How a Non-Technical Founder Scaled Whisper AI to 80,000 Users in Just Four Months
6-figure+ ARR
achieved in just four months
80,000+
users worldwide across 100+ languages
1,000,000
min. of audio transcribed and recorded
6-figure+ ARR
achieved in just four months
80,000+
users worldwide across 100+ languages
1,000,000
min. of audio transcribed and recorded
"For someone who does not have a technical background, Replit offered everything I needed to scale, without having to go out to 3rd party software or hosting."
~ Eman Khoubian
Overview
Eman Khoubian, founder of whisperai.com, built a production-ready transcription platform that competes with established players like Otter, Rev, and Descript. With no coding background and using only Replit, Eman transformed a simple prototype into a thriving SaaS business serving a global customer base.
Before founding Whisper AI, Eman, who has a background is in finance and investing, ran Crescent Capital Real Estate, an investment firm focused on real estate in Los Angeles and throughout the US. He also held senior roles at Google, where he ran global payments, and at Deloitte in their tech strategy practice. This is his first time building a tech company.
The Challenge
Eman wanted to build something technically sophisticated—a speech-to-text application similar to Whisper. The challenge was significant: he had no coding background and no technical team. Building a transcription platform typically requires backend infrastructure, real-time transcription, multi-language support, authentication, payment processing, and deployment. Traditional approaches would require hiring developers, significant capital, and months of development time.
Why Replit?
Eman discovered Replit through social media and experimented with competing platforms. Replit stood out because the agent was faster and delivered higher quality work. The platform provided everything he needed in one place—database, authentication, deployment, and storage—eliminating the need to stitch together multiple services.
Most importantly, Replit's AI agent could work autonomously for extended periods, understanding complex requirements and implementing sophisticated features. "I tried the other tools that are out there, and Replit was the best one. The agent was faster. The quality of work was better. Everything about the experience with Replit from beginning through launch and even now is better than any other tool."
What They Built
Over four months—"thousands and thousands of hours" of work—Eman built a comprehensive transcription platform that rivals established enterprise solutions.
The platform supports live recording with real-time transcription, file uploads for pre-recorded content, and translation across more than 100 languages. Users worldwide use the app 24 hours a day. Speaker detection automatically identifies different speakers in multi-person recordings, ideal for meetings, interviews, and podcasts.
Using OpenAI's API, Whisper AI provides intelligent summaries along with unique analytics—speaking time percentages for each participant, meeting efficiency scores, action item extraction, and topic identification. Users can export transcriptions with timestamps in multiple formats, including subtitle files for podcasters and video creators.
Beyond the core product, Eman built landing pages in 100+ languages, a help center and blog with automated webhook publishing, Google authentication, payment processing, and responsive design across devices. Everything runs on Replit's infrastructure using Replit Auth, App Storage, database management, and custom domain deployment.
Scaling a transcription pipeline involves job orchestration, retries, queue saturation, cost controls, rate limiting, storage, latency, diarization accuracy, subtitle formatting edge cases, multilingual QA, payments/chargebacks, abuse prevention, and support. And it was all done with the Replit Agent.
Value Realized
In four months, Whisper AI generated over six figures in annual recurring revenue. From the first 100 users—which took two months—to now adding 100 subscribers daily, growth has accelerated dramatically. The platform has surpassed 80,000 users and processed over one million minutes of audio.
“We have a lot of small business and individual customers from around the world. But we also have customers from companies like Amazon, Google, Accenture, Netflix, TikTok and the NFL.”
Whisper AI earned unsolicited praise comparing it to established competitors. One user evaluating Rev, Descript, Otter, Trint, Sonix, and Fireflies for 30 hours of video posted: "Whisper AI was by far the best for what I needed." Major industry players have begun reaching out with partnership inquiries and acquisition offers.
Building with Replit saved enormous time and money, and it helped him scale in my ways. Everything is built-in, including a database, servers, and Google cloud storage (via App Storage). Especially with the Autoscale servers, he was able to easily ramp up servers as usage scaled so quickly. And with Replit's App Storage, I don't have to worry about any storage limits.
Looking Ahead
Eman continues refining the platform based on user feedback, exploring capabilities that will further differentiate Whisper AI from competitors. His goal for this year is to scale to seven figure ARR, add a Chrome Extension for live speech to text, and offer enterprise plans, including its own API.
His advice for aspiring builders: "You can vibe code a functioning app that's gonna serve a global audience. The advice is to be patient, to be determined. You have to be thorough."
But the opportunity is real: "If I can do it, it doesn't stop anyone else from doing it. Without Replit, I couldn't have done it."
About Whisper AI
Whisper AI is a speech-to-text transcription platform providing live recording, file upload, and real-time translation across 100+ languages. Built entirely on Replit, the platform serves over 80,000 users worldwide with speaker detection, AI summaries, and professional export options.