# Risenote

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/risenote/ · added 2026-11-01 · updated 2026-11-02

**In short.** Risenote (AI meeting notes app for iPhone, Germany): US$1.1K a month, September 2026. Evidence grade A: disclosed by a company or a filing, or verified by a payment processor. Team: 1 founder, no employees (seller's form). Launched 17 December 2025; still running, revenue falling.

AI meeting notes app for iPhone · Germany · AI-native · solo founder · still running, revenue falling · group: Voice and audio

- Outcome: US$1.1K a month, September 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: A; headline in US dollars: 13020)
- Launch: 17 December 2025; months from launch to the outcome: 9
- Team: 1 founder, no employees (seller's form)
- Outside funding: None (bootstrapped, seller's form)
- Main factor: Subscription paywall
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 3, copyable pattern 3, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Solo founder, Bootstrapped, Running, B2C, Productivity

Links:

- App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6756504124
- Verified revenue on TrustMRR: https://trustmrr.com/startup/risenote
- Verified revenue on whatsthe.app: https://www.whatsthe.app/risenote

**The product.** An iPhone app that records a meeting, writes the transcript while people speak, and then gives a summary, the action items with deadlines, answers to questions raised in the meeting, and a chat that can search all past meetings. Every feature needs a paid subscription: US$7.99 a week or US$99.99 a year in the App Store listing.

**Why it worked.** It is a thin app on top of two rented AI services: AssemblyAI turns the audio into text and OpenAI writes the summaries and answers. One person built it in Flutter and sells it through the App Store with a hard paywall, so almost every user who stays pays. Verified revenue rose from about US$100 a month in its first months to US$1,000 to US$1,400 a month from May to September 2026, then fell to US$718 in October.

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

Risenote is an AI meeting note taker: an app that listens to a meeting and writes the notes, so the people in it do not have to. It uses speech-to-text, software that turns spoken words into written text, from the company AssemblyAI, and a large language model, a program trained on large amounts of text that can summarize and answer questions, from OpenAI. The app shows the transcript live, lists action items and deadlines, and has a chat window for questions such as "What did we decide about pricing?". It sells only through the Apple App Store as a subscription, a payment that renews every week or every year until the user cancels it.

Theo Kramer, a developer whose app identifier starts with "de." and whose TrustMRR profile gives Germany as the country, released it on 17 December 2025 under the name "Meeting Minutes: Focus AI" and renamed it Risenote around the end of April 2026. TrustMRR reads its revenue directly from RevenueCat, a service that records every App Store subscription payment for app developers. That data shows US$115 in December 2025, about US$100 to US$200 a month until April 2026, then US$1,233 in May, US$1,131 in June, US$918 in July, US$1,364 in August and US$1,085 in September. October 2026 was US$718, and all-time revenue was US$7,106 on 1 November 2026.

The money figures are grade A: two marketplaces, TrustMRR and whatsthe.app, each read them from the founder's RevenueCat account. The team size and the absence of funding come only from the founder's own sale form. The app has been listed for sale since 13 June 2026, at US$20,000 on TrustMRR and US$16,934 on whatsthe.app. An asking price is not a sale, and no sale has been reported.

## Pricing

Risenote prices from the App Store listing read on 2 November 2026 (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pro, weekly |  | 7.99 a week | all features |
| Pro, annual | 8.33 |  | 99.99 a year; all features |

The listing names two plans that unlock every feature: Pro weekly at US$7.99 a week and Pro annual at US$99.99 a year. The App Store also lists other Risenote Pro purchases at US$4.99, US$9.99, US$14.99, US$19.99 and US$49.99 without saying which periods they cover; they are probably other subscription lengths or paywall offers and are left out of the table. Weekly billing at US$7.99 comes to about US$34.62 a month (calculated: 7.99 x 52 / 12). Transcription and AI work run on AssemblyAI and OpenAI, paid by the developer.

