# Blog Recorder

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/blog-recorder/ · added 2026-11-03 · updated 2026-11-04

**In short.** Blog Recorder (AI tool that turns voice recordings into blog post drafts, Netherlands): US$250 a month, December 2024. Evidence grade C: the founder's own figures, not verified by anyone else. Team: 1 founder, part-time next to a 32-hour-a-week developer job, from launch to closure. Launched June 2024; closed later.

AI tool that turns voice recordings into blog post drafts · Netherlands · AI-native · solo founder · closed · group: Marketing and social content

- Outcome: US$250 a month, December 2024 (evidence grade of the headline number: C; headline in US dollars: 3000)
- Launch: June 2024; months from launch to the outcome: 6
- Team: 1 founder, part-time next to a 32-hour-a-week developer job, from launch to closure
- Outside funding: None (bootstrapped)
- Main factor: Founder's network
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 3, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Solo founder, Bootstrapped, Closed, B2C, Content writing

Links:

- Archived blogrecorder.com, December 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20251216231633/https://blogrecorder.com/

**The product.** A web app in which you talked about a topic into your microphone, or uploaded an audio file, and received a structured blog post draft with headings and lists. You then edited the draft in a rich text editor and exported it as rich text, HTML, Markdown or plain text. Later versions let you train a personal AI model on 3 to 10 of your own articles, so that new drafts sounded like your own writing.

**Why it worked.** It was a narrow tool for one job, the first draft of a blog post, sold to software developers and developer advocates who already knew the founder from conferences and social media. The founder's first paying customer came from his early testing group, and he met users in person at a conference where he spoke and had a sponsor table. It stayed small: the founder wrote that growth stopped when he spent his limited time on a large feature instead of on marketing.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Blog Recorder was a speech-to-text writing tool. Speech-to-text, also called transcription, is software that converts spoken audio into written words. Blog Recorder went one step further: after transcription, a large language model (LLM), an AI model trained on large amounts of text that can rewrite and structure text, turned the spoken, unordered thoughts into a blog post draft with headings, lists and paragraphs. The user then edited and exported it. A personalized AI model feature studied 3 to 10 of the user's own articles and wrote new drafts in the same style.

Eddy Vinck, a software engineer in the Netherlands, built and ran it alone next to a 32-hour-a-week job at a consultancy. It went live in mid-June 2024. The founder wrote on his blog that it had 6 paying customers and US$75 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR, the subscription income that repeats every month) in July 2024, about 18 paying customers and about US$250 a month in October 2024, and 17 paying customers, more than US$250 in MRR and more than US$2,000 in total revenue at the end of December 2024. The legal documents name Brabant Web in Mierlo as the operator, and a signed copy names Eddy Vinck as its owner.

On 17 April 2026 the founder announced that Blog Recorder would shut down on 27 May 2026, without giving a reason. Every figure on this page is the founder's own statement on his blog, grade C; the figures agree across three dates in 2024, and no later money figure was published. The amounts are small. The page is useful as an honest record of what a part-time solo AI product earned in its first six months.

## Pricing

Blog Recorder prices from the archived home page of 16 December 2025 (the site no longer exists; grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 12 (140 a year) | 14 | 5 articles a month, 15-minute recordings, 1 personalized AI model |
| Blogger | 23 (270 a year) |  | 15 articles a month, 30-minute recordings, 4 personalized AI models |
| Professional | 80 (960 a year) |  | 50 articles a month, 60-minute recordings, 10 personalized AI models, priority support |

Every plan started with 3 free articles and no credit card. The page showed yearly prices as a monthly amount and gave the yearly total; the FAQ on the same page gave the Starter price as US$14 when billed monthly. Monthly prices for the other plans were behind a toggle that the archived copy does not show; the yearly savings that the page states imply about US$27 and US$93 a month (calculated). The service closed on 27 May 2026.

## How much revenue did Blog Recorder make before it closed? The numbers, graded

A part-time solo AI writing tool that reached about US$250 a month in subscriptions six months after launch, as the founder reported, and closed in May 2026

