Ironically, I stopped using it last week.

[The show, Rumble with Sinha is co-hosted in partnership with Rumble, a platform that enables one to do a podcast with their AI co-host - after all, solo talks are boring!]

Not because I found a better product, but because I ended up building my own Mac client. It does almost everything I need, and that got me thinking about something much bigger than my own setup.

I don’t think Wispr Flow has a product problem. I think it has a business model problem.

The underlying technology has become a commodity. Whether you use Whisper.cpp, Parakeet, Faster-Whisper or any of the newer open-source models, the gap between a polished commercial product and a free alternative has narrowed dramatically.

That’s not a technology problem. That’s a pricing problem.

I suspect there are still plenty of people happily paying for Wispr Flow simply because they don’t know these alternatives exist. But information arbitrage doesn’t last forever. Developers are already discovering them, building their own clients, and sharing them. Over the next year or two, I expect this to become mainstream.

If that happens, I don’t think Wispr Flow should fight open source. It should lean into it.

In fact, I’d seriously consider making the consumer product free.

That sounds counterintuitive because AI products cost money to run. But I don’t think consumers are the business anyway. I think enterprises are.

The Slack analogy comes to mind. Slack didn’t start by selling to CIOs. Individuals and small teams adopted it first because it was useful. Once enough employees were using it, companies had to buy it. Wispr Flow could follow exactly the same playbook. Let individuals get addicted to voice-first computing and let them bring that habit into their workplace. That’s where security, compliance, centralized administration and enterprise workflows become valuable enough for companies to pay.

There’s another asset that Wispr Flow has which people don’t talk about enough: voice data.

Before everyone gets upset, I’m not suggesting the company secretly sells user conversations. That would destroy trust overnight.

But what if users had a choice?

Pay for complete privacy, or use the product for free and explicitly opt in to contributing anonymized speech data for model training.

That’s a much more honest trade-off.

The reason I think this is particularly interesting is because of India. Wispr Flow has publicly said that India is one of its largest markets. At the same time, every major speech AI company wants more high-quality multilingual voice data. Today, companies are literally paying people to record speech in studios because good datasets are hard to find.

Wispr Flow already sits on top of exactly that kind of usage. Every day, thousands of people dictate naturally instead of reading scripted sentences into a microphone. With explicit consent, that becomes a valuable asset.

Maybe data licensing never becomes the biggest revenue stream. Maybe it simply offsets the cost of serving free users. Either way, I think it’s a more interesting direction than trying to convince consumers to keep paying a monthly subscription for dictation.

The enterprise biz doesn’t change. In fact, it probably becomes stronger.

No company wants its sales calls, customer emails or internal strategy documents entering public training datasets. They’ll continue paying for privacy, compliance and contractual guarantees. That’s where the money is.

Consumers and enterprises don’t need the same pricing model.

What's you're take?

• Why Sam Altman dreads the first and last hour of his day.

• The "Slack Trap": Why internal communication feels like progress (but isn't).

• The Danger Zone: Premature scaling and "Political Theater."

• The 24-Hour Rule: How to filter your tasks for Real Work.

The Bottom Line: We don't fail because we are lazy. We fail because we choose comfort over truth.I’ve been guilty of this myself—polishing a landing page for hours just to avoid making a sales call.

What’s one 'Fake Work' task you’re going to cut from your schedule tomorrow?

Let’s be honest in the comments. 👇

For e.g. that new ‘productivity app’, that ‘event discovery platform’ and an all-time fav, ‘friend finder’ :)

In this video, I break down why so many consumer AI startups fail and share a realistic 2×2 framework that separates doomed ideas from winners.

• X-axis: Existing Behavior vs New Behavior

• Y-axis: ARPU * AI, i.e. Low ARPU uplift vs High ARPU uplift from AI (if AI does’t help you increase the TAM / revenue..then what’s the point).

