Profile - rune (Naoya Sasaki / disolo Co., Ltd.)

It Started with Chuunibyou

Back in 8th grade, I got hooked on Japanese light novels — and that's what got me writing.

In college, I'd skip lectures, write novels, submit them to literary awards, and get rejected every time. Day after day.

So I thought, "Fine, I'll sell them myself!" — built a website, started selling my own work, and... it didn't sell at all (ToT)

College was just one failure after another. I felt like I'd hit rock bottom. Eventually I dropped out and became a freelancer.

The pay was bad, so I worked dawn to night and wrote in the middle of the night. Inevitably the strain caught up — within a few years my health gave out, I moved back in with my parents, and became a full-fledged shut-in (^^;

From Shut-In to Publication

Living off my parents (gnawing right at their legs!) at least covered food and rent, but at 26, being unemployed was getting awkward, so I started looking for work.

I ended up doing web work — mainly building websites. Turns out the side gigs from college paid off (lol)

Web work went better than expected, and I was able to incorporate. Trouble was, I was so busy I couldn't write novels at all back then.

So my "I want to write novels" / "I want to get published" itch kept smoldering — and right then, through web work, I got to know a publishing producer. When I asked him about publishing, he said, "Novels are a tough sell, but with your background, maybe a novel-style practical guide could work?" We put together a plan, and I finally made it to publication.

That became The 3-Minute Method to Make Studying Stop Feeling Like a Slog (Sōwasha; Japanese only) — basically a guide to escaping shut-in life (lol)

Later I was able to publish Effortless Work Hacks: Stop Thinking, Get It Done (Shūwa System; Japanese only) too — that one wraps up the work hacks I built up during my web business years.

Now Active on the Web

Having published books, the "I want to write more novels" feeling was still there — and that's when Kindle launched in Japan. The eBook era had begun.

So I thought, "I'll sell them myself, again!" — exactly the same idea I had in college (lol)

I quit web work, took out a loan, dove into Kindle... and crashed and burned. Half a year in, my cash was gone.

After that, I had to work like a packhorse to pay back the debt (ToT)

A few years later, when I finally cleared the debt and felt like I'd just been let out of prison — I went right back to pouring my energy into writing eBooks and online novels, same as ever (lol)

I Also Build Apps

So I was spending my days writing and building websites — and as I watched AI's capabilities ramp up, I started thinking, "this is a different field, but maybe I could build apps too?"

As a precursor: I tried building a business system for my web work — and since I was able to put it together solo with AI, I figured "if that worked, I should be able to build a consumer app too."

And honestly, the writing apps I'd been using had been bothering me for a while.

For example, when writing a novel, I'd open multiple text editor windows alongside my reference materials — and the very setup of that was a hassle every single time.

Writing is already the kind of thing you tend to put off, so if you stumble at the very start, you really don't get anywhere.

I went looking for an app that could open everything at once, but no such niche tool existed. So I decided to build it myself.

I also publish my novels on Kindle, so I figured if I folded in the EPUB generation system I'd built for my own use, the whole thing would be even more useful — and bundled that in too.

That became rune Studio.

Originally, Hub and Studio were being developed as a single integrated app — but Hub turned out to be more generally useful, and Hub's features couldn't be sandboxed (so they couldn't ship on the Mac App Store). So I split them into two separate apps.

As for Lux, that one was honestly just on the side. When recording your screen, filter-type brightness dimmers get baked into the recording. To avoid that, I built an app specialized in brightness control via gamma adjustment.

For reference: I'd been operating as a one-person company for my web business, so the apps are released under the corporate name (disolo Co., Ltd.), but in practice it's solo development. Thanks to the leap in AI, what one person can do has expanded enormously and development time has shortened dramatically — letting me work on apps in between writing sessions. Bless AI (lol).

Because I implement features I want exactly when I think of them mid-draft, I'd like to think these tools really scratch the itches that come up during long-form and novel writing.

That's the kind of person who built these apps — I'd be happy if you take a liking to them!

P.S.

I post version updates, status reports, and new book announcements on X and on my site.

If you'd like to keep up with what I'm doing, I'd be happy if you'd follow.