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly recurring revenue, end of December 2024 | more than US$250 | C | Founder's blog post of 31 December 2024: "$250+ in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)". About six months after launch. | [1] |
| Total revenue by end of December 2024 | more than US$2,000 | C | Founder's blog post of 31 December 2024: "Over $2,000 in total revenue". Some customers paid for a year in advance, which explains why the total is larger than six months of MRR. | [1, 3] |
| Paying customers, end of December 2024 | 17, with 5 churned | C | Founder's blog post of 31 December 2024. Churned customers are customers who cancelled. | [1] |
| Sign-ups, end of December 2024 | more than 250 | C | Founder's blog post of 31 December 2024. | [1] |
| Share of sign-ups that were paying | at most about 6.8% | calc | Calculated: 17 paying customers divided by 250 sign-ups. The founder wrote "over 250", so the true share is lower. | [1] |
| Revenue per paying customer | about US$14.71 a month | calc | Calculated: US$250 divided by 17 customers. Close to the Starter price. | [1, 8] |
| Monthly revenue, October 2024 | about US$250, with about 18 paying customers | C | Founder's blog post of 14 October 2024: "It's got around 18 paying customers and is bringing in about $250 a month." Agrees with the December figure. | [2] |
| Monthly recurring revenue, July 2024 | US$75, with 6 paying customers | C | Founder's blog post of 9 July 2024, a few weeks after launch: four customers on yearly plans and two on monthly plans, more than 120 users. | [3] |
| Paying customers, late July 2024 | 9, with 144 users on the list | C | Founder's blog post of 27 July 2024, five or six weeks after launch. | [4] |
| Users claimed on the home page | 316 | C | The home page said "316 HAPPY USERS" in the archived copies of 16 December 2025 and 20 April 2026. A marketing claim; it does not say how many paid. | [8, 15] |
| Launch | mid-June 2024 | C | Founder's blog post of 31 December 2024: "Blog Recorder went live in mid-June 2024." His project page is dated 19 June 2024. | [1, 6] |
| Closure | 27 May 2026 | C | Notice on the product's blog, dated 17 April 2026, signed "Eddy Vinck - Founder of Blog Recorder". His project page says it was shut down at the end of May 2026. | [9, 6] |
| Time from launch to the December 2024 figure | 6 months | calc | Calculated: June 2024 to December 2024. The whole life of the service was 23 months, June 2024 to May 2026. | [1, 9] |
| Team | 1 person, part-time | C | The founder's project page: "a SaaS I built, launched, and ran solo". In December 2024 he still worked 32 hours a week as a software developer. | [6, 1] |
| Operator | Brabant Web, Mierlo, the Netherlands | C | The archived terms (10 September 2025) and data processing agreement name Brabant Web as "the Company". The signed copy of the agreement, dated 5 June 2025, reads "Blog Recorder (owned by Brabant Web)" and "Owner Brabant Web, Eddy Vinck". | [10, 11] |
| Outside funding | none reported | C | The founder called it "this bootstrapped, part-time project". | [1] |
| AI services used | Deepgram for transcription; OpenAI and Anthropic models for writing | C | Founder's project page, technical section. | [6] |

How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement by the founder on his own blog or on the product's own pages, or a summary of those statements by a third party. A grade X value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No value is grade A or B.

## When did Blog Recorder launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From launch in June 2024 to closure in May 2026, 23 months, with all money figures from 2024. Each entry carries its grade.

- **Mid-June 2024** (grade C [1, 6]): Blog Recorder goes live, with a free trial of 3 articles and paid monthly and yearly plans.
- **9 July 2024** (grade C [3]): 6 paying customers, 4 of them on yearly plans, and US$75 in monthly recurring revenue, the founder writes.
- **Late July 2024** (grade C [4, 1]): The founder flies from the Netherlands to THAT Conference in Wisconsin as a speaker and with a sponsor table for Blog Recorder. He has 9 paying customers and meets his first paying customer there.
- **14 October 2024** (grade C [2]): About 18 paying customers and about US$250 a month, the founder writes.
- **December 2024** (grade C [1, 14]): He releases OG Image Maker, a free tool for making preview images for blog posts, which links back to Blog Recorder. He reports a small rise in sign-ups after it.
- **31 December 2024** (grade C [1]): 17 paying customers, more than US$250 in monthly recurring revenue and more than US$2,000 in total revenue, the founder writes. His goal for 2025 is US$1,000 a month.
- **17 May 2025** (grade C [12]): Update: upload of any audio file, for example a recording made offline on a phone, and a new editor with a slash menu, images and drag and drop.
- **17 April 2026** (grade C [9]): Notice that the service will shut down on 27 May 2026 and that users should export their posts before then.
- **End of May 2026** (grade C [6]): Blog Recorder closes. The domain no longer resolves in November 2026.

## Why did Blog Recorder work?

### One job, not a general chat

The product did one thing: turn a spoken explanation into a structured first draft that the user then edited. The founder wrote that it was not a transcription app and not a tool that writes articles from a prompt, because everything in the draft came from what the user said. The home page compared it with ChatGPT directly.

