Project 5
Launched: Day 9
April 17, 2025
Monologger
An app that turns your audio recordings into social media posts or articles, helping you find your voice online, stay consistent and remove the friction of creating things to publish. The main idea is to have it be authentically you.
writing
productivity
audio
content creation
Project Timeline
17.8h
Work Sessions
Day 13
April 21, 2025
Creating a favicon for monologger.app
31m
Day 10
April 18, 2025
Fixing audio upload dropzone monologger.app
26m
Figuring out db backup before deployment monologger.app
16m
Audio journalling about monologger.app
32m
UI/UX monologger.app
2h 25m
Day 9
April 17, 2025
UI/UX monologger.app
44m
UI/UX monologger.app
13m
UI/UX monologger.app
3h 31m
UI/UX monologger.app
1h 2m
Day 8
April 16, 2025
UI/UX monologger.app
42m
Troubleshooting db issues with monologger.app's deployment
1h 23m
Solving monologger.app email troubles
51m
Deploying monologger.app
1h 38m
Day 7
April 15, 2025
Working on an audio-text app monologger.app
2h 41m
Day 6
April 14, 2025
Brainstorming abt audio -> public writing tool monologger.app
25m
Working on transcript -> social media app monologger.app
22m
Launch Day
Day 9Backstory
I actually needed to update the information on 30in30days.com for my challenge. I wanted to have updates about what each project is, with screenshots and detailed descriptions, but I was avoiding it for a long time. Then I had an epiphany together with my wife Jordan - I decided to sit down and talk into a voice memo about all my thoughts and experiences of the past days. I wanted to transcribe this and get AI to write the first draft that I would adjust for the website. And the second piece was making that into public social media posts because I struggle a bit with sitting down to write posts and scheduling things. There's less friction to just record audio when you have inspiration.
The Challenge
The challenge here is mainly UI and UX - what is a natural interface for this? It's not 100% clear. I started building something that made sense, but then realized it didn't look right. Should I center it around posts or audio files? I think audio files should probably be grouped by date and tags. I also spent way too much time on polish - I need better guardrails for getting a more polished output straight up.
Features
- Magic link login - I'm so happy about how smoothly it turned out
- Upload audio that gets transcribed automatically
- Generate social media posts with variables like how many posts, style, and level of authenticity
- Mark posts as published or drafts
- Super responsive app - sub-40ms response time in Europe and the US
- Planned: Telegram integration so you can just send voice messages directly
- Planned: Better organization of audios with tags and projects
- Planned: Article writing capabilities
Technical Implementation
It's on a dedicated small server on DigitalOcean with just 500 megs of RAM and one vCPU. I'm using Docker to package the application and automatically deploy after every commit via GitHub Actions. I built a simple deployment system that just works. I'm using Caddy for managing certificates, Grainian for the WSGI layer, Flask for the application layer, and Cloudflare for DNS. I'm really happy with how it turned out technically - it has sub-40ms response time which is kind of insane for a Flask app on such a small server. I think it will scale pretty well to easily 10,000 users without much change.
Monetization
For this project, monetization is very direct. I want to make a generous free account until I figure out what things people are using and what I should charge for. The closest competitor is VoiceNotes, charging $10 per month or $69 per year. My costs are transcription and AI usage, so I'll need to set limits - maybe free users can only choose up to three audios in one go. There might be additional avenues like letting people host their blogs directly on the platform or even launching and hosting podcasts.
What I Learned
Having a smooth CICD pipeline is great - I cannot imagine shipping this if I had to do deployment manually. I'm so happy I did the groundwork for automatic migrations, packaging, health checks with rollbacks if the app doesn't pass. I need to focus more on bare essentials though - I spent too much time polishing things that aren't must-haves. I also learned you need to prompt LLMs to do mobile-first design and then optimize for desktop - the other way around is more difficult because it creates stuff that looks cramped and weird on mobile.
Final Thoughts
I'm continuing with my bet to build tools that make me more efficient and productive, making it easier to complete this 30in30 challenge. I think I'm on the right track. This should be really instrumental in organizing my thoughts and gathering insights, being more consistent with journaling and more reflective about my projects. Looking forward to improving it - every commit goes live, so we'll see how it works.