Turning A Niche Marketplace Into an Industry Play

The story behind Studiotime and it’s immediate growth was picture perfect. The milestones that were hit in the first two weeks after launch are what every entrepreneur dreams of. Studiotime was picked up by over 30 press outlets internationally, over 700 organic studio listings were created, and over $3k in booking revenue was generated. In addition, we quickly spread to over 25 countries and became genre agnostic by saturating the EDM, Hip-Hop, and Country scenes.

Music evokes emotions and passion. As a founder that is very product focused, I have learned not to become attached to my own builds, but let users validate my assumptions through usage and feedback. Since we had hundreds of thousands of hits to our site, the user feedback (and sample size) we received was invaluable and has led to a rapid iteration on Studiotime. People really love Studiotime, and support our mission to help artists further their career by giving them access to top studios and other industry professionals. What we quickly found out though, was that while the music industry is a massive market, the market for studios and actual studio spend was much less. We had launched a business that focused on successfully solving a core problem of the friction involved with the artists’ need to discover, book, and pay for location specific studio time. By the end of the second week I also learned that we had launched a business with a limited market cap, or niche business. It was then that my focus became one of exploring how to capture and scale additional revenue streams.

With a proven but limited model for studio bookings, Studiotime became a test platform to explore additional revenue verticals that would not deviate from our core value proposition, and would also be a paying point for our users. To find a pre-validated answer to this, we started visiting studios and speaking with everyone whose business revolved around the physical studios we were booking, to find out what their additional services and needs were. In a few days we had our answer, which validates the launch of our Studiotime.io Community. The Studiotime community is a place where highly-vetted industry professionals have a verified profile offering their services — everything from producers, engineers, artists, vocalists, and even the video creatives often filming in the studios. The market opportunity has now increased with this new platform. We are offering more value to artists to not only book studios — but to participate in this new community where top industry professionals collaborate.

We are looking forward to scaling our Studiotime community and as always, we would love to hear feedback! You can reach me directly at Mike@studiotime.io.