not only guided development but also helped us surprise users with thoughtful features that matched their behavior and expectations. Today, Speech to Note has grown to over 7,000 users, with strong reviews across platforms: 36 on Product Hunt, 92 on AppSumo, 33 on the Play Store, and a similar number on the App Store. We now have users from over 60 universities worldwide, with 20–25 people signing up daily. Each day, the platform processes around 45,000 seconds of audio transcription. Importantly, this growth has been almost entirely organic. Apart from a small $15 Facebook ad campaign, we haven’t spent anything on paid marketing. Our progress has come from word-of-mouth, community feedback, and continuous improvement. We’re still bootstrapped and focused on learning, iterating, and building forward.

One of the crucial things that Speech to Note did for us, it became a very good portfolio project for our agency team co-design because we were able to attract better clients by just telling them like hey we are not just someone who can provide service but we have done this on our own for our own products so that was like a very good promise they saw and we were not just designing or developing, we were delivering. For freelancers and agency owners: building a SaaS product teaches you invaluable lessons about what it takes to launch, build, and grow something meaningful. Running Speech to Note has allowed me to learn, showcase my capabilities, and better acquire clients. I continue to run my agency, and I make sure users are never left in the dark—I ask the right questions, gather feedback, and ensure that everything we ship is built around real user pains and needs.