One Developer Got Thousands of Users Before His App Launched

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Sep 17, 2025

Naveen Naidu, an entrepreneur and solo engineer at Every, shares his unique journey in developing Monologue, an innovative voice-to-text dictation app. He reveals how he built a massive user following before the app even launched, thanks to intensive dogfooding and valuable feedback. Naveen discusses the evolution of Monologue from early side projects, the challenge of launching in a crowded market, and his one-man AI development toolkit. Listen in for insights on finding product-market fit and the strategies that propelled his success.

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00:00 / 00:00

Solo Engineer, Early Revenue

Naveen built Monologue alone and it reached $1,000 MRR before public launch.
The app found thousands of users during incubation with almost no landing page or marketing.

00:00 / 00:00

Quitting After A First Paid User

Naveen quit his job after validating he could make money from a small product.
Early side projects taught him to ship fast and iterate instead of hiding unfinished work.

00:00 / 00:00

Ship Small Experiments Fast

Do ship small experiments quickly and learn from real users instead of perfecting unreleased work.
Force yourself to release one experiment per week to build a muscle for shipping.

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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, 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/