We cover real examples:

• Why short-news apps or generic AI tools built in hours almost always die (existing behavior + low ARPU)

• The massive opportunity in AI astrology (existing behavior + high ARPU via subscriptions)

• Why AI companions (new behavior + low initial ARPU) are VC catnip right now

• And the mysterious high-ARPU new-behavior quadrant — what could live there?

If you’re building in consumer AI, raising funds, or just trying to spot real opportunities instead of hype, this framework will help you avoid wasting time and money.

The conversation is a reminder about what matters in one's life - did you focus on the outcome or..your ego?

I made a lot of tough decisions this year (thanks to a near death experience) and the mental model of outcome vs. ego kept coming to me - hence this rerun.

And in the process, created a 400 cr+ (~$50mn) revenue business - accidentally!

My next guest in #UnPluggdWithSinha podcast is Shashi Kumar, Cofounder and CEO of Akshayakalpa - India’s first certified organic dairy enterprise bringing together a balance of practices based in science and the traditional heritage of dairy farming.

Topics we discussed:

How Akshayakalpa’s business model is a gamechanger (It is among the top soil management company in India, ended up selling milk as it offers a compelling value prop to farmers - faster revenue cycle being the most important one).

Shashi’s startup journey - he worked with Wipro, was in US. So why come back to India and go back to farming - something his parents wanted him to never take up (can you believe that his father did not speak to him for 8 years after he decided to take up farming as a career).- Why India being one of the largest producers of milk doesn’t stand a chance in global diaspora?- Why most agritech startups trying to disrupt middle-men fail.-

What’s the future of food? Answer: We are in a serious trouble

As a consumer - what is it that you need to understand about food ecosystem? Is your food producer making enough money?

The UnPluggd with sinha conversations bring you the very best of India’s startup ecosystem (minus the hype) in an informal setup.Wanna suggest guests for the show? Use this form: https://forms.gle/J1GfdGifcVgB7gA87—

• Raised funding - as expected great expansion plans et al. 

• The money didn't hit the bank account (some % did) 

• Almost lost his startup to investors - somehow got it back (had to take a loan) 

• Activated the 'sane' mode - survived, scaled up. 

Meet my next guest in #UnPluggdWithSinha show - Manish Sharma, cofounder and CEO of Printo, a leading printing business in India.

UnPluggd with Sinha podcast brings you unfiltered, candid conversations with India's leading entrepreneurs, authors and business leaders. 

In this episode, we discuss

• Manish’s lessons building Printo

• Raising money, the (evil) power of liquidation preference clause most founders often ignore

• Building one of the early D2C businesses in India

• His advice to founders out there

• Why founders should have a life beyond their startups - Manish is into cycling, was intensely involved with AAP political party (Bangalore chapter), does theatres.

(episode language: Hinglish)

• building capitalmind from a blog to leading financial research company

• Deepak’s early days of running tech startups and lessons learned

• Deepak Shenoy’s relationship with money

• His take on the power of compounding

• His advice to new investors

------------- Contact us for feedback / speaker suggestions / exploring partnerships using this form: https://forms.gle/Q6hZdXaYfeiQqR2x8 This show is brought in partnership with VidRow team.

• The unpredictability of success in creative products is a key theme.

• Generative AI is widely recognized, but predictive AI poses ethical challenges.

• AI agents must be more than just wrappers around models.

• Benchmarking AI in complex environments is a significant challenge.

• The capability reliability gap highlights the unreliability of current AI systems.

• Human-AI collaboration is crucial for effective AI deployment.

• Inference scaling is a promising area for improving AI performance.

• Trust in AI is at risk due to rapid deployment without proper evaluation.

• Future engineers should focus on technical breadth and adaptability.

Before this he started ThreadSol, a very boring B2B company building fabric management solutions for the apparel industry which was acquired by Coats.

Manasij has written a wonderful book : The Economy Class founder and in this conversation, we talk about the evolving nature of GTM for SAAS businesses, the rise of AI snake oil selling (esp in B2B) and well..samosas.