## How much revenue does Risenote make? The numbers, graded

A one-person meeting notes app with payment-provider data: about US$1,100 a month in revenue from May to September 2026, falling in October

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue in September 2026 | US$1,085 | A | TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline, read from RevenueCat through its API. This is the headline figure of this page. | [1] |
| Run rate from the September 2026 month | about US$13,020 a year | calc | Calculated: US$1,085 x 12. | [1] |
| Revenue per month, May to August 2026 | US$1,233, US$1,131, US$918 and US$1,364 | A | TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline. August 2026 is the best month in the data. | [1] |
| Revenue per month, December 2025 to April 2026 | US$115, US$99.92, US$99.75, US$133 and US$201 | A | TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline. May 2026 was about 6.1 times April (calculated: 1,233 / 201). | [1] |
| Revenue in October 2026 | US$718 | A | TrustMRR monthly revenue timeline. About 47% below August and 34% below September (calculated). The profile gives last-30-day revenue of US$618 and a 30-day revenue growth of -42.8% on 1 November 2026. | [1] |
| Revenue in the 28 days to 1 October 2026 | US$1,040 | A | whatsthe.app: "All data is verified through RevenueCat. Last updated: Oct 1, 2026". A second, independent reading of the same RevenueCat account, which agrees with TrustMRR's September figure. | [2] |
| Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) | US$941 on 1 October 2026; US$768 on 1 November 2026 | A | whatsthe.app and TrustMRR. MRR is the subscription revenue that renews each month. The fall is about 18% (calculated); TrustMRR gives -19.4% over its own 30-day window. | [1, 2] |
| All-time revenue | US$7,106 | A | TrustMRR, revenue synced 1 November 2026. The monthly rows above add up to the same total (calculated: US$7,105.66). | [1] |
| Active subscriptions | 66 on 1 October 2026; 63 on 1 November 2026 | A | whatsthe.app and TrustMRR. whatsthe.app also gives 7 active trials, 205 downloads and 205 new customers in the 28 days to 1 October, and average revenue per active subscription of US$14.24. | [1, 2] |
| Profit margin, last 30 days | 97.0% | C | TrustMRR snapshot. The profile shows no connected cost source, so the cost side is not verified; AssemblyAI and OpenAI usage is a real cost of each meeting. | [1] |
| Release date | 17 December 2025 | C | App Store version history (version 1.0, 12/17/2025) and whatsthe.app ("Worldwide Release Date: December 17, 2025"). The sale form says business operations started in November 2025; TrustMRR gives 1 December 2025 as the founded date. | [2, 3, 1] |
| Team and funding | 1 person, bootstrapped | C | whatsthe.app sale details: "Team Size 1", "Financing Bootstrapped". Entered by the seller. | [2] |
| Country | Germany | C | TrustMRR profile: "Country: DE" (founder-entered). The app identifier is de.tk.meetingNotes, and the same developer sells a German school-grade calculator, "Abi Noten Rechner", in the App Store. | [1, 3] |
| AI services behind the app | AssemblyAI for transcription, OpenAI for summaries, advice, action items and chat | C | Privacy policy: audio is streamed to AssemblyAI; transcript text goes "through our Cloudflare-hosted server to OpenAI". | [4] |
| Asking price | US$20,000 on TrustMRR; US$16,934 on whatsthe.app | C | Listed for sale on TrustMRR since 13 June 2026 with 8 offers received; whatsthe.app shows 77 buyers who viewed and 2 inquiries. An asking price is not a sale price. US$16,934 is about 1.3 times the September run rate (calculated). | [1, 2] |
| Time from release to the September 2026 figure | 9 months | calc | Calculated: December 2025 to September 2026. | [1, 3] |

How to read this table: a grade A value was read by TrustMRR or whatsthe.app from the founder's RevenueCat account through its API, not typed in by the founder. A grade C value is the founder's own text: the App Store listing, the sale form or the legal pages. An "X" value was computed on this page from the rows it names.

## When did Risenote launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a December 2025 release to a for-sale listing in six months and about US$1,100 a month by late summer 2026. Each entry carries its grade.

- **November 2025** (grade C [2]): Business operations start, according to the seller's form.
- **17 December 2025** (grade A [3, 1]): Version 1.0 is released in the App Store as "Meeting Minutes: Focus AI". December revenue is US$115.
- **January to April 2026** (grade A [1]): Revenue stays between about US$100 and US$201 a month.
- **23 April 2026** (grade C [3]): Version 1.0.3 improves the "AI advisory", the feature that gives advice during a meeting. The release note still uses the old name.
- **1 May 2026** (grade A [3, 1]): Version 1.0.4 is the first release note with the name "Risenote – AI Meeting Notes". May revenue is US$1,233, about six times April.
- **13 June 2026** (grade C [1]): The app is first listed for sale on TrustMRR.
- **August 2026** (grade A [1]): Best month in the data: US$1,364.
- **14 September 2026** (grade C [3]): Version 1.0.5 fixes transcription that stopped when the Lock Screen turned on and adds a Lock Screen Live Activity that shows the transcript during recording.
- **1 October 2026** (grade A [2]): whatsthe.app reads US$1,040 in 28 days, MRR of US$941 and 66 active subscriptions from RevenueCat. Asking price there: US$16,934.
- **October 2026** (grade A [1]): Revenue falls to US$718. On 1 November MRR is US$768 with 63 active subscriptions.
- **2 November 2026** (grade C [6]): The Google Play page for the Android version returns "Not Found".

