I'm going to tell you something that will probably sound familiar if you've ever tried to film yourself reading a script.
You set up the shot. Lighting looks good. You've got the script open on your phone. You hit record, look down at your notes for exactly one second — and the take is already ruined. Not because you forgot the words. Because your eyes moved.
That's how FlowPrompt started. Not with a business plan. With genuine frustration.
How I Ended Up Here
For a few years I was making videos for an international nonprofit — traveling to places like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, the Philippines. Photographing communities. Doing interviews. Filming programs that showed what this organization was actually doing on the ground.
That work taught me a lot about being in front of and behind a camera. When you're documenting something real — an entrepreneur explaining how she started her business, a student describing what changed for him — you learn quickly what natural looks like. And natural is not someone reading off a screen that's clearly not where the camera is.
I came back from those trips with hundreds of hours of footage and a very clear sense of what made some interviews land and others fall flat. It wasn't the lighting. It wasn't the location. It was eye contact. It was whether the person felt like they were talking to you or reciting something for you.
When I started making my own content — YouTube videos, course material, short-form — I ran into the same problem every creator runs into. I have a lot to say and I can say it well when I'm talking to someone. Get me in front of a camera with a blank stare back at me, and suddenly I'm stumbling over sentences I've written a dozen times.
So I needed a teleprompter.
The Existing Options Were… Fine
I tried a lot of apps. I don't want to trash them here because they're not bad products — they just weren't solving the actual problem.
The problem isn't scrolling text. Every app scrolls text. The problem is that when your script is on a screen that isn't also where your camera is, your eyes go to the script and away from the lens. Even if the script is right next to the camera, there's an offset. Viewers see it. It feels like watching someone read, because that's exactly what they're watching.
Some apps were subscription-based at $8-10 per month for what is fundamentally a scrolling text utility. That didn't sit right with me. Some had the overlay feature but the recording quality was noticeably worse than just using the stock camera app. Some had the quality but not the overlay. A few had both but the UI made simple things unnecessarily complicated.
I spent a couple months just dealing with it. Using the least-bad option. Getting frustrated.
The Moment I Decided to Build It
I was in the middle of recording a module for an online course. The segment was maybe four minutes long. I had done it eight times. Not because I kept forgetting lines — I knew the material cold — but because every take had at least one moment where my eyes visibly tracked to the script and broke the feeling of direct conversation.
I remember stopping, putting my phone down, and thinking: this is a solved problem. Reading text directly off a camera feed is not technically complicated. The phone is already running a camera app and displaying the preview. The script could just be overlaid on that preview. Your eyes would be pointed at the lens the whole time. Why does no app do this well?
I'm not a professional developer. I've built things before — mostly for personal use, internal tools, that kind of thing. But I know enough to know when something is doable.
I spent a weekend prototyping. By Sunday night I had something that worked well enough that I used it for the rest of the course module. By the end of that week I had a version I could describe to other creators.
That was the start.
What Almost Stopped Me
Honestly? Thinking it wouldn't matter.
There are thousands of apps. The App Store is full of things that solve problems that feel important to one person and don't resonate with anyone else. I spent a lot of time wondering whether the camera overlay thing was actually a meaningful distinction or whether I was just annoyed at existing apps because I hadn't used them correctly.
I talked to other creators. Not in a market research way — just in a “hey, do you run into this?” way. And the response was consistent enough that I kept going.
The other thing that almost stopped me was scope creep in my own head. Every time I got the core thing working I'd start thinking about all the features it didn't have. Mirror mode. Import from Files. AI pacing. Script templates. There's a version of FlowPrompt that I could still be building today if I'd tried to build all of it first.
What actually helped was deciding to ship the thing that solved the core problem and add everything else later. Camera overlay that actually records well. Smooth scroll speed control. Simple script management. That's it for version one. Everything else is a future problem.
Where It Is Now
FlowPrompt is currently in beta — you can join the waitlist right now. It does the thing I built it to do: overlays your script directly on the live camera feed so you can read and look at the lens at the same time. It records at real quality, not the compromised output of early overlay apps. And it's a one-time purchase, not a subscription, because there is no reason a scrolling text app should require a monthly commitment.
I've been using it for my own content for a while now. The number of retakes I do for scripted segments has dropped significantly. Not because I'm a better reader — because the geometry is finally right. My eyes are at the lens. The script is at the lens. They're the same place.
That's all I wanted.
If you're a creator who's been dealing with the same problem — give the beta a shot. And if you have strong opinions about what it's missing, I'm genuinely listening.
— Jacken
