r/Startups_EU

About a year ago I started recording videos. Bought a physical teleprompter, used it three times, put it back in the box. 

Tried a bunch of apps. They all do the same thing: scroll text on a screen. 

That's it.

And I kept thinking, there has to be more to this. 

The problem isn't seeing the words. The problem is delivering them without sounding like you're reading a wall of text.

So I started thinking about how I'd actually want to learn a script. And I remembered RSVP, rapid serial visual presentation, where you see one word at a time centered on the focal point your eye naturally lands on. 

That's not even a teleprompter thing, that's a way to actually learn your script before you stand in front of a camera. I thought, why doesn't any teleprompter have that?

Then I kept going. 

What if the script itself could carry the delivery? 

What if pauses, speed changes, emphasis, even the emotional tone of a section were just part of the file? So you mark a pause before an important line, tag a section as "urgent" or "calm," and the teleprompter renders it differently when you read. You don't think about pacing while recording. It's already there.

That's how I came up with TPS, TelePrompterScript. It's markdown, you can write it in any text editor, but it understands pacing, emotions, pauses, pronunciation, all of it. 

The spec is open: https://tps.managed-code.com

Then I got busy with other stuff and forgot about all of this for months.

A few weeks ago I came back to it. I'm a developer, so I sat down and built the whole thing in about a week. C#, Blazor WebAssembly, .NET 10. 

Runs entirely in the browser, no installs, no accounts, no backend. Write a script with TPS, rehearse it in RSVP mode, read it on the teleprompter with your camera feed behind the text, and record directly from the browser. 

One tool, one script that carries through every stage.

https://github.com/managedcode/PrompterOne

this is open source. 

I use it myself every time I record. Still early, native app for phones and tablets is next. 

i made a place where people post startup ideas and others vote on a scale from 💀 to 🦄

think TikTok for startup ideas. no essays, no pitch decks

to be honest, i can’t get users to actually post yet, everyone just lurks
so if you do drop an idea, you’re basically helping me prove this app is not really 💀

am i getting roasted or is this decent?

https://www.shiporskip.club

Most early stage teams in Europe focus on product, fundraising, and basic acquisition, but treat search indexing as something that “just happens.” In reality, indexing is a gatekeeper. If your pages are not indexed, they cannot rank. If they cannot rank, search will not be a reliable acquisition channel.

There are three steps before any page can bring search traffic: discovery, crawling, and indexing. Discovery is how search engines find a URL. This can come from sitemaps, internal links, external links, or manual submissions. Crawling is when bots actually fetch and render the page. Indexing is a separate decision where the engine decides if the page is worth storing and showing in results.

For a young startup site, the main constraints are crawl frequency and perceived importance. New domains have lower crawl budgets, so bots visit less often and process fewer URLs per visit. If your structure is messy, important pages are buried, or sitemaps are incomplete, search engines simply do not see everything. If content is thin or very similar across many URLs, they may crawl but choose not to index.

The benefit of getting this under control early is simple. You avoid a situation where, six months in, half of your pricing, feature, and comparison pages are invisible in search. You also get faster feedback. When new pages are indexed quickly, you can see which topics resonate, which keywords bring impressions, and where to iterate, instead of waiting weeks for basic data.

From a practical standpoint, an indexing strategy for an early stage startup in the EU should include:

• Clean, up to date XML sitemaps that only list URLs you actually want indexed.
• A simple, shallow site structure where core pages are reachable in a few clicks.
• Internal links from your most important pages (home, pricing, top articles) to new strategic pages.
• Regular checks of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to see coverage: what is indexed, what is stuck, and why.

On top of this, it is worth considering active submission instead of passive waiting. Google’s Indexing API and protocols like IndexNow for Bing allow you to notify search engines when important URLs are created or updated. That shortens the delay between “we shipped a new page” and “users can actually find it.”

Tools like IndexerHub exist to automate this submission layer. You handle which URLs matter and how the site is structured. It takes care of scanning sitemaps, pushing new URLs to Google and Bing, and tracking which pages have actually been indexed. For small teams with limited time and no in-house SEO engineer, having that infrastructure in place early can make search a more predictable channel instead of a black box.