How Wispr Flow manufactured viral moments by personally onboarding 500 users on Google Meet | Tanay Kothari ($56M Raised)

Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now let's dive right into today's episode.

Hey everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we're speaking with Tanay Kothari, CEO and founder of Whisperflow. Tanay, how are you?

Doing pretty well, man. How's it going?

Good. Really excited to have you here and appreciate you taking this call Friday, 4 PM. You said you're feeling fresh, so good to go. Looking forward to it. Let's talk about everything that you're building. So take us back to the early days. What was the big aha?

So we started working on, on Whisperflow about a year ago. But I've been working on this company for 4 years. And so the story actually goes way back. I started working in this space about 17 years ago in 2008 when the first Iron Man movie came out because I wanted to build Jarvis. And so me and a friend of mine built what was then one of the world's first voice assistants. So before Siri, before Alexa, and people just felt like magic. So scaled to a few million users in the first year, then Google shut us down because they didn't like what we were doing. And then Fast forward a few years, this was just something that kept me up at night, day in, day out. And so with Whisper, we again started this company with the vision of building Jarvis. And our thesis then was, hey, in the next few years, everybody's going to be talking to their computers and phones. When you do that, you want to be able to do that even when you're around other people. And so we built this wearable device that went from talk to text and took 3 years to build. It worked. We hooked it up with ChatGPT and Siri and Alexa to see if those would be good voice assistants for that device to work with. Turns out they all suck. And what we decided to do was build a system that goes from the rambles that you have into something that is structured and ready to send. And we called that little project Flow. We gave it to a few users. They actually started sharing it with their friends, and it went on and on, and it was one of the most viral experiences I've seen. And that was when we decided to focus the company fully on building that product. And we rebranded ourselves to Whisperflow. And that was about less than 12 months ago. So it's been quite the uphill journey from there.

So your friends start sharing it. Like, how long until you said, oh shit, like, for sure, this is going to be like a company? Was that within like 5 hours? Was that 24 hours? Was it like a month? How long did that take?

I'm a skeptical guy. Took me 2 months to get there. Once we saw it go from 5 users to hundreds to thousands, then I was like, okay, interesting. I initially thought this was just, you know, a viral spike, but there might be something real here.

For business model, what is the business model? How do you make money? Put it in blunt way.

So business model, super simple. As a user individually, you can download Flow for free and start using it. If you use it above a certain limit, for us it's the number of words you speak with Flow. You then have to subscribe to continue using it. Very similar actually to ChatGPT where you get a limited number of questions you could do of the top models and then you have to pay to do more.

Makes sense. Is there a B2B component here as well or is it all consumer?

There is. So consumer is the biggest thing that we have taking off. And then we have about 100 companies that sign up for Flow by themselves as well. Again, that's on a per-seat basis. And usually the way that works is the VPs or executives of these companies start using the product. They love it. They get it for their team. Their team loves it. And they're like, hey Tanay, how do we make make this official. And so we actually have zero salespeople and we're closing 100 deals a week where we just help them set it up for their team, get compliance and all out of the way. And that actually has been phenomenal to see.

What's the budget item? You know, when they go and buy this product, you know, from the B2B side, of course, like what is the budget item or is it creating a new one?

So it usually fits into what people describe as their AI budget. Every company today has that, like, hey, we have an AI budget, we need to go AI tools that uplift our users. And the interesting thing is it is not standard what business value they're trying to get out of it, which is interesting because we can be then more creative and actually very direct with the business value that comes up and being able to show that ROI quantitatively and qualitatively and being able to sell it that way. So very interesting space in B2B sales right now if you're there.

Is that hard that there's so many different use cases and ways that the product can be used? Like, are there downsides to that?

I feel it's what you make of it. I think the fantastic thing with Whisper, right, is it is a bot product built for humans. Our market is 5 billion people around the world who type on their computers or phones. And I think when we're building the product, it's top of mind for me to make sure it is an incredible product for the average human being. But marketing and product marketing always has to be extremely focused on ICP. So what we have to do is like, okay, here's the 25 different ICPs that we have product market fit with. Let's pick the top 2 or 3 that we can really focus on and nail and sell it to works. And that's how we run the organization. As soon as, okay, very clear motion for this specific ICP, time to pick another one and then expand that because every single person that we build it for, we want them to feel like this is a broad product built for people like me.

