Richie McIlroy

Cap

Open the app.Hit record.Share the link.

Cap is the open source screen recorder that works on every platform. I build it as a solo founder.

cap.so

About

Hey, I'm Richie McIlroy. I'm the solo founder of Cap and I've been writing code . I believe in empathy, both in code and in life. I believe in and learning from . I love , my family, my friends, and our small French Bulldog, Xara the French Bulldog in a Cap hat.

You can follow me on X, see my code on GitHub, or email me. There's also a longer biography if you want the whole story.

How I got here

  1. Age 9

    An h1 tag

    My uncle, a web developer, showed me how to write my first heading, for a Call of Duty modding site I wanted to build. Watching text appear on screen felt like the coolest thing in the world. That feeling never really went away.

  2. Age 12

    The motherboard wasn't fried

    My parents saved for months to buy me PC parts for Christmas. It wouldn't boot, and the repair shop said the board was dead. It wasn't. I'd mounted it without risers. Experts can be wrong, and the answer is usually out there if you keep looking.

  3. Age 13

    A cheat code to life

    I re-edited fail compilations in Sony Vegas Pro. Some hit two or three million views. I made about three thousand dollars before I turned fourteen.

  4. Age 16

    Learn by doing

    I liked learning. I couldn't stand exams. So I left school for an apprenticeship in IT. My first salary was £4,180.80 a year.

  5. Age 18

    Fired

    Running a web design business from your work email isn't the smartest move. With nothing to fall back on, I went all in, building sites for anyone who'd pay and learning at two in the morning.

  6. Age 19

    Days and nights

    My first professional web development job. Shopify at agencies by day, my own apps by night. Along the way: forty kilograms of memory foam, and a dropshipping weekend that turned into a month of refunds.

  7. 2020

    The first exit

    An app I built during the GPT-3 beta sold in a $100k acquihire. It gave me the confidence to keep building in public.

  8. 2021

    Most Technically Challenging

    Built SEOCopy.ai in 24 days. Won at the first-ever Supabase hackathon with Feature.so. The prize was a gold t-shirt.

  9. 2022

    Sold, shipped, open sourced

    Sold Recover. Launched Question.to. Open sourced Reflio, because code can outlive a company.

  10. 2023

    Show HN: Cap

    Version 0.0.1 of an open source alternative to Loom. Open the app, hit record, share the link. No hoops.

  11. 2024

    Public beta

    Cap opened to everyone on 25 April 2024. A few weeks later it was the top post on Show HN.

  12. 2025

    10,000 stars

    Cap passed 10,000 stars on GitHub, and the team got together in San Francisco.

  13. 2026

    Married

    Liv and I got married in front of all our family and friends.

  14. Now, 2026

    Still pressing the power button

    A solo founder with $1.25M raised, outranked at home by a French Bulldog. There's a lot I want to ship.

Writing