Anton Lebedev

Anton Lebedev is a Valencia-based app founder best known for Letterly, an AI speech-to-text app that turns rambling voice notes into clean messages, notes, emails and social posts. Letterly has been reported at around $250,000 in monthly revenue with a team of about ten people, making it one of the most successful indie AI apps built on OpenAI's speech and language models.

Lebedev studied at the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (formerly the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute). Before Letterly, Lebedev spent roughly 15 years on startups that did not take off, and has described launching around five to seven of them, each built around a brand-new idea that turned out to have no market. The lesson from those years was that you do not need an invention, just a clearly better version of something people already want.

In 2023 Lebedev and the team were building yet another project when the first apps combining OpenAI's Whisper with ChatGPT appeared. Lebedev found them clunky but realised the tool was something needed every day, so the team dropped what they were doing and switched entirely to Letterly, launching it in 2023. Co-founder Ilfat Khairullin leads marketing. The app is deliberately simple: you talk, pick a style, and Letterly rewrites the transcript into polished text. It is available on iOS, Android, the web and desktop, and later added dictation into any app and meeting recording.

Growth came from App Store search, word of mouth, short video clips, an AppSumo deal and, later, paid ads. Heavy paywall and pricing experiments in 2025 lifted monthly revenue by 345% in about five months to $215,000, according to a case study by subscription platform Adapty, and Starter Story later featured the app at $250,000 a month. Lebedev has noted that most revenue comes through the web via Stripe rather than app-store payments.

Lebedev is an example of a long-time founder whose breakthrough came only after dropping the search for novelty and polishing a simple AI utility.