About Data Concept Studio

Data Concept Studio is an independent consumer AI company based in Kraków, Poland. We own and operate Briefcaster, an iPhone app that turns the news topics, RSS feeds and YouTube channels a listener follows into a short personal audio briefing.

Legally, it is the sole proprietorship of its founder, Michał Szarek, trading under the name Data Concept Studio. We are a product company: we develop and run our own app, and do not take on client projects or sell development services. Briefcaster is free today. Our planned business model is a subscription paid by listeners.

Company facts

Everything on this list can be checked against a public source; the section below says where.

Trading name
Data Concept Studio
Registered to
Michał Szarek
Legal form
Sole proprietorship (jednoosobowa działalność gospodarcza) registered in Poland
Owner
Michał Szarek, founder
NIP (Polish tax ID)
9691673171
REGON (statistical number)
542296618
VAT-registered since
15 September 2025
Based in
Kraków, Poland
Product and status
Briefcaster, live on the App Store since July 2026; free to use
Company type
Independent consumer AI product company
Briefcaster revenue today
None; a paid consumer subscription is planned
Team
1, the founder
Funding
Bootstrapped, no outside investment
Infrastructure
Google Cloud
Website
dataconceptstudio.com, online since June 2026
Contact
contact@dataconceptstudio.com

How to check who we are

In the Polish tax and business registers

The Ministry of Finance's public VAT register returns, for NIP 9691673171, an active VAT taxpayer named Michał Szarek with REGON 542296618, VAT-registered since 15 September 2025. The same NIP finds the business in CEIDG, the register of Polish sole traders.

VAT register search (podatki.gov.pl) CEIDG search (biznes.gov.pl)

On the App Store

Apple lists the seller of an app under the legal name held on its developer account. For a Polish sole proprietorship that is the owner's own name, so Briefcaster's seller appears as MICHAŁ JERZY SZAREK M: Michał Szarek, the founder of Data Concept Studio, and the same business as above.

The developer page on the App Store

Through the founder

The business is its founder, Michał Szarek, whose professional profile is linked below. Every contact address on this site is on the company's own domain; the company inbox is contact@dataconceptstudio.com.

Michał Szarek on LinkedIn

A note on dates: VAT registration began on 15 September 2025. This is a tax-registration date, not the business start date recorded in CEIDG. This website went online in June 2026, ahead of Briefcaster's App Store launch.

Michał Szarek, founder of Data Concept Studio

Michał Szarek

Founder and owner. Responsible for Briefcaster's product and operations.

Michał owns and runs Data Concept Studio. He is responsible for Briefcaster's product direction, the app listeners use and the service that produces their audio briefings. The company is bootstrapped: he funds its development and makes the decisions about what it offers, how it operates and how it will be priced.

Before starting his own product, he worked on large-scale data platforms, cloud infrastructure and machine-learning operations, including data engineering in banking. That experience is the foundation for running Briefcaster: collecting material from many sources, turning it into a useful script and delivering reliable audio to a phone. He applies it to a product the company owns and operates throughout its life.

The product serves people who want to follow their chosen sources without spending the day reading feeds. Michał handles the full listening experience, from choosing sources and generating a briefing to playback and account management. Product decisions stay with the company, and listener questions reach him directly through its support inbox.

  • Briefcaster product direction
  • News sources and briefing generation
  • AI narration and listening experience
  • App releases and product operations
Email Michał LinkedIn

Why the company exists

Newsrooms and large media companies have editors who read everything and tell their audience what matters. Individual readers have the opposite: more sources than time, and apps that decide for them what to show next.

Language models and natural speech synthesis make a different arrangement possible: a briefing written for one person, from the sources that person chose, in that person's language. Briefcaster is our attempt to build it well, honestly labelled as AI-generated, and priced so that the people who listen are the ones paying for it.

Milestones

  1. September 2025
    VAT registration

    The Ministry of Finance's public register records Michał Szarek's VAT registration from 15 September 2025.

  2. June 2026
    Website and company domain go live

    dataconceptstudio.com is set up ahead of the app launch.

  3. July 2026
    Briefcaster launches on the App Store

    The app passes Apple review and becomes available to download.

  4. August–September 2026
    Faster briefings, shared previews, new daily briefings

    Audio starts playing while a briefing is still being made; shared episodes play in the browser; ready-made daily briefings arrive in Polish and English.

  5. In progress
    Android version

    Account management and deep links required by Google Play are in place; the store listing is being prepared.

All product updates

How Briefcaster is built

A one-person company can run a consumer app reliably only by leaning on managed services and automating the work a team would otherwise do. Briefcaster runs entirely on Google Cloud.

AI

Gemini on Vertex AI writes every briefing script from the material collected for that listener. Google Cloud Text-to-Speech narrates it, with a second speech provider for some voices.

Service and data

Serverless containers run the API and the briefing pipeline, a managed PostgreSQL database holds accounts and feeds, and object storage keeps the generated audio. Infrastructure is defined as code and changed through review.

Operations

Automated tests gate every change, and the service watches itself: health checks and alerts that reach a human when briefings stop being produced.

Briefings are generated by AI end to end, and the app says so. We treat that disclosure as part of the product; our terms describe how it meets Article 50 of the EU AI Act.

Our planned business model