A small product studio

Condemned to be free. Might as well ship.

Sartre meant it as a burden. We took it as a job description. Slipway Labs is Laurin and Anne Albert, and we want to decide for ourselves what we work on, who we work with and when we go for a walk. Building our own businesses is the most practical way we've found to do that. So we make software, market it properly and stay close to the people who use it.

See what's in the water Say hello

In the water

What's afloat right now.

Two examples of what we're working on: the current fleet, not the final one. Not all of it is ours alone: WhisperTranscribe has a third co-founder and a whole team behind it. Either way, we care a lot more about month twelve than about launch day. We'd rather make something people want and tell them about it loudly than make something clever and wait politely to be discovered.

Co-founded 2023 · B2B

WhisperTranscribe

Turn what you said into everything you have to publish.

Podcasters, YouTubers and teams drop in audio and get back a clean transcript plus the show notes, chapters, subtitles, newsletter and social posts they'd otherwise spend an evening writing. Your files stay on your device; only the audio is processed, and we don't keep it.

We co-founded it with a third partner and build it with a team — we're two of the owners, not the whole crew.

  • Transcription and translation across 55 languages
  • One recording in, a week of content out
  • On-premise deployment for larger teams
Visit WhisperTranscribe
Live · Consumer

LottaLou

A diary for the moments you'd never sit down to write.

Say it out loud in twenty seconds and it becomes a written entry, kept in a journal you can share with the people who were there. Built for parents first — the small things your kid said today, before you forget them by Thursday.

  • Speak a moment, keep it forever
  • Shared journals for both parents and grandparents
  • Works offline; syncs when you're back
Visit LottaLou

Why we do it

Freedom, with a business plan.

A slipway is the ramp a boat slides down on its way into the water — the last bit of solid ground before something has to float on its own. We think a life works roughly the same way: nobody hands you the meaning, you build it, push it in and see whether it floats. Business is how we do the building. It pays for our time, it makes us learn a bit of everything (engineering, design, sales and a great deal of marketing), and it keeps the decisions with the people who have to live with them.

Kierkegaard called anxiety the dizziness of freedom. We call it launch week.

02Founders at the helm, plenty of room on deck
10+Years building products
50/50Building it and telling people about it
01Life each. We intend to use it.

Who's holding the rope

The crew, so far.

Right now Slipway Labs is the two of us. That's where things happen to be, not a rule. WhisperTranscribe has a third co-founder and a team, and we're always glad to meet good people to build the next thing with.

Laurin Wirth, arms folded, standing against a concrete wall.

Laurin Wirth

Product & Go-to-market

Decides what we build and makes sure people actually hear about it. Lives in the pricing page, the ad account and the support inbox — usually all three before lunch, and happily.

Anne Albert van der Galiën, arms folded, standing against a concrete wall.

Anne Albert van der Galiën

Engineering

Leads engineering. Cares about the architecture, the database and the pager — which is why the architecture stays the kind you can still reason about at 2am.

Partners, ideas, questions

Mail us. A founder replies.

hello@slipwaylabs.io