I don't know Winston (VoiceDream developer) personally, but there a bunch of things that impress me about both his product and himself.
On the product side - it's long been a well established app in the space. I think it's been out for 10+ years, offers a lot of voice options, handles a lot of input document formats, has good support for offline playback, and has been well featured in a bunch of publications.
I was also very impressed when I read this :
https://www.voicedream.com/macos-reader-subscription/
I really admire Winston for bootstrapping VoiceDream for so long - his initial users bought the iOS app for $2 and he has held true to continuing to provide them with the feature set that grew considerably since the app's origins.
His blog post also details how he was on vacation when VoiceDream had a P0/downtime issue and he caught the first flight back to address this, motivated by many users who really depended on the app (such as students studying for exams).
There is a ton to admire here.