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This is the story of how open source AI created a $3M business for a news company:
Clare Spencer tells on the GAIN blog how a Danish software engineer found OpenAI's Whisper model and turned it into Good Tape. It's now generating $3M ARR for news service Zetland.
Great playbook on how to build a good product:
- This idea came from a software engineer, Jakob Steinn, who was not only able to spot a new model, but also listen to feedback from his colleagues in the newsrooms (he thought they would use it for translation, but they were more interested in transcription in Danish)
- They built iteratively: they went from running the model in the terminal to a notebook to a full-fledged web interface
- They didn't just wrap the API. They rebuilt the transcription engine from scratch, moved it to TPUs for 45-second processing of hour-long audio, and added EU-based data sovereignty
Now Good Tape has 2.5M users worldwide, with only 30-35% being journalists.
Small languages (Danish, Finnish, Croatian, Hebrew) were underserved by existing tools - suddenly there's a "very very big market" when you put them together.
This shows how open source AI can solve real workflow problems and create sustainable businesses. Sometimes the best opportunities emerge from solving your own daily problems.
Worth a read: https://generative-ai-newsroom.com/how-a-danish-news-service-made-a-profit-with-its-transcription-tool-285bc05b7cf9
Clare Spencer tells on the GAIN blog how a Danish software engineer found OpenAI's Whisper model and turned it into Good Tape. It's now generating $3M ARR for news service Zetland.
Great playbook on how to build a good product:
- This idea came from a software engineer, Jakob Steinn, who was not only able to spot a new model, but also listen to feedback from his colleagues in the newsrooms (he thought they would use it for translation, but they were more interested in transcription in Danish)
- They built iteratively: they went from running the model in the terminal to a notebook to a full-fledged web interface
- They didn't just wrap the API. They rebuilt the transcription engine from scratch, moved it to TPUs for 45-second processing of hour-long audio, and added EU-based data sovereignty
Now Good Tape has 2.5M users worldwide, with only 30-35% being journalists.
Small languages (Danish, Finnish, Croatian, Hebrew) were underserved by existing tools - suddenly there's a "very very big market" when you put them together.
This shows how open source AI can solve real workflow problems and create sustainable businesses. Sometimes the best opportunities emerge from solving your own daily problems.
Worth a read: https://generative-ai-newsroom.com/how-a-danish-news-service-made-a-profit-with-its-transcription-tool-285bc05b7cf9