And what are those top use cases?

Top use cases. A lot of people use it for emails. Everybody hates writing emails and they spend hours every day down the drain replying to hundreds of emails. Oh, it's easy. Hold a button, speak, let go, perfectly drafted email in your inbox. And you can go through 100 emails like that versus it being something that you kind of procrastinate on day in, day out, and sometimes never even get to. Second big one is Slack. A lot of teams use it, and if you're remote, people are lazy when they type, right? You don't want your team to send one-sentence messages to each other. You want them to share a lot more context. And so that actually is being used a lot by remote teams to message each other. Third big one is actually using it for engineers when they're programming with Cursor Windsor. Engineering is as much English as it is code today. And so Instead of saying fix bug to Cursor, and Cursor is not going to do your job, they go through this whole ramble of, hey, this happened and that happened, and I tried this thing, that thing, none of this worked. And with that much context, these AI systems actually get the work done. And that just translates into people just love using it with ChatGPT and Claude because it one-shots everything that they're trying to do with it. And so honestly, like overall, WhisperFlow is used in over 100,000 different applications and websites these days. Wow. Yeah.

From the technology side, how are you making that work so well? Yeah, I try voice-to-text every couple years. I feel like, okay, maybe the technology is good enough now, and I do it, and it's never good enough. So, like, what's the how for how this all happens?

So, key things that make it exceptionally good is, one, it's insanely accurate. The average time between when Flow puts something on your screen and you press send is half a second, which means that most people trust it enough where they're not even reading what Flow produces. And this is actually the first time in the history of voice that this has ever happened, where people trust a voice system enough. And that is a lot because of the incredible machine learning and intelligence team that we have. My co-founder is incredible, Sahej. He's one of the guys who invented diffusion models, and the rest of our intelligence team are some of the smartest PhDs in machine learning and beyond. And them working together, building a custom solution for this is how we've been able to make this work so well. Second thing that's incredible is the latency. Every time you use Flow, it produces things in half a second. It is the fastest inference on the planet today, and that is something that users really care about. You don't want to wait to see results like ChatGPT takes 20, 30 seconds to produce the whole output that comes in. You want something that works in half a second.

From a growth perspective, where are users coming from? How are you acquiring customers?

90% word of mouth. It is people start using the product and we've designed the product in a way where every moment in the user journey is an aha moment. When you're onboarding, you hit the first aha moment. Well, first day you hit the second one, first week you hit the third one. And then as these come in, people just feel a deep sense of love towards the product and they can't stop themselves from telling everybody else about it. And so if you go on Twitter, you go on LinkedIn, you'll see a lot of people posting about it. And that is all organic. And that's how most of our users end up finding us.

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How do you identify those aha moments, or is it more you're manufacturing those aha moments?

Well, those are all manufactured, purely manufactured. When we first built the product, I onboarded the first 500 users by myself on a call, Google Meet call. Share your screen, install the product. While they're doing that, I'm seeing what they're confused about. When they're trying to do something, where is their mouse going? Where are their eyes going? At every step of the process, what is the expression on their face? Is it confusion? Is it delight? Is it the spark in their eyes and they're jumping off of their seat? And the whole process of this is find the things that repeatedly create delight, make sure that never dies, and then find the other places where there's confusion, and kind of take them out. The result of that is people describe this as one of the best onboarding experiences they've had. And I think this is honestly one of the things that most companies miss out on. You miss out on the first impression. You care a lot more about, hey, how the product UX and the feature sets and all we have, but no one cares. People care about how you make them feel, especially how you make them feel the first time you interact with them.

Who's inspired your thinking, how you approach building products?

A lot. Steve Jobs. A lot. Rahul Vora from Superhuman.

On the team side, you mentioned you have some amazing team members there. Like, how do you feel when you see these stories about Meta going after these teams and throwing around a bunch of money? Like, does that worry you at all, or is the team so locked in, so bought into the mission that that's not something that you have to worry about?

