Smart Keys

This is a summary of a 16 months journey. From idea to profitable business.

The idea was born from a personal need. I wanted a tool that could help me proofread my texts on my phone or computer. My main inspiration was Grammarly. But better. (Delusion is a requirement for starting a business).

I didn’t want to start another VC-backed startup. I wanted to build a lifestyle business, something my wife and I could run together and make a living from. This is important because some ideas just don’t fit that kind of model.

I was drafting a method to build things I care about. This is my secret process now, but it wasn’t back then. In summary, it was something like this:

1. I have a problem, and the solutions aren’t good

I have always struggled as an ESL learner. My wife has too. Writing an email or a simple text message and feeling confident about it was always a struggle. This was always a top of mind problem.

We had been using Grammarly to help us with that, but it was infuriating. Always trying to teach me and repeatedly correcting itself. I got really excited about the possibility of making a tool that a company needed millions of dollars and hundreds of engineers to build, but doing it with just me and my wife. We were either geniuses or about to have a very expensive hobby.

Grammarly and other players were moving a lot of money and traffic and growing. My goal was to get 1% of their market share. I figured that was a humble enough slice of the pie. Spoiler: It was not.

2. Lets build it

The first version was a wordpress site that was simply proofreading my texts. It had a prompt that I was always using on ChatGPT.

That evolved to a point that I was using it everyday. My wife too. We added more “pre prompts” and suddenly it became a huge list of prompts for different purposes.

The first names were Slap Keyboard and Tapp Store. I am not proud of those. It took some time to feel confident with Smart Keys. I still don’t think it is the best name (it sounds like a car key tool), but we got to a point that we needed to launch. We could change it later. We didn’t.

The tool evolved to something more than just proofreading. It became a tool to easily convert any text to any language, or even create your own text transformation.

3. The launch

We had not tested the market costs before building it, because apparently I like not following my own process. So I was curious to get the first numbers for cost of acquisition. We created many creatives and started seeing people quite excited.

Because my budget is quite restricted, I decided to focus on one main channel to distribute and market. Mostly iOS for distribute and Meta for marketing. I tried Apple Search Ads and Google Search Ads. I did not succeed.

I noticed that the first customers were using the app multiple times a day. That gave me confidence to scale more ads. Even though ROAS was low, I was confident by our own use and those first customers that eventually we would get that money back.

As a product person, I decided to create a MacOS version of it. The concept is the same: an easy way to proofread or transform your texts. However, I ended up using the Mac version much more than the iOS one.

One major event that happened about a month after our launch was the introduction of the native proofreading feature on iOS 26 (iOS and MacOS). That made me a bit worried, thinking people might stop downloading our app. However, our use case is so broad and offers many possibilities that we kept going. We even joked that Apple copied us.

12 Months burning cash

The first six months felt like a slow cooker with our small marketing budget. The profit chart was slightly going down every month. I started to doubt my strategy a bit, should I put in more money to see faster results, or was this not going anywhere? But the LTV numbers started to improve, and retention remained very high.

The good news started after six months, when the ad costs finally became lower than the profits. I didn’t expect it to take that long to see the chart reverse and start earning money again. Naively, I thought we would be profitable in about three months.

16 Months later

After 12 months, we recovered everything we invested from the start and finally began making money, not a lot, but enough. Margins are tight. The app is stable and requires little maintenance. The money we earn is being used to fund our other ideas.

Seeing the profits surpass the costs was an important milestone for us. I confess that I slightly reduced the budget just to see that happen faster during that month.

But I still don’t really feel pumped about dropping over $25,000, mostly with Meta. It’s wild to think that while my customers’ LTV is about $35, Meta’s average LTV is probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So, are we rich?

No. Did we make Zuck richer? Yes.

Smart Keys didn’t become the “Grammarly Killer” I naively thought it would be. I didn’t get my 1% market share. Maybe 0.0001% 🤷‍♂️❓

But what I got was a business that pays the bills, works for us, and allows me to keep building weird stuff. I traded the stress of “growth at all costs” for the anxiety of “I don’t get a support ticket for months. Are users stuck on the first screen?” and honestly, I prefer the latter.

It’s not a unicorn. It’s a small, profitable, slightly oddly named app that solves our problem, and we use it every single day. That’s exactly what we wanted.