## Why did Risenote work?

### Subscription paywall

The App Store listing says that all features, including transcription, summaries and chat, need an active subscription. There is no free tier to support. whatsthe.app shows a paid subscriber share of 90.4% among active subscriptions, and the paywall is run with Superwall, a service for showing and testing payment screens.

### Rented AI, no model work

The founder did not build a speech or language model. Audio goes to AssemblyAI and text goes to OpenAI through a small server hosted on Cloudflare. The work is the mobile app, the prompts and the payment flow, which one person can do.

### Short-video marketing and ad measurement

Both marketplace profiles name TikTok, Instagram and YouTube as the marketing channels. The privacy policy says that, when the user allows tracking, Meta and RevenueCat process subscription and trial events "to measure Risenote advertising". No source says how much was spent on ads or creators.

### A name that says what it does

The app was renamed from "Meeting Minutes: Focus AI" to "Risenote – AI Meeting Notes" around the end of April 2026, and revenue went from US$201 in April to US$1,233 in May. The sources do not say whether the name, an ad campaign or something else caused the rise.

## How it was built

These details come from the App Store listing, the privacy policy, the terms of service and the two marketplace profiles. The technical details are grade C.

- Flutter, Google's toolkit for building one app for iPhone and Android from one code base (both marketplace profiles).
- Speech-to-text by AssemblyAI, streamed live, in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese, with automatic detection of when the speaker changes.
- Summaries, action items, proactive advice and chat answers by OpenAI models, called through the founder's own server on Cloudflare, so the app does not hold the API key.
- Recordings, transcripts, summaries, tasks and chat history are stored on the phone, not in a cloud account.
- Payments through the App Store, checked by RevenueCat; paywalls by Superwall; Meta's tools for measuring ads, only after the user allows tracking in Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt.
- The app asks for permission before it sends anything to the cloud AI services, and the user can withdraw it in Settings.

Sources: [4, 3, 1, 2]

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

Four companies in our database of failed startups sold a productivity app for notes or calendars and lost to products that were free or built into a bigger platform. 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.

### Transpose (2012 to 2018; funding US$0; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A note-taking and data organization tool for businesses, first launched as KustomNote, as an alternative to Evernote.
- Why it died: Without outside money and without a strong reason for users to switch from the tool they already had, few free users became paying customers.
- Record: 

### Springpad (2008 to 2014; funding US$7.5M; cause: Unit Economics)

- Promise: Collect and organize web articles, videos and recipes in one place, as a competitor to Evernote.
- Why it died: Users liked the free product, but the company did not find a feature that they would pay for before the money ran out.
- Record: 

### Sunrise (2012 to 2016; funding US$8M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: One calendar app on every device that joins Google, iCloud and other calendars.
- Why it died: Microsoft bought it in 2015 and closed it in 2016, after its features went into Outlook. Calendar features were becoming part of the big platforms.
- Record: 

### Hera (2021 to 2024; funding US$15M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: An AI calendar that looked better than Google Calendar.
- Why it died: It charged money where Google and Microsoft gave calendars away inside their suites, and too few users converted from free to paid.
- Record: 

## What changed

The four predecessors spent years and, in three cases, millions of dollars of venture money to build their own note or calendar software, and then competed with products that were free or bundled. Their costs were salaries and servers before the first paying customer.

Risenote's costs are different. The hard parts, speech recognition and language understanding, are rented per use from AssemblyAI and OpenAI, the app is one Flutter code base written by one person, and the App Store handles payment. So a few dozen subscribers are enough to cover costs: 63 active subscriptions on 1 November 2026 brought US$768 of monthly recurring revenue. The risk is the same as before. The App Store page that sells Risenote also lists Granola, tl;dv, Meeting.ai, Cockatoo and other AI note takers under "You Might Also Like", and the falling October figure shows that a small app in a crowded category must keep paying for attention.

