Yo, what's up YouTube it's Mike Williams?
You might also know me as yoga roomie alright, so I'm super excited to talk to you about something today
And that's a side project
I built and it's probably got two years ago now, but it's called studio time you might have heard of it
We've been picked up by press since then literally from the first week of launch we generated million hits the site in ten dollars in
Revenue, and week's video Tom. It's probably the best thing to happen to a musician in a very long time. I went on the website
Took me two minutes, and I was put into this studio here
so I'm gonna talk to you on this video about first off how I came up with the idea and
validated in so quickly, second off that initial MVP
on what I use to build it and then where I launched and how the launch went all right, so let's get started
so I'm gonna talk to you first about how I came up with the concept and
Built it so quickly I came up the concept after I saw a lot of friends in the music industry
That literally were texting other friends, and maybe this is managers other producers engineers other artists
And they were saying all right like what Studios around
You know what's the rave path artists equipment all these kind of like different factors that were involved with running a music studio
And how could they book them I knew that there needed to be a better way to do it
So I wanted to build it now first thing I did once
I knew there is an existing need for something like this while I was like someone had built this idea, right
this is during the time of like Airbnb 4x4 everything for literally like dog walkers and
Literally everything you can think of right what I did was I made a product
I'm so I'll link down here below to product hunt
But this is a place where a lot of people launch products before they actually become companies
So well like side projects exactly what I was gonna build to my amazement
No one had built this idea at least from what I what I tried to see so I knew all right
I'm gonna cancel a dinner. It was literally
This is one evening and I was like I have to build this because someone else is what did I do?
The steps as far as to build it first thing
I did was I needed to come up with a name and do some kind of
Link branding and come up with a logo and so forth because I to identify
Who we are and kind of what we're doing that resonates with this alright first thing
I did or I guess thing that came to my mind was studio time
So I literally just went to go Daddy and started like plugging into mains studiotime.com all right taken ok
So what's the next thing studiotime.io a little bit more $59.99 a year
But I was like done click the Buy. I had mines made from there next thing
I did was I use Squarespace logo generator, so this is great
It's literally like a WYSIWYG tool where you can create a logo easily in minutes
and it's about $5.99 or
$9.99 for a commercial license which we were going to be accompanying potentially so I click purchase on that and I have my logo
So I didn't have to sketch
Photoshop any other kind of more robust design tools
I simply did this with in browser on Squarespace logo generator, so obviously I'll link down that below too- alright
So I had the name logo, then next what I had to do was try to find some pre-existing
technology
platform or tools for
Getting the technical component of a marketplace and try to leverage that as much as possible
So I didn't want to build anything from scratch on this it totally didn't make sense because I had like an evening to literally take
This idea that I had that was in my head and get it out there fast so I found sharetribe
Which I'll go into more if you guys want just comment below
And I can go in a totally just talk about sharetribe and how I pack the platform up
To use it for my needs and studio time in other marketplaces for me
And then other companies now that I've scaled, but it's a great tool to
Use in literally within 30 minutes to an hour you can build the basics of a marketplace so think like an Etsy for X and
Airbnb for X kind of
Marketplaces so I got the first first one first MVP of this thing built in about 30 minutes to an hour on
sharetribe now a lot of people will know it was functional from user side so to list the studio if you're a music studio or
discover based off location or other criteria music studios around you basic profiles
But when you click request studio the payments actually didn't work
Why because I didn't have time to get it hooked up?
but I wanted to just go ahead and put it out live in domain and try to build some inventory and demand and see if
People even wanted to use this site first before I spent a lot of time actually building out more robust functionality
That was not part of the initial user
Experience so now that I had that
Then what I wanted to do is take this initial prototype and validate it quickly this was I think on a Thursday
It was kind of a race against a clock because I wanted to get this out there quickly and just get some kind of
Signaling and validation like is this a great idea or not
All right people going to tell me what I did was I needed to build
Inventory so actually searched on Craigslist based in LA and then New York City
I wanted to see what our studios will first off our music studios creating listings on Craigslist
To rent their spaces they work, which is amazing. I've looked at their descriptions and their pictures and I said, okay
How do I compare this aside to the studio time profiles?
for our studios
So I added a few fields in there that I didn't initially count for why because I wasn't an industry professional
So I had to get some more validation from how this is actually working pre-existingly before studio time
So this is on the weekend so I made a few changes
And then I actually found the phone numbers when you click reply on Craigslist to some of these studios
And I literally text them I said hey
I'm building this new concept and air being me for music studio is kind of site
Would you list your studio on here, and then I made it free for them, and they're like yes
I probably sent out about 45 or 50 of these initial texts
But I got my first three to five studios that weekend now. What did I do from there?
How do I get take it to the next step I actually went on Twitter
And I found people that were looking or talking about music studios, so what I wanted to do was identify
Where is the conversation taking place about music studios now? I tweeted out them. I tweeted the link to the site
I got the site Twitter account set up
Then I went in that account liked it from that so I wanted to try to gain a little bit of engagement on that
And get their attention and say hey, what is studio time so I got a couple of users from there
So now I had inventory and I had users there was a an actual liquidity of them wanting to book these music studios yet
But I hadn't even launched and this was in like
48 hours of me building a prototype
alright next I knew I was gonna launch our own product on because for me that was a great place to launch it and
First off get some kind of feedback from other people who have built other market places so on product time
This is where a lot of investors a lot of other founders a lot of other developers
product managers that do build side projects and have built successful companies
this is where they launch products and like to look at products early and be the first to know so I watched Monday morning and
Honestly, it was pretty wild thankfully for me a lot of people in the tech industry are also super passionate about music so I was
In business I got a lot of great feedback. I didn't get a ton of upvotes. It was around 200
I think upvotes
Which you know you get some products on product