Turning Weakness Into a Multi-Million Dollar Business

Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexic founder who overcame his learning challenges by building Speechify, a text-to-speech app that is now used by millions 💬

I came across his story via this short video: Dyslexic Entrepreneur Creates $1B App

That $1 billion valuation seems high 🧐

But Speechify has apparently raised about $70M in funding and its estimated annual revenue is $14.5M… so it’s pretty successful no matter how you slice it.

Anyway, here’s the story…

Growing up in the USA 🇺🇸 as an Israeli immigrant, Cliff struggled to read and learn English. His parents and teachers thought he was lazy until they found out the cause was dyslexia.

Cliff shared on a podcast what it’s like to have dyslexia…

​​Reading a sentence takes me as much energy and brain power as most people take to do a long division equation in their head. So… it takes me a long time to read a sentence and it’s very energy-fatiguing.

At age 8, Cliff’s love of Harry Potter 🪄 led his dad to start reading the books aloud and recording them on cassette tapes. Cliff would then listen to the tapes over and over to understand and learn English.

Later, Cliff made it into Brown University, where he again had issues with reading and was falling behind in classes 😕

To keep up, he built a text-to-speech tool that could automatically narrate written content. He soon realized other students were interested in using the tool as well.

That was the start of Speechify, which officially launched in 2016 🚀

The app now has over 100 employees, provides text-to-speech in 14 languages, and is #1 in the App Store’s magazine and newspaper category, ahead of even the New York Times.

I love that Cliff was able to take something that’s considered a weakness, and leverage it to build a hugely successful business 💪

Could a “weakness” of your own actually be a strength in disguise?

Another example of Cliff turning a weakness (student loans) to his advantage 👇

He writes on his LinkedIn that he founded a project called FindMeScholarships back in 2016…

I had almost $80K worth of school loans but wanted to work for myself after graduation.

So, I hired a team of 10 virtual assistants in the Philippines and coached them to find and apply to scholarships for me. I made a 3,540% return on my investment in 4 months and paid off most of my loans.

As the final project for my Software Engineering class at Brown I worked with friends to build a suite of tools to automate much of this work for my team in the Philippines. Then, we wrote a system that would automatically hire new virtual assistants and assign them to clients who paid for the service… Sold out capacity in less than a week.

The final project was worth 42% of our grade in the class. We got a 100% score.

Get 10 more business ideas in your inbox each week