Not a big worry. Like, being at Whisper is almost like being a part of a cult. You see the rocket ship that we are on. And this incredible team genuinely believes we can be the next biggest company in history of technology.

What do you think brings the team together? What's like the unifying mission? How do you think about the mission?

The mission that we have at Whisper is we want to make interaction with devices feel just as natural and effortless as talking to a close friend. And so eventually we want Whisper to be the layer that sits between you as a person and everything that you're doing. With technology and AI. And it's all about the intuitiveness, the seamlessness, how you're making people feel every step of the day. And essentially, a big part of it is there are so much that you do in life that feels like grunt work, and we just want to take away all of it so you have the time and energy to do things that really matter for you. And that is something that a lot of people in the team have felt themselves when they started using the product. They felt it as soon as they started telling other people about it, and they then wanted to be a part of the mission because very few companies make people feel that way.

How long until people are no longer typing? Are we like 1 year out, 3 years out, 5 years? Like, when is that going to become like an extinct foreign concept that people are going to be like, you believe that humans used to sit there and type?

Honestly, it depends. I see it all like evolving as circles of influence, right? And so we're talking about like, say San Francisco, New York, LA, the hotspots. Next couple of years, starting to go extinct. And then it's going to spread out to different countries, different occupations, user groups, different levels of tech savviness. And so in about 5 years' time, you can go buy keyboards at a vintage store.

That's an exciting future. I look forward to the day that I no longer have to type. What else is on your mind in terms of mission and vision? Where do you see the product going from here?

We want to build Jarvis. And for me, that has 3 core pillars that we need to build from a product side. Number 1, you speak, Whisper writes for you. That's what was for FloDubs today. Number 2, you speak and it does things for you. And number 3 is it's able to help you proactively. And once we have these 3 pillars, it forms a really strong foundation for what you want an AI assistant to be like. At the heart of it, it is less so to me about the voice interface going back and forth and a lot more about Hey, this is the system that's with you 24/7 that doesn't need you to stare at a screen every time you need to use it. And it's something that understands you maybe even better than you understand yourself.

What do you think of the companies like friend.com? Is that in any way a competitor or is that a completely different world?

That's a completely different space. I think about, you know, at the end of the day, what you do as a company and the market you're in is essentially the job to be done. right? The job to be done that Friend.com is solving is a lot more about loneliness, I would say, and people's desires to have a connection than it is about the kinds of things that we care a lot about. And so to me, very far adjacent. Them, Character AI, Replica, like those are great companies in that space.

Are there any competitors that are in the market that are doing something similar? —of course, not as good, but what's the competitive landscape look like for you?

Companies I care the most about with regards to that is OpenAI and Apples of the world. And as a company, right, when you have an incredible team across machine learning, engineering, design, growth, one, it's insanely rare to have a team that has excellence in all of these domains. Once you have that and you're moving really fast, the one thing that is an existential risk is companies with a distribution advantage. And so that's just my mental model around it. and there's no key solution to that except acknowledging it and be like, the only way we get past this risk or reduce this risk is grab as much mindshare and grow as fast as we possibly can, which is why we raised our most recent round of funding and we're scaling up the team and our user base at an insanely fast rate to meet the challenges that are up ahead. You mentioned the recent round there.

Talk to us about that round. What were some of the lessons learned?

Lessons from that round. So we just raised $30 million Series A. This was led by Menlo Ventures, and we also got some phenomenal angels along the way, like the founders of Pinterest and Typeface and Intel and Opal and a lot of other companies on our board. And it was funny how it started because we have a lot of cash in the bank already, right? And company is lean. We don't burn a lot of money for no reason. And we actually weren't looking to raise, but that is oftentimes the perfect time to raise capital because as a founder, right, you're in a position of power. You don't need, you could want. And at those times you are just able to have all the cards in your hand. This is what we had. Again, a couple of other things that really helped us was every single VC in the Valley was using Whisper. It was a huge value add to them. And so I didn't need to convince them about why the product was good. All I had to tell them about, if you believe why Whisper is good today, here is where we can take the company and here is how, and this is what I care about. And I'm generally a no BS person, so I just laid all the cards out as they were. And that to me is the best way I find partners that I want to work with is show them your authentic self. See if that is of interest to them. Turns out it was of interest to a lot of people. And then we found the people that I think we resonated the most with in terms of just values and mission alignment.