### Customers from the founder's own circle

The users the founder names are software developers and developer advocates, people who write blog posts as part of their work and who met him at conferences or knew his writing. His first paying customer was a member of the early testing group.

### Yearly plans early

Four of the first six customers chose yearly plans. That is why total revenue, more than US$2,000 by the founder's December 2024 account, was much larger than six months of US$250 a month.

### Small marketing tests

A conference sponsor table, which the founder thought probably lost money after travel costs, and a free side tool, OG Image Maker, built to send visitors to the main product. He wrote that sign-ups fell when he stopped promoting to build the personalized AI model feature.

## How it was built

These details come from the founder's project page and blog posts. They are grade C.

- A TypeScript monorepo with pnpm workspaces and Turborepo: a Next.js 15 and React 19 web app, shared packages, and Node.js functions on AWS Lambda.
- The browser uploaded audio straight to Amazon S3 storage with a short-lived signed upload form, so audio never passed through the web server.
- An S3 upload event went to a message topic (SNS) and a queue (SQS); a worker function downloaded the audio, transcribed it with Deepgram, and wrote the draft with OpenAI or Anthropic models.
- PostgreSQL 16 on DigitalOcean with the Drizzle ORM; the web app ran on DigitalOcean App Platform, all set up with Terraform and deployed from GitHub Actions.
- Stripe for payments, Clerk for sign-in, Sentry and PostHog for errors and product analytics, SendGrid for email, and the BlockNote editor for editing drafts.
- Built and run by one person in his spare time next to a 32-hour-a-week job.

Sources: [6, 1]

## Who tried this before Blog Recorder, and why did they fail?

Four companies in our database of failed startups tried to sell writers a better writing or voice tool and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Draft (2011 to 2014; funding US$120K; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A minimalist online editor for writers.
- Why it died: A narrow writing tool with a free tier could not compete with Google Docs, which was free and did more.
- Record: 

### Taleship (2018 to 2020; funding none; cause: No Market Need)

- Promise: Real-time co-writing for novelists, like Google Docs for fiction.
- Why it died: It built many features for every kind of writer and did none of them best; few writers wanted to write together.
- Record: 

### Hyperink (2011 to 2014; funding US$1.4M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A publishing platform for niche authors' e-books.
- Why it died: Free self-publishing on Amazon and free content online took its market.
- Record: 

### Tellme (1999 to 2011; funding US$238M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Information by voice command over the phone.
- Why it died: Smartphone apps and the voice assistants of the platform owners replaced it.
- Record: 

## What changed

The four predecessors sold a writing or voice tool against free products from large companies, and the large companies won. Blog Recorder faced the same competition from ChatGPT and from many voice-note apps, and the founder said so on his blog and on the home page.

What was new in 2024 is that one person could build the whole chain, from recording to transcription to a structured draft in the user's style, with rented AI services from Deepgram, OpenAI and Anthropic and no staff. That made a paying product possible on spare-time hours. It did not solve distribution: the founder's figures show that sales came from people who already knew him, and they grew only while he promoted the product.

## Can one person copy Blog Recorder now?

**Verdict: Yes, the build. Plan the marketing time first.**

Everything in Blog Recorder was built from rented services that any developer can use today, and the founder documented the architecture in public. What did not scale was the part-time marketing: by his own account, a few weeks of building without promotion stopped the growth.

1. Pick one writing job that people do every week, and make the AI output a draft they edit, not a finished text.
2. Sell first to a group that already knows you, and offer a yearly plan from the first day.
3. Let users train the tool on their own past writing, so the output sounds like them.
4. Keep a fixed weekly time for marketing that does not depend on new features.

**What is still open.** Voice-to-draft tools for other recurring texts: newsletters, release notes, meeting summaries for a team, documentation, and posts for one platform.

## What could go wrong for Blog Recorder?

- **Why it closed.** The notice of 17 April 2026 says only that the service would shut down on 27 May 2026 and that "Blog Recorder's time has come to an end". No source gives a reason. The last money figures the founder published are from December 2024, when he wrote that it would not reach his goal of US$1,000 a month at the growth rate of that time. In November 2026 his about page says he is not building a personal SaaS now.
- **Self-reported and small.** Every money figure is the founder's own statement on his blog, and no payment processor or third party has confirmed it. The figures agree across July, October and December 2024. The amounts are small: about US$3,000 a year at the December 2024 rate.
- **No figures after 2024.** There is no published revenue figure for 2025 or 2026, and the home page claim of 316 users was the same in December 2025 and April 2026. A third-party summary (Startup Founder Stories) says Blog Recorder reached US$100 a month in three months; that figure was not found in the founder's own posts and is left out.
- **Operator name.** Customers contracted with Brabant Web, a trade name in Mierlo, not with a company called Blog Recorder. The signed data processing agreement names Eddy Vinck as owner of Brabant Web, which ties the operator to the founder.
- **The founder's own marketing.** The founder promoted the product with a paid sponsor table at a US conference and with a free side tool, OG Image Maker, that links to Blog Recorder. The home page shows named testimonials from developers; several of the same people are named as users in the founder's 2024 blog posts.

