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Richie McIlroy

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This is a personal page on richiemcilroy.com, styled after Wikipedia.

Richie McIlroy is a software developer and entrepreneur from Liverpool, England. He is the solo founder of Cap, an open-source screen recording and sharing application with millions of downloads.[31] His earlier projects include the AI copywriting service SEOCopy.ai and the Stripe checkout recovery tool Recover.[1][2][3][4]

McIlroy began coding as a child, entered the technology industry through an IT apprenticeship, and worked in web development before building independent software products. He has documented his projects through personal essays, Indie Hackers, and social media, sharing both product milestones and the difficulties of running a software business.[1][5][10]

McIlroy raised US$1.25 million for Cap as a solo founder.[14] Cap was presented on Hacker News in November 2023 and entered public beta in April 2024. Its subsequent development centred on local recording, editing, and sharing, with source code published on GitHub.[6][7][8]

Early life and education[ link ]

In his autobiographical essay My story so far, McIlroy describes growing up in Liverpool and writing his first HTML at nine for a Call of Duty modding website, with help from his uncle. At twelve, he assembled his first PC and began recruiting YouTube creators for multi-channel networks. He later earned money editing compilation videos. He left school at sixteen to begin an IT apprenticeship.[1]

Career[ link ]

Web development

McIlroy writes that he lost his IT job at eighteen, after starting a web design business on the side. He continued building client websites independently. At nineteen, he obtained his first professional web-development position, followed by work at web agencies, principally on Shopify sites. He continued developing his own applications outside working hours.[1]

In 2020, according to his retrospective, an application he built during the GPT-3 beta led to a US$100,000 acquihire. He describes the deal as an important source of confidence for his later independent projects.[1]

Independent products

In June 2021, McIlroy launched SEOCopy.ai, a service for generating search-engine-oriented marketing copy. A September update described a blog-post generator that assembled an article from a subject, keywords, title, introduction, and subheadings. He reported building the initial product in 24 days.[18]

In August 2021, McIlroy won the Most Technically Challenging category at the first-ever Supabase hackathon with Feature.so, a tool for building and managing application components from a dashboard using an embedded code snippet.[30]

On 14 September 2021, he reported that SEOCopy had sold all twenty of its initial founder plans and reached US$413 in monthly recurring revenue. He also created a public startup metrics page and used an AI-generated blog to demonstrate the product.[3]

While looking for a way to follow up on abandoned Stripe checkouts for SEOCopy, McIlroy developed Recover.so. In a November 2021 introduction, he described a service that connected to a customer’s Stripe account and sent scheduled recovery emails.[4] In January 2022, he sold Recover for US$4,500 after listing it on MicroAcquire. His account states that the product had no revenue at the time; the agreed price included additional pricing-tier functionality.[5]

Jade Craven included McIlroy in her Indie Hackers article 25 Indie Makers To Watch in 2022, discussing his work on SEOCopy and Recover.[17]

In February 2022, he launched Question.to, an embeddable feedback tool that let website visitors send questions, bug reports, and in-browser Loom videos without having a Loom account. Its launch included a React package for embedding the service.[19]

Later that year, he developed Reflio, an open-source affiliate and referral platform for SaaS businesses. He explained that he wanted to charge per successful referral rather than require a fixed monthly fee. A June essay set out his reasons for open-sourcing the project, including community participation and the ability for code to outlive a company. By August 2022, Reflio was in public beta with Stripe integration and support for subscriptions and one-time payments.[20][21]

Cap

Main project: Cap · Source code

McIlroy introduced Cap as an open-source alternative to Loom. The project appeared in a Show HN submission on 28 November 2023 while still under development. In the discussion, he explained that he wanted to share the project early to gather ideas and feedback.[6]

Cap’s public beta launched on 25 April 2024 after approximately six months of development. It initially offered browser-based recording and a macOS application built with Tauri. Recordings could be shared by link, with comments, reactions, and viewing analytics.[7]

