Speaking, Learning and Making Things in Public
Creating Your Free Teleprompter App
I want to tell you a short story about embarrassment, curiosity and the places they take us.
A few weeks ago, I launched a new initiative with a friend and colleague. We ran a webinar together. He is one of those people who can speak in complete paragraphs without trying. Erudite, calm, effortless. I’m not like that. I’m a competent communicator, but the moment I know I’m being recorded, my brain becomes a jammed filing cabinet.
When I watched the recording back, I winced. The hesitations, the umming and ahhing, the drift in my sentences. Nothing catastrophic, just not the standard I hold myself to. So I did what obsessives do. I re-recorded my part, edited it and released a cleaner version. It took longer than it should have, but it was the only way I could live with pressing “publish”.
That experience led me to Chris Brogan. I’ve been on Chris’s email list for decades, and I can’t recommend him enough. He has this easy way of writing. It’s both warm and sharp in equal measure (if that makes sense). In a recent post, he mentioned he was teaching himself to code and had built a simple teleprompter.
A teleprompter! I thought, that’s exactly what I need. Something to anchor my delivery so I wasn’t scrambling for the next sentence while staring into a camera.
So I went looking in the app store, but everything I found requires a subscription.
Then I thought perhaps I could build one too.
At this point, it’s worth saying I understand code. I’m not a developer, but I’ve run enough projects with dev teams to know how things fit together at least enough to build a simple MVP that doesn’t fall over.
But the truth is, none of that actually matters now.
I opened VS Code. I plugged in Claude Code and, within an hour, had a fully functional teleprompter running in a single HTML file. Drop it into any browser, and it just works. No subscription. No lock-in. No dreaded ‘in-app purchases’.
You can download it here to use it offline.
You can grab the GitHub repo and improve it here.
Or you can ignore it if it’s not helpful.
Why give it away? Because this is the deeper point.
AI isn’t just about making us faster or more accurate. It’s about widening the circle of what any of us can attempt. It closes the gap between “I can’t do that” and “Let me try”. And that shift only matters if we meet it with a certain kind of leadership. Creative leadership. The willingness to learn in public, share early, collaborate freely and build things that didn’t exist yesterday.
AI lowers the floor for all of us. This small tool is my way of modelling that. I needed it and you might need it too.
We are entering a moment where the people who thrive won’t be the ones with the most polished expertise. They’ll be the ones who stay open. They’ll try things, make a mess and ship something anyway.
This is me shipping something anyway.
I hope you find it useful.
I get why you built the teleprompter as it solves the immediate problem.
But do you ever think that struggling through it without assistance might actually build the deeper presentation skill?