Earlier you were talking about how the first, I think you said 500 users, you personally onboarded them, you watched them go through the Google Meet process. Where are you spending your time right now? And then how do you see that evolving in the next 12 months? You know, where do you think you're gonna be spending time 12 months from now?

Funny question, man. I don't know what I'm gonna do next week. But where I'm spending my time today is I would say 30% of my time goes in leading initiatives within the company. Could be entire new features, product lines, go-to-market motions. But 40% of my time is going towards hiring. We are hiring some incredible people. And so after the round, we had a huge burst of influx of people who wanted to come and join Whisper. So spending a lot of time getting to know them better and also defining the kinds of people that we want to bring on board. And then I would say the other 30% goes a lot towards the miscellaneous tasks, which could go from partnerships that we're doing with the largest enterprises to driving culture within the company, to building our new B2B sales, which is again planning a lot for inbound, but everything and anything that we need to make that happen.

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You mentioned earlier, I believe you want to be the biggest technology company ever or something along those lines. So as you think ahead to that, what keeps you up at night? You know, apart from Celsius that we talked about pre-interview, what keeps you up at night as you think about your big ambitious goals?

I think most companies die by suicide, and there is a very delicate balance where you want to do a lot as a company, but you also want to be insanely focused. And so the thing that keeps me up at night all the time is what is one thing I cut? What is one thing that we can do lesser of so we have more time to do things that are actually working? And my philosophy there is like, we all know the rule of 80/20. 20% of the things that get you 80% of the results. What most people don't realize is you can cut the 80% of the things that are not giving you the results. And so you have more space to experiment more. You find a new 20% that's going to give you 80% more results, and you can just keep doing that again and again. And so that is what I keep thinking about day in, day out, is what to cut, where to double down, because those are small decisions that have the biggest impacts down the line.

What's an example of something that you cut that was painful to cut?

So much. Very simple one. SEO, search engine optimization. If I told that to most people, they would be like, you're cracked. Like, that is of course a great way to do— you like, everybody goes to search engines, they're searching for things. But honestly, you got to understand your business. And the fact of the matter is no one is searching for voice dictation. Nobody even knows that voice dictation is good enough that you can actually use it. And if that is something that I can have one less person focused on that is not taking my headspace or the headspace of my CMO, we have more time to focus on what really matters. And that we had to cut. But we had full alignment in the team. It was very easy. Say it, it's gone. Other things that were painful is honestly, there have been some user groups I wanted to build a lot more for. I wanted to spend a lot more time on. For example, There's a whole group of people, quadriplegics, right? They're just unable to type and it really hurts their quality of life. I want to build for them. I want to build an incredible experience. And that requires us to build a lot more than we have today because they don't want to do just dictation. They want to be able to control their entire computer using Flow. As much as this would be life-changing for them, that is just something we cannot prioritize right now. And that would kill the company if we try to take on this massive problem at this stage where we are with the resources that we have. So I still spend a lot of time with a lot of folks in that accessibility group trying to see where what we have so far can really fit into their lives and really help them. But that's just something we have to heavily prioritize.

You mentioned a CMO there. How did you find your CMO?

I found him through a referral, and we actually started working with him on a 4 hours a week basis to help drive PR. I liked working with him, and I was like, hey, do you want to spend some more time together? And he was doing some other consulting things at that point. So he joined as an interim CMO a few months later. And at that point I was just like, hey, you know, we just pivoted from a hardware to a consumer software company. We have nobody in marketing right now, and I want you to help build and lead that while we find a CMO. And so he was kind of running the team, building that operation. And the more I worked with him, the more I just, just love the guy. Dude's an absolute beast. He's a machine. And a couple of months of working with him that way, messaged him one day and I was like, let's commemorate this. Let's make it full-time. I want you here. And then he joined. That was in March of this year. And I think one of the best hires we've made.