The September 2024 release of Cap 0.3 introduced a rebuilt application, local recording and editing, video trimming, custom backgrounds, and screenshots. McIlroy described the release as a shift towards a local-first approach.[8] In November, he published an account of a payment attack during Cap’s Product Hunt launch, detailing the team’s response and changes to payment protection.[9]

In September 2025, McIlroy and Brendan Allan published a postmortem on an outage affecting Cap’s website and sharing services. The article explained the infrastructure change that caused it and the subsequent safeguards. Local Studio Mode recording remained available during the outage.[10]

Cap 0.5, announced on 27 May 2026, added Google Drive storage, merged recordings, screenshot text recognition, camera background blur, and organisation branding, alongside recording and export fixes.[11] In August 2026, McIlroy published announcements of Cap’s SOC 2 Type II audit and ISO 27001 certification, followed by its HIPAA compliance offering.[12][13]

Funding

McIlroy raised US$1.25 million for Cap as a solo founder, according to his confirmation for this biography.[14] A December 2024 Startup Grind event described him as having secured US investment and moved to working on Cap full-time following a successful pre-seed round. The listing also described him as having previously built and sold four micro-SaaS products.[22]

Open-source contributions[ link ]

Open-source software is a recurring part of McIlroy’s work, from Reflio to Cap. In his 2022 essay on open-sourcing Reflio, he argued that public code could invite community contributions and allow a project to remain useful even if the business behind it closed.[20] He subsequently introduced Cap publicly as an open-source screen-recording application and invited feedback while it was still in development.[6]

Beyond his own products, McIlroy has contributed to open-source projects including Supabase, UnInbox, react-lazy-media, and CapSoftware’s Cinder.[23][24][25][26]

Writing and public presence[ link ]

McIlroy writes about independent software development, learning through practical work, and building products in public. His 2021 SEOCopy updates used revenue and product-development reports as both documentation and marketing.[3] His later essays discuss AI-assisted development and product judgement.

  • My story so far (27 December 2025), an account of his childhood, web-development career, and path to Cap.[1]
  • Just Start Building (27 February 2026), a practical approach to developing ideas with AI coding tools, written specifications, and repeated review.[15]
  • Taste is a moat (5 March 2026), an argument that product judgement, restraint, and coherence become more valuable as software becomes easier to build.[16]

Selected public posts

The following posts trace publicly documented projects. The original Recover tweets are linked in McIlroy’s own sale retrospective; the early Cap post is linked in the Hacker News discussion.[5][6]

Selected posts and project milestones
DateSubjectOriginal source
14 September 2021SEOCopy reaches $413 MRRIndie Hackers
7 November 2021Introducing RecoverIndie Hackers
10 January 2022Recover listed for saleTwitter / X ↗
23 January 2022Recover acquisition announcementTwitter / X ↗
17 November 2023Early Cap developmentTwitter / X ↗
28 November 2023Introducing Cap to Hacker NewsHacker News

Personal life[ link ]

McIlroy is married to Olivia Mae Hanlon.[27] Hanlon is an entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Girls in Marketing, an education and networking community she started in 2019. The organisation provides training, resources, events, and a podcast for marketers, with a focus on supporting women in the industry.[28][29]

Hanlon graduated from Birmingham City University in 2019 with a degree in Psychology and Criminology, having freelanced in content writing and SEO alongside her studies. She was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2024 and received BCU’s Alumna of the Year award in January 2026.[29] McIlroy’s autobiographical writing also mentions their French Bulldog, Xara.[1]

References[ link ]

Biographical details are drawn primarily from McIlroy’s own published accounts. Revenue and acquisition figures are self-reported. The funding amount was confirmed directly by McIlroy for this biography; the public event listing independently documents the round but does not state an amount. His marriage to Olivia Mae Hanlon was also confirmed directly by McIlroy. Details of Hanlon’s career are drawn from Forbes and Birmingham City University. Open-source contributions are supported by merged pull requests. Sources checked on 7 September 2026. This is a curated biography, not a complete archive of tweets; unavailable or unindexed posts are not represented.

