mitm llc // one-person product studio
Rene Zelaya
product owner · solo entrepreneur · built on customer feedback
I find a real user problem, ship the fix, and improve it with customer feedback. Everything below is live. Seven products shipped. Two with paying customers.
the operator
About
I'm Rene, a product owner and solo entrepreneur with eight years of UX research across SaaS, telecom, and financial services, and a master's in HCI and AI from Elisava in Barcelona. MITM LLC is the studio where I ship: I find real user problems, build the fix, and improve it with the feedback of the people who use it. The products below range from local voice dictation to on-device transcription and a pixel-art weather app.
the portfolio
The products
Every product here is live and shaped by customer feedback. WhisperPad and Sky Critter have paying customers; the rest ship free.
WhisperPad
Local, privacy-first dictation running Whisper entirely on-device. The flagship.
PixelPinch
A menu bar app that captures, downsizes, and compresses screenshots so pasting them into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini costs roughly 4× fewer tokens.
Transcribd
On-device diarization with speaker labels. No cloud, no upload.
IntentOps
A form for logging studio work: capture intent, reasoning, risks, what got done, blockers, and the AI’s role, then export a structured log. A hosted, authenticated web app (sign-in gated).
Skycritter
A pixel-art kitten weather app for iPhone, live on the App Store. A real forecast underneath; cosmetic critters and Pro extras on top.
Sample Size Calculator
Plan study sample sizes without the spreadsheet gymnastics.
Significance Calculator
The A/B test calculator: compare success rates between two versions of a design and find out if the difference is statistically significant, in plain language.
flagship case study
WhisperPad
A macOS voice-to-text app that runs OpenAI's Whisper model fully on your machine. No audio leaves the device, ever. It ships in two builds: one on the Mac App Store and a direct build from the studio site, both with full auto-paste through the Accessibility API.
When Apple rejected the auto-paste feature, the writeup about it ran on the front page of Hacker News. Then Apple called and reversed the rejection. The constraint became the story, the story became the channel, and both builds now ship in parallel.
Read the full story on the blog: the rejection · the reversal.
the research career
Eight years of UX research
Before the studio: research that shaped products at telecom, fintech, and SaaS scale. Three highlights; the full case studies live in the portfolio.
Spectrum News App
Led the generative research behind a unified local-news app: in-context mobile interviews, surveys, and concept testing that reframed local news from geography to identity. 1M+ downloads in 8 months; iOS rating 4.2 → 4.8; 5M unique mobile visitors by 2024.
Life Insurance Journey Map
Built the journey-mapping program that gave a legacy insurer its product north star: stakeholder alignment, deep-dive interviews, and embedded surveys that flipped internal assumptions about digital self-service. Research directly shaped the modernized application's self-service strategy.
Voice of the Customer + NLP
Led a three-week international field study (a team of three researchers) that turned raw support calls into an NLP categorization model and a VOC dashboard across 21 products. Contributed to a 12% reduction in support call volume.
the thesis
Shipped Solo, the method
I just finished my master's in human computer interaction for artificial intelligence in Barcelona. My thesis focused on enabling individuals to leverage AI for productivity while avoiding the common pitfalls. The result is a methodology: run a one-person studio that releases real products, with AI as the junior employees and as much of the work automated as possible.
work with me
Open to UX research and AI product roles in the Bay Area and the EU.
Also up for talking about solo shipping, on-device AI, or any of the work above.