I feel like CMOs, you can generally put them in two buckets. They're on like the demand gen side or more on the brand building side. Yep.

Which side did he fall into? That is the thing that I think is great with Daniel is he is extremely flexible in being able to just like water fit into whatever is most important for the company at that point. If you look at our website, if you look at the videos that we've been putting out, incredible stuff, right? And he's leading all of that. And so brand creative side, phenomenal. We have insanely ambitious growth targets. That's also something— it's not a challenge he shies away from. And so he's my partner in crime and thinking about how do we get Flow to the next million, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of users that are out there. And we have a number of incredible people within the team who focus on either end of that spectrum. And together, I think it's the team that would take us to the moon.

You mentioned he was doing PR early on. How have you used PR to grow the business so far? Has that had a big impact?

PR is one of the things that I realized does not have a measurable impact. A lot of things you do, you can measure and attribute impact to it. PR is one of the things, essentially a tide that lifts all boats, right? Gives you credibility, gives you an audience that you otherwise through your own channels would have not been able to reach. And so if I had to put in a spreadsheet the ROI we get from doing PR, that column would be empty. But it's something that I know is really important. And honestly, it makes us think a lot more about framing is when we're building something, any new feature, The thing I think to myself is, what can I sell as a hook to a journalist? Sell, give them as a hook to a journalist that would make for a really interesting story? And while thinking about that, you come up with a lot of ad ideas. You come up with a lot of ideas on how you're going to make your stuff viral. And that itself is an exercise that is great in itself.

What are some of the hooks that you've used to get some of these stories?

What are the hooks that we've used? We're going to kill the keyboard. And an actual video of me sawing a keyboard in half, which I actually did in our office, and I still have that. That was a really fun one. There's a new one that we're gonna ship soon, which is just all about how the best engineers are not gonna be touching their keyboards. And there's just some very clear examples of people who are like that, and we're just showcasing these phenomenal developers that use Whisperflow as their daily driver. To drive those conversations.

With everything happening in AI, and I feel like every day there's like 10 pieces of news, like how do you think about, you know, long-term product planning when the world seems to be just changing so fast?

It's really simple. The key thing that I've told the engineering team, right, is if at some point that you feel afraid of a new model launching, you're doing something wrong. If GPT-5 is dropping tomorrow and you are terrified that it might make some work that you're doing redundant. Pinpoint what that work is, because that was work that we should not have done. And with that framing, what you do is you build an antifragile technology stack that only gets better as the rest of the AI industry is improving, and you're not spending time doing things that would otherwise just be moot points soon after. One very clear example is cost optimization. You can have a whole army of people trying to optimize your prompts, optimize your costs, all of that. Or you can just wait for OpenAI to drop their API costs in half. And I always pick the latter.

Final question for you. When we think ahead about the future, we talked about you have very ambitious plans. Like, what's the number one most important thing that you and the team are going to have to really nail for that to happen?

It is going to be— this is something that I think about a lot, which is most AI tools are built for techies in Silicon Valley. Most AI tools are used by techies in Silicon Valley. But what most companies forget is the 95% of the population who's not tech savvy, who is not in these hotspot cities, and building for them. And that is something that I think is going to be a massive unlock because they also end up being your most loyal users. They've been using Microsoft Word since the '90s and they're going to keep using Microsoft Word like until the day they die. And that is the audience we really need to make sure our product really can cater towards. Because if you can build something for them, you'll build something for humanity, period. Amazing.

All right, man, that's where we're going to end it. It's a really fun conversation. Where should people go if they just want to follow along with you and your journey?

Definitely one, get the product. It's whisperflow.ai. W-I-S-P-E-R-F-L-O-W. And then I am pretty frequently on Twitter and LinkedIn. So do go find me there and you can follow along the journey, the challenges. I'm an open book. I talk about most stuff quite actively and pretty open to conversations.

Amazing. Appreciate you taking the time. Fantastic.

Thanks for doing this, Brad.

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