Reverie

In July 2025, I got frustrated. I wanted to create ambient soundscapes from existing audio. Long, evolving textures from songs I liked. The tools exist: Paulstretch, spectral processing, granular synthesis. But they all live inside complex DAWs with steep learning curves. If you're not already a sound designer, forget about it.

So I thought: what if you could just drop a file, pick a mood, and get 30 minutes of ambient music out? No DAW. No manual. No prior knowledge.

That's how Reverie started.

6 months of solo dev hell

I built everything alone. Python backend with 38 audio modules, Electron + React frontend, builds for Mac and Windows. I had no idea what I was getting into.

Getting Paulstretch to handle 2-hour files without eating 5GB of RAM forced me to rewrite the entire processing pipeline into blocks. I spent weeks chasing audio glitches that only showed up at weird stretch ratios. Fix one module, break two others. Classic.

But honestly the code wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the silence. Months of working alone, zero users, zero feedback. Just me staring at waveforms at 2am asking myself if anyone would ever use this thing.

I almost quit twice. Both times what kept me going was loading some random song into Reverie and hearing something beautiful come out that I couldn't have made any other way.

Where things stand

Just launched. Free version gives you 3 minutes with 5 styles. Pro is 19 euros, one-time, no subscription. 30 minutes of generation, 19 styles, 15 factory presets. Runs offline on Mac and Windows.

No impressive numbers to share. I'm not here to flex a Stripe screenshot. I'm in the early grind of cold emailing YouTubers, posting on Reddit, trying to find the people who actually want this.

Stuff I figured out the hard way

Building the product is maybe 40% of the work. The other 60% is finding people who care.

Solo dev burnout is no joke. I should have shipped something ugly way earlier instead of polishing for months.

The thing you think is "intuitive" is only intuitive to you because you built it. Hand it to someone else and watch them get lost immediately.

So what would you do at this stage? I know how to write code but I have no clue how to do marketing. If you've been through the early launch grind I'd love to hear what worked for you.