  1. McIlroy, Richie (27 December 2025). “My story so far”. richiemcilroy.com.
  2. McIlroy, Richie (Profile). “Richie McIlroy (@richiemcilroy)”. GitHub.
  3. McIlroy, Richie (14 September 2021). “Sold all of our founder plans, now at $413 MRR”. Indie Hackers.
  4. McIlroy, Richie (7 November 2021). “I built a tool that generates your Stripe account extra revenue”. Indie Hackers.
  5. McIlroy, Richie (24 January 2022). “How I sold my $0 revenue SaaS side project for $4.5K”. Indie Hackers.
  6. mcilroy et al. (28 November 2023). “Show HN: Cap – open-source alternative to Loom”. Hacker News.
  7. McIlroy, Richie (25 April 2024). “Cap Public Beta Release”. Cap.
  8. McIlroy, Richie (28 September 2024). “Cap v0.3.0 – A New Direction”. Cap.
  9. McIlroy, Richie (30 November 2024). “Handling a Stripe Payment Attack During Our Product Hunt Launch”. Cap.
  10. McIlroy, Richie; Allan, Brendan (23 September 2025). “A deep dive into our September 23rd outage and what we changed”. Cap.
  11. McIlroy, Richie (27 May 2026). “Cap v0.5 is here”. Cap.
  12. McIlroy, Richie (3 August 2026). “Cap is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified”. Cap.
  13. McIlroy, Richie (20 August 2026). “Cap is now HIPAA compliant”. Cap.
  14. McIlroy, Richie (7 September 2026). “Cap fundraising: US$1.25 million raised as a solo founder”. Direct confirmation for this biography (not a public announcement).
  15. McIlroy, Richie (27 February 2026). “Just Start Building”. richiemcilroy.com.
  16. McIlroy, Richie (5 March 2026). “Taste is a moat”. richiemcilroy.com.
  17. Craven, Jade (2021). “25 Indie Makers To Watch in 2022”. Indie Hackers.
  18. McIlroy, Richie (10 September 2021). “Generating a full blog post with AI”. Indie Hackers.
  19. McIlroy, Richie (17 February 2022). “Launched the MVP for my latest product”. Indie Hackers.
  20. McIlroy, Richie (25 June 2022). “Why I'm making my latest product open-source”. Indie Hackers.
  21. McIlroy, Richie (24 August 2022). “Affordable referral marketing software for indie hackers”. Indie Hackers.
  22. Startup Grind Liverpool (12 December 2024). “Fireside chat with Richie Mcilroy, founder of Cap”. Startup Grind.
  23. McIlroy, Richie (7 October 2021). “Add support for playsinline (#19)”. GitHub, merged pull request.
  24. McIlroy, Richie (21 September 2023). “Fix empty state text color in editor (#17521)”. GitHub, merged pull request.
  25. McIlroy, Richie (24 August 2024). “[Bug fix] Org name not changing instantly (#737)”. GitHub, merged pull request.
  26. McIlroy, Richie (15 August 2026). “Accelerate Cargo development workflows (#1)”. GitHub, merged pull request.
  27. McIlroy, Richie (7 September 2026). “Marriage to Olivia Mae Hanlon”. Direct confirmation for this biography.
  28. Forbes editors (9 April 2024). “Olivia Hanlon”. Forbes.
  29. Birmingham City University (8 January 2026). “Marketing Megastar: Meet BCU’s Alumna of the Year”. BCU Alumni.
  30. Wilson, Ant (9 August 2021). “Open Source Hackathon Winners”. Supabase.
  31. McIlroy, Richie (9 September 2026). “Cap has millions of downloads”. Direct confirmation for this biography.
Categories: People from LiverpoolSoftware developersOpen-source softwareIndependent founders