Sharing Economy Scaled to Thousands of Users in Hours
Studiotime.io was born from an idea that I had heard floating around in the music space for some time. The idea was very simple, to create a marketplace where artists can find and book time at music studios near them.
As a huge music fan myself, one evening I was searching Product Hunt expecting to search the “Airbnb for x” collection and find this idea already existing. Much to my surprise though, I could not find anything similar and that is when it hit me that I had to execute on this idea.
Being the Founder of Codeity (a rapidly growing company itself), the opportunity cost and time constraints here were to0 big so this had to be a passion project. That’s when I set the rules for the creation of Studiotime.io:
- Come up with a catchy name and logo in minutes. Do not do explore design/branding initiatives for the MVP.
- Use pre-existing technology/code as much as possible and do not reinvent the sharing economy marketplace on the tech side (went with Sharetribe).
- From idea to a functional prototype should not exceed one evening and that would be the cutoff. Cancel dinner plans and instead build Studiotime.io. By the end of the evening I should have a MVP of Studiotime.io or I would put this idea on the back burner and pass on to someone else.
- Following the evening build of Studiotime.io, the next day would be spent trying to convince a few friends to signup and hope that nothing breaks and it is compelling.
After I wrote down these rules on a white-board (for accountability), I got started working on Studiotime.io and much to my surprise completed the site in a few hours and even had the social hooks built-in that I would use in an attempt to then convince artists and studios to sign-up. I tested everything and marked this project off as done at around 1 am, not to iterate on it any further.
The next few days I mentioned the site to a few friends in the music industry and they were shocked to find out that no one else was doing this and that there was an actual need for it. That was easy for me, as I then immediately had my first two or three artists on the site and it was now time to try and onboard users when time allowed the following weekend.
Being a passion project and constrained on time, I did not touch Studiotime.io until the weekend where I created Craigslist ads in an attempt to get studios to signup.
The Craigslist campaign was also in parallel with a Twitter blast where I tweeted at industry influencers and media outlets letting them know about this cool new site I was trying to build awareness for called Studiotime. The results were nothing to blink at and I saw a few users Sunday in the afternoon.
That all changed when I decided to take the site off test and make it live that Sunday afternoon at the URL I purchased minutes before, www.studiotime.io. I wanted to see if this idea had legs to it so I submitted it to Product Hunt a few hours later. I told one of my friends about this immediately after and he commented that it was way too early and it would get eaten alive on Product Hunt.
Monday morning (yesterday) I was on Product Hunt and much too my surprise the upvotes started adding up. I started receiving email notifications for new users in the hundreds by lunchtime and I even had people in Europe asking to add their studios to the site. Since we had targeted select cities for launch, I created a wait-list for studios in cities that we were not planning on serving. The results certainly surprised me!
By about 6pm on the day of our Product Hunt launch we had reached over 1k users! We had studios signing up, a growing community of artists, and even a wait list for studios in markets that we did not serve. We even had people emailing me asking to volunteer to be ambassadors for Studiotime and also asking for jobs!
At this time I was thinking that the week was off to a great start for my passion project and it might generate further interest down the road. Much to my surprise (again!) FACT Magazine picked us up and wrote a piece about us that drove even more traffic to the site.
The results of the article generated interest outside of the Product Hunt community and put us on the radar for the music industry. As I am sharing my experience of how we scaled up Studiotime.io this morning following the whirl-wind yesterday, I have a handful of meetings with industry professionals this coming weekend to find out the future of Studiotime.io. Regardless of where it goes, this article serves as a case study for all to take action on their ideas and go for it!
For more information or to contact me, my Twitter is @Yoroomie.
