One person.
One thing.
Built carefully.
I kept running the same hack on hard calls — a second monitor with a notes doc open, eyes darting down between the question and the answer, the conversation arriving five seconds late.
It works, sort of. But after eight calls in a row, it stops working at all — the notes never quite catch up with the question, and the moment passes before you finish reading.
So I started building the thing I wanted for my own calls and prep sessions: a personal reference tool that runs on my machine, recalls from my own notes, and pulls the right line when I need it. No tab-switching. No frantic scrolling. No "let me circle back on that."
The frame.
The product is named for the metaphor: the call is on stage, you are the performer, your audience is the call. Backstage is where your prep lives — your notes, your CV, the last quarter of call memory, all within reach. You bring your own script.
"The call is on stage. Backstage has the notes."
That's the line I keep coming back to when I make trade-offs. The product is yours alone — your local notes, your practice rounds, your prep work. It runs on your computer like any other reference tool, and nothing about the call itself changes when you have it open.
What I believe.
Local-first or it doesn't ship.
Audio never leaves your machine for transcription. Bring your own model key if you want zero of it leaving at all.
Tools should disappear.
If I'm doing my job, you forget Backstage is there. The moment you have to "use" it, I've failed.
Truth over confidence.
Answers cite the source line. If the model doesn't know, it says it doesn't know — and surfaces the gap, not a guess.
The roadmap is yours.
One release a week. Public roadmap. Every Friday I ship the thing the user vote put on top.
Who I am.
I'm Roy. Fifteen years in hi-tech — the last six leading teams through release reviews, regression triage, customer escalations, and the kind of on-call shifts where a single answer matters more than a whole document.
I love finding the weak points in any process — at work, in life — and figuring out the fix. The pattern, the workaround, the small change that makes the whole thing run smoother for the people on the other side of it.
That's how Backstage.AI started. One of those calls where I felt the gap between knowing the answer and saying it. I built the version of the prompter I wished had been in the room — and now I'm putting it in front of the people I know who live on calls. The product names the weak spots and helps you train through them: how to prepare, how to answer, how to act.
I'm building it from my home town, Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut. Solo, for now. The roadmap is small and the cadence is weekly. If something doesn't work, you'll hear from me directly. If you want a feature, the same.