## Can one person copy Risenote now?

**Verdict: Yes, the method is easy to copy. Holding the revenue is the hard part.**

The build is a mobile app around two paid AI services, a hard paywall and short-video marketing, all within reach of one developer. The category is crowded, and the verified data shows a business that reached about US$1,000 a month for five months and then lost a third of it in one month.

1. Pick one recurring situation where people need written notes, such as meetings, and build only that.
2. Rent speech-to-text and a language model through your own small server, so the API keys never ship inside the app.
3. Put every feature behind a weekly or yearly subscription, and measure the paywall with a tool such as RevenueCat or Superwall.
4. Test short videos on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and give the app a name that says what it does in the App Store search.

**What is still open.** Narrow note-taking cases that the general meeting apps serve badly: one profession's vocabulary, one language that the large apps handle poorly, or one kind of meeting with a fixed output format.

## What could go wrong for Risenote?

- **Revenue is falling and small.** Verified revenue was US$718 in October 2026, against US$1,364 in August and US$1,085 in September, and MRR fell from US$941 on 1 October to US$768 on 1 November. The business is at the low end of what this site covers.
- **For sale, not sold.** The app has been listed for sale since 13 June 2026: US$20,000 on TrustMRR, US$16,934 on whatsthe.app. The seller wrote on whatsthe.app that the reason is personal: he is moving to the United States on a student (F-1) visa and "due to the restrictions around my situation, I'm no longer able to continue owning and operating apps". No sale has been reported.
- **Recording other people.** A meeting recorder captures the voices of everyone in the room. The terms of service forbid using the app "To record conversations without proper consent from all parties (where required by law)" and say: "We strongly recommend informing all participants at the start of any recorded meeting." The privacy policy asks users to "inform participants and obtain recording permission where required". No page read for this story markets secret recording.
- **Founder-entered details.** The team size of 1, the bootstrapped funding, the country (Germany) and the 97% profit margin are entered by the founder, not verified. The terms of service show "Last Updated: December 13, 2024", a year before the app's release, which suggests a template that was not updated.
- **Android version and tracking.** Both marketplace profiles link a Google Play version, but its page returned "Not Found" on 2 November 2026; the revenue may come from iPhone users only. The App Store privacy label says purchases, identifiers and usage data may be used to track users across other companies' apps for advertising, after the user allows it.
- **Other apps by the same developer.** The App Store lists other apps by the same developer: a digital scale, a German school-grade calculator, a voice note taker called Notie AI, a music discovery app and a logic puzzle. They are not part of this story.

## Sources

1. TrustMRR: Risenote profile, revenue verified through RevenueCat, synced 1 November 2026 — https://trustmrr.com/startup/risenote.md (grade A). Read the markdown profile in full, downloaded 2 November 2026 (UTC). Grade A for the revenue, MRR and subscription metrics in its Verification Sources section; the description, country, founded date, profit margin and sale listing are founder-entered (grade C).
2. whatsthe.app: Risenote - $1,040 Revenue (for sale), data last updated 1 October 2026 — https://www.whatsthe.app/risenote (grade A). Read in full, downloaded 2 November 2026 (UTC). The metrics are "verified through RevenueCat" (grade A); the sale details, team size, financing and listing text are the seller's (grade C).
3. Apple App Store: Risenote – AI Meeting Notes, seller Theo Kramer — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/risenote-ai-meeting-notes/id6756504124 (grade C). Read in full: description, subscription prices, version history, privacy label, in-app purchases and the developer's other apps.
4. Risenote privacy policy (Google Sites) — https://sites.google.com/view/meeting-minutes-ai/privacy-policy (grade C). Read in full. Source for AssemblyAI, OpenAI, Cloudflare, RevenueCat, Superwall and Meta, the on-device storage, and the recording-permission sentence.
5. Risenote terms of service (Google Sites) — https://sites.google.com/view/meeting-minutes-ai/terms-of-service (grade C). Read in full. Source for the recording-consent section and the age rules (13 or older; parental consent under 18).
6. Google Play: details page for de.tk.meetingNotes — https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.tk.meetingNotes (grade C). Could not open: the page returned 404 "Not Found" on 2 November 2026 (two attempts, with and without a country setting).
7. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.