Case study

RecLet

Your Records & Letters. Your Stories. A local-first writing and audio studio for iOS, Android, and web, and the product I founded a company to build.

Role

Founder & Creative Director · product, brand, copy, and AI engineering direction

Company

Mautonce LLC (Illinois)

Timeline

March 2026 – present

Status

80+ releases; App Store submission in preparation; site live at reclet.now

The problem: creative tools have started claiming the work

Writers and audio creators are being pushed into cloud suites that hold the file, meter the features, and increasingly run AI over the content. RecLet was built on the opposite promise: your work stays on your device, exports in formats you keep, and no AI ever reads it. The tagline says what the product does; the promise says why it exists.

Four tools, one app

• Records. Record in your own voice; trim, level, share. With Studio: a multitrack timeline, EQ, compression, limiting, mastering to −16 LUFS for podcasts and −19 LUFS for audiobooks, and produce to MP3, M4A, chaptered M4B, or FLAC. Entirely on the phone.
• Letters. A real page: trims from 5×8 to A4, running headers, chapter openings, front matter, embedded typefaces in the PDF and ODT, and a live print preview.
• Planners. A board for planning; draft it into a page without losing the thread.
• Quotes. Turn a line into a signed card, sized for cover art, ebook listings, and social.

Everything organizes as Galleries → Collections → Stories, backs up to folders the user controls, and requires no account.

The brand, and the site that explains it

A name that says what it does

RecLet, like letter, names Records and Letters in one word. It came out of the tagline rather than the other way round, because a product whose promise is that your work stays yours has to be named for what it keeps. I designed the identity system, wrote the StoryBrand brandscript and the positioning against Descript, Auphonic, Scrivener, and Ulysses-class tools, set the 28-typeface library users choose from for their own pages for the page, and wrote the marketing site. The tagline system has one lockup line and two approved short forms, and nothing else is allowed, because a name this unusual gets one chance to explain itself.

I directed the engineering the way I direct a design team

I don't write code by hand. I wrote the briefs, the acceptance criteria, and the review gates, and AI coding agents did the implementation. To make that trustworthy I built the same things I build for human teams: a standards library of 67 specialized agents, 75 skills, and 84 rules covering QA, security review, accessibility, store compliance, and brand voice; a 42,000-word product Blueprint that has to be updated in the same pull request as any change; 50+ architecture decision records; adversarial review before every release, where an independent reviewer agent audits the implementer's work; and a device pass on physical iPhone hardware against a written checklist before any version ships.

Release 2.7.1 is a good example of why the gates exist: fourteen defects fixed, two of which could only be found on a real phone, and three quality gates that were found passing on broken things and repaired.

Copy, legal, and store readiness

I owned all of it: onboarding, a 43-entry help FAQ, paywall and billing copy, the App Store listing, the privacy policy and terms, and the App Store privacy labels. Seven voice audits keep every surface in one voice. When a security audit found the privacy label disclosing analytics that a content-security rule was silently blocking, the fix was to remove analytics entirely rather than misdisclose them. Accessibility is checked in CI and against WCAG and VoiceOver checklists.

Free is a complete tool. Paid is for when projects grow.

Free costs nothing and always will: Records, unlimited Letters, the teleprompter, export to every format, no account. Pro at $4.99 a month adds book craft: trims, front matter, embedded typefaces, print preview, unlimited Planners and Quotes. Pro+Studio at $12.99 a month adds lossless capture, the multitrack Studio, mastering, chaptered M4B, and podcast seasons. Billing runs through the App Store via RevenueCat, with a seven-day trial, a pricing audit, and a dark-pattern review of the paywall before launch.