The why (personal)
Hi.
If you're here — then you're interested in learning more about the person behind Bowdler.
I'll take the following path — first I'll tell you about myself, then I'll tell you about Bowdler and why I built it. I hope that every reader will find a piece of themselves in this text and feel that they're not alone in their work. That in fate and in vast thoughts — they're not alone either.
At the time of writing I am 22 years old. This text might seem surprising or naive, might seem like an excuse. But since you're here — I have nothing to hide. And I don't need to justify myself to anyone. Enjoy the read.
Let's go back to my childhood — I was always a very curious person. I lived everything that surrounded me. I tried to understand everything around me. When I say "lived everything that surrounded me" — I mean I really dug deeper and asked hard questions about everything that happened to me. All parents idealize their children, but mine looked at me differently — as someone who doesn't just dream, but does everything to achieve goals and ideals, where only interest and the possibility of changing something mattered.
One of the most important objects of my attention became my father's personal computer. It was the first thing I drowned in after solving social problems. (By pure coincidence, my father is a huge man, an engineer with a kind soul who also didn't dwell on problems — he solved them. And he still does, successfully, to this day. I know he'll read this — you never stopped my hunger and my foolishness, you were always there when needed, you led by example. Your contribution is hard to overstate. He is foundational.) And from early childhood I started digging deeper into everything connected to that computer. Looking back, it was fairly modern for its time, and I didn't just take it apart as a kid — I thought about why and how. Besides hardware, I got into software too — I taught myself editing, tried programming, played a lot of games and modified them. I don't know computers as a tool — I know them as a friend. And I see people through and through.
After finishing school, I moved many kilometers from home to study in another country. I went back and forth between professions (after all, you have to decide what you'll devote your life to) — and in the end I enrolled not in Computer Science, but in Finance, Accounting & Management. An interesting turn, isn't it? The catch was this — I wanted to combine technology and management in companies in my life. But one was impossible without the other. In my first year of university I wasn't just studying macroeconomics and EU law — I was also writing Telegram bots. I didn't attend computer science lectures at all — they were trying to tell us why AI mattered, while I had already spent a year understanding how ChatGPT worked, and had been following AI training even before that. I could have taught informatics in that very lecture hall myself — it just wasn't the right audience. And who was I, anyway?
Several years passed at that pace — I worked with technology and Python, in parallel learning things that were already obvious to me. I'd been drawn to economics and the organization of people since childhood — it came naturally to me. And it turned out that by attending university, I almost never learned anything new for myself, or I learned things that would probably have come to me anyway when needed. That's a very bold claim for an ordinary, unassuming person to make. But that's my nature. I won't trust the system — I'll build it myself, inside myself. I'll gain knowledge by arriving at it myself, not by dryly cramming a book before an exam. Having become completely disillusioned with the education system, I understood — it wasn't for me.
When I dropped out, I wasn't afraid. Incredible challenges life had thrown at me and surviving in another country had taken their toll on me and on the person I loved and still miss to this day (...). I was in a severe depression (I've been fine for a long time now!) — but I knew I'd return home to the people close to me. Because, introvert as I am, being with them is what makes me keep moving forward. That was the second time in my life I believed in myself and sent myself out into open waters. By that point, my total experience in programming was 5 years. From time to time, not consistently, I solved my own small problems with code. And I dealt with computers the way someone who'd worked in tech support would — all the friends I helped can attest to that. I also tried a bunch of cool things, like Swift Playgrounds, which pushed me to make a simple iOS app (AI couldn't write a single line of code back then — I figured it all out myself. And, by the way, I belong to that generation that used to look for answers to coding errors on Chinese forums). But what was I supposed to do with that experience? It was so scattered that I couldn't find a job with it (not that I wanted one — but hunger took its toll), and I was simply stuck before the next stage of my life.
While editing test videos (something I'd also been into on and off since childhood — hello, Sony Vegas Pro 13 — and I'd even done test assignments to work as an editor), I noticed that Final Cut didn't have the tools I expected. Why was there no way to make great subtitles in my language? Why couldn't you remove silence from a video? Later, while editing Twitch streams, I asked myself another question — what services even help remove profanity from video? It's so simple to implement technically.
I remember that exact moment — a downloaded small Whisper model that ran beautifully on my Air M4, a script named whisper_profanity_test.py. That script became the starting point of my life. Three months later, the world saw Bowdler. But it was a different Bowdler then — one that could only make subtitles, remove silence, and mute profanity.
As I talked with people in the professional editing world, I realized that wasn't what they needed. They needed other features. My vision broadened in that moment — Transcript Edit was born. I started seeing the market more clearly — even though that was never my priority. I began applying my love of technology and bringing it into editing wherever it made sense. Slowly, for now — but users were glad.
So basically, first I solved my own problem, and then I saw other people's problems, and that only deepened my interest in development, because I love helping people and I love complex systems. That's where my two selves met — INFJ in how I relate to people, and INTJ in how I work. The second one, by the way, is too much of an idealist, which is exactly why I spend so much time on development — I'm afraid to release something that isn't perfect. In the three weeks before writing this text, I spent around 200 hours on development, all to rewrite the architecture and make it more convenient and better.
Now, after 7 months of practically daily development (I'm not exaggerating) — as I write this, a lot is planned (and some of it is already done, just not properly tested yet). And I'd like to see Bowdler as a tool that helps hundreds of people around the world speed up their editing process and focus on the creative work.
Right now, I want to sharpen the app like a stone, and after that, keep it close and keep sharpening it for as long as I possibly can. Because this — this is my project. I see where the market stands — and it's lagging behind technological trends. Also, a lot of similar services have stopped chasing new technology altogether — they settle for "the product works" — and the ones that do chase it cost an insane amount of money.
Along my path with Bowdler, I've talked with an incredibly large number of kind people who forgave my development delays and my inconsistency, and who saw how much this mattered to me and how much I love working on something I care about. Thank you. You have no idea what state I was in when I read your kind emails. I wanted to cry and smile at the same time, but I had to keep working. Kind people really do exist! And I got lucky — I attracted users who don't just want to see a product, they want to see the person behind it. But it's important to stay grounded, not to float away — which is exactly why I deeply value it when the app gets criticized constructively, even harshly. Any feedback is valuable to me.
I want to believe that human creativity will remain irreplaceable. You can use powerful tools, but the final decision should always be made by a human. That's the principle Bowdler runs on: it doesn't make the final call in creative work like editing, it removes the routine, tedious parts. Whether it's a videographer or an editor — only they make the final creative decisions. And they're worth far more than people tend to think.
So that's me. A technology-hungry empath. I walked a very hard road to get here, and not everyone who just wants to speed up their editing needs to know about it. But to those who want to know what kind of altruist builds a project like this for half a year with no marketing, basically no profit, and no team — I say hello to you. If you're reading this, you are an incredibly valuable person, not just to me, but to the people close to you. Your kindness will come back to you twofold. Thank you.
I don't know what happens next, how my life will unfold, or whether the effort will pay off. But I know one thing for certain — I tried to help people. And it just so happened, fortunately, that my skills and knowledge were enough to achieve that goal. I'm not sure I'll write something like this publicly again, but let this text be the beginning of a bigger story — for Bowdler, and for me. I regret nothing. One last thing I can say for certain: once I feel that Bowdler is fully grown and polished (and there's still a lot of work ahead), I'll keep closing out the natural need of my complicated personality — to make this world better, with my skills and my wide-open view of it. See ya.
May your dreams come true too,
Vladislav Korobkin