Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Williams.
Mike, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Sure! I’ve been the founder of a few startups before (two that were both acquired), so I guess you could say I am a serial-entrepreneur. About three years ago though, I noticed how hard it was for friends who were in the music industry to find and book music studios. I thought that surely someone had already built the “Airbnb for music studios”, but at that time no one had. Funny enough, I actually canceled dinner plans I had, built an initial prototype instead that evening, and then launched what is now Studiotime a few days later.
Since I’d built, launched, and scaled a few other startups before, taking ideas to products and launching them was thankfully not that new to me. What was though was how much interest Studiotime immediately got, how quickly we grew, and how much of a need there ended up being for it. We basically went from an idea I had in my head to thousands of users, studios, and a presence in 35+ countries within months.
Having said that, it wasn’t all just growth and easy. We ended up creating a market for home studios, broke into an industry that is very hard to build a revenue-generating business in, and also had to learn how to navigate within the music industry to get to where we are today. We’re proud to be still bootstrap though (we’ve raised $0 from outside investors) and are the largest online marketplace for music studios in the world. We even just made a huge announcement and partnered with Airbnb on Experiences to make our studios even more accessible through intimate shows, events, and more that we’ll announce.
Has it been a smooth road?
It’s certainly been challenging, but since we were able to build a revenue-generating business from day one, this has allowed us to reinvest back into the business, be able to put our studios and community first, and operate the business as we see fit. That has proven to be a big upside for us and helped us continue to be who we are today, but it has also been a constraint in some ways. We are a small team, we have to stay focused on being the absolute best platform for booking music studios, and have had to turn down a ton of potential opportunities since we’re a small team that supports the largest community of music studios in the world.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Studiotime story. Tell us more about the business.
So we’re sort of unique as a business and company in that we sit in the middle of music and tech. Not only that but in the music industry, we are used by everyone from home studios, indie artists, to some of the world’s best studios and top artists. We’re also genre agnostic, so we have everything from hip hop focused studios to studios that have live rooms that are built-out for large orchestras. We don’t really position ourselves as sided to one artist type, studio type, specific industry segments, etc. We just try to be the go-to and best for booking music studios, whether you are a first-time artist or top-line artist and your label or manager is booking it for you through Studiotime.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Since we are a marketplace, the markets we are in and serve are maturing, our marketplace is evolving, and our business is always growing thanks to the network effects we’ve created. We do see a big increase in the demand for studios and not only just making them more accessible by providing a platform to book them, but also with bringing together creatives in studios through new initiatives we’ve launched like our Studiotime and Airbnb partner Experiences. We’ve received an incredible amount of positive feedback after we announced this, so this should be a big opportunity that we are focused on pursuing and turning into a large part of our business. It’s something we’re super excited about and will be sharing more on soon!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.studiotime.io
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/studiotimeio/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/studiotimeio/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/studiotimeio
Image Credit:
Mark Mendoza
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