Enjoy the conversation.

In this episode of the Ashish Sinha Show, I talk to Gaurav Singh, founder of Verloop on how contact centers are evolving, how the ICPs are evolving and importantly, how does BPO2.0 will look like.

In this episode, we talk about:

1. Gaurav’s journey from B2C to B2B / Enterprise

1. ​2. How ICPs are evolving in GenAI era.

2. ​3. How Gen AI products also compete with companies’ CTOs/Product Managers

3. ​4. Outcome based pricing: How close are we to achieve that?

4. ​5. Enterprise LLMs: Is it a fad?

5. ​6. Why new-age enterprise products cannot be boring or unsexy.

6. ​7. Advice to Indian founders building global SAAS, especially on HQ/incorporation location

7. ​8. Tips to early stage startups on how to build trust / collect ‘logos’.

8. ​9. If you are building a global SAAS, does it make sense to raise funding from Indian VCs?

9. ​..and so much more!

10. ​​Masters of AI segment of the podcast brings deeper insights from founders / practitioners building AI-native businesses, deep in the trenches (and are way beyond fancy demos).

Expect a mix of SAAS, prosumer and consumer startup founders and leaders sharing their learning building a growing AI native businesses.

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Vijay Rayapati is a tech entrepreneur  who earlier sold Minjar to Nutanix and is now building AtomicWork, an AI-powered ITSM platform.

In this conversation, Vijay and I talk about

• his startup journey

• Finding PMF in AI led world. And how PMF has evolved over the last few years

• Choosing the right problem statements

• Choosing the right target market (hint: GDP matters, but there is a product side to it)

• Vijay's tips to entrepreneurs building global SAAS businesses from India

• Enterprise AI: How are CXOs evaluating AI solutions

Do subscribe, share and like this conversation :)

Today, the big qn is whether your AI tool is a feature or a product.

There are 2 broad parameters to look at when answering this - customer benefit (i.e. value as perceived by your customers) AND integration / implementation effort.

Do listen to this episode and share your feedback. What else would you like me to talk about? Do share.

More: https://sinha.nextbigwhat.com

First of all, there is no right or wrong answers here.

"What'ever floats your boat" is a generic advice, but there has to be a better framework for founders to make a well-informed decision.

At scale (say $100mn+ revenue or Series D onwards_, startups are all about 2 things

1. Control
   i.e. ability to control your decisions, your destiny, your path. Given the gen AI world we live in where companies are getting disrupted with each and every new model launch, you need to have a lot of control on your decision making. This also helps you move fast, take quick decisions and not be at the mercy of your competition’s agility.

2. Growth
   Of course, nobody wakes up saying ‘I want to build a slow growth business’. We all want high growth business - but here is the reality: growth comes at a cost. And we all have seen what happened to those high-growth businesses of 21,22 (ZIRP era). They don’t even have money to pay salaries to their employees. Founders are left with neither growth nor control of their business.

So what’s the right framework to look at this dilemma? Enters 2 by 2 :)

Do review/share your feedback.

This episode brings you insights from the keynote delivered by Aloke Bajpai at UnPluggd conf, India's largest startup conference.

Aloke shares the early days of ixigo and how the company survived economic downturn to VC rejections..and everything else!

Today, my guest is Shane Parrish. Shane Parrish is widely known for creating Farnam Street, a blog, podcast and learning community. He is also the author of several books and his latest one is Clear Thinking - you should check it out.

In this conversation, we explore various aspects of mental models to parenting and everything in between. 

Get Shane’s latest book Clear Thinking: https://amzn.to/3SzNHuz

The show is done in partnership with BigIdeas app, an app that brings you big ideas from the world’s best non-fiction books, podcasts, articles and YT videos - for free! 

Get it (on Android, iOS) : https://bigideas.onelink.me/oCN2/get

Show notes: https://nextbigwhat.com

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Contact us at team@nextbigwhat.com for any partnership inquiries.