Bill Kiani is building Genie 007 around less typing and less friction
Bill Kiani, founder of Genie 007, is building an AI voice assistant that turns spoken requests into text and actions inside apps and websites. The conversation covers winning early customers without an ad budget, learning from product mistakes and reducing the steps between sign-up and first use.
Watch new users try a product without help, then remove steps that delay their first useful result. Early customer numbers can show that someone values the product, but they are not proof of a business.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I left a six-figure job to bootstrap Genie 007 because I was tired of typing my day away. Ordinary dictation only solves half the problem: you still compose every sentence in your head, then read it out word for word. Genie 007 is an advanced AI voice assistant with think-to-text and voice-to-action. You say what you want, like “reply to this email and move the meeting to Friday”, and it gets it done. Emails, posts, comments, commands. It works right inside any app or website you’re on, with no integrations, no new tabs and no copy-pasting. On top of that you get lightning-fast voice typing at 99.5% accuracy, live translation in 140+ languages, and full privacy, GDPR compliant and HIPAA ready.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Slowly, and without an ad budget. At one point my dashboard showed seven users, one paying customer and £5 a month. That £5 proved someone valued what I’d built. It didn’t prove a business. So I went where people already had the problem. I wrote one guide for every frustration people search for, like how to dictate in a particular app or what to do when dictation keeps stopping. Our Google Search Console clicks went from 65 in one 28-day period to 180 in a later one. I’ve also queued 150+ free directory listings, set up a partner programme paying 30% commission, and reached out to university disability services, because people who find typing hard often need this most.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision: my co-founder left six weeks in, and I nearly shut the whole thing down. I almost quit six times in total. Each time, I chose to keep going alone, which means every decision, every bug and every support email is mine. The mistake: I underpriced at the start and built more than people needed. Users taught me what to cut. One told me our icon popping up on every text box made it hard to focus, so I switched it off that week. That became a rule: anything that interrupts has to earn its place.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
AI got very good, very fast, so people now expect it to work instantly, wherever they already are. Nobody wants another tab or another app to copy and paste from. The real battle isn’t intelligence any more, it’s friction. Our new desktop app got flagged by antivirus tools and people uninstalled it before they ever tried it, so we went through AVG’s whitelisting programme, which also covers Avast, Norton and Avira. We found onboarding asked Mac users for a permission they didn’t need yet, and we fixed it. The model matters, but so does whether someone can get their microphone working and finish their first task.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: watch the first five minutes a new user spends with your product, without helping them. Count every step before they get any value, then cut every one they don’t need yet. That’s where most products quietly lose people. Ignore the pressure to make your story sound bigger than it is. My most useful marketing has been plain pages that say “here’s how to get this working”. One paying customer is a start, not proof. Keep going, but stay honest about what your numbers are telling you.
Thank you to Bill Kiani and the team at Genie 007 for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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