## Sources

1. Eddy Vinck's blog, 31 December 2024: The Story of My First SaaS, 6 Months In — https://www.eddyvinck.com/blog/my-first-saas-6-months-in/ (grade C). Read in full. Founder's own review. Source for the December 2024 MRR, total revenue, customers, sign-ups, launch date, OG Image Maker and the 2025 goal.
2. Eddy Vinck's blog, 14 October 2024: How to guarantee your bootstrapped SaaS will fail (and what to do instead) — https://www.eddyvinck.com/blog/guarantee-saas-fail/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the October 2024 figure of about 18 paying customers and about US$250 a month.
3. Eddy Vinck's blog, 9 July 2024: Juggling a Developer Job, Part-Time SaaS and Conference Speaking — https://www.eddyvinck.com/blog/juggling-job-saas-and-conference-speaking/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the first 6 customers, the yearly and monthly split, and US$75 in MRR.
4. Eddy Vinck's blog, 27 July 2024: Flying to the other side of the world to promote my SaaS — https://www.eddyvinck.com/blog/i-am-promoting-my-saas-at-a-conference/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the conference sponsor table and 9 paying customers.
5. Eddy Vinck's blog, 10 July 2024: Blog Recorder is NOT a voice transcription app — https://www.eddyvinck.com/blog/blog-recorder-is-not-a-voice-transcription-app/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the product's positioning against transcription apps.
6. Eddy Vinck's project page: Blog Recorder — https://www.eddyvinck.com/projects/blog-recorder/ (grade C). Read in full (downloaded 4 November 2026 UTC by the pipeline's harvest). Source for the solo team, the closure at the end of May 2026 and the technical architecture.
7. Eddy Vinck's about page — https://www.eddyvinck.com/about/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for his day job at a consultancy and that he is not building a personal SaaS now.
8. Blog Recorder home page, Internet Archive copy of 16 December 2025 — https://web.archive.org/web/20251216231633/https://blogrecorder.com/ (grade C). Read the hero, testimonials, comparison, pricing and FAQ sections. Source for the prices, plan limits and the 316 users claim.
9. Blog Recorder blog, 17 April 2026: Blog Recorder is shutting down on May 27th (Internet Archive copy of 16 May 2026) — https://web.archive.org/web/20260516175851/https://blogrecorder.com/shutting-down-may-27 (grade C). Read in full. Source for the closure date and the founder's signature.
10. Blog Recorder Terms and Conditions, Internet Archive copy of 10 September 2025 — https://web.archive.org/web/20250910001342/https://blogrecorder.com/terms (grade C). Read the definitions section. Source for Brabant Web as the operator.
11. Blog Recorder Data Processing Agreement, signed copy dated 5 June 2025 (Internet Archive copy of 9 September 2025) — https://web.archive.org/web/20250909211236/https://blogrecorder.com/dpa-signed.pdf (grade C). Read in full (PDF text extracted). The signature block reads "Blog Recorder (owned by Brabant Web)" and "Owner Brabant Web, Eddy Vinck".
12. Eddy Vinck's blog, 17 May 2025: Exciting Updates for Blog Recorder: Easier Audio Uploads and Enhanced Editing — https://www.eddyvinck.com/blog/new-blogrecorder-update/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the audio upload and the new editor.
13. Startup Founder Stories: Eddy Vinck, Blog Recorder — https://startupfounderstories.com/stories/eddy-vinck-blog-recorder-first-saas (grade C). Read in full. A third-party summary of the founder's December 2024 post; its US$100-a-month-in-three-months figure is not used.
14. OG Image Maker home page — https://ogimagemaker.com/ (grade C). Read in full. Shows "Made by Eddy Vinck" and a link to Blog Recorder.
15. Blog Recorder home page, Internet Archive copy of 20 April 2026 — https://web.archive.org/web/20260420210922/https://blogrecorder.com/ (grade C). Read the notice bar and the hero. Shows the shutdown notice and the unchanged 316 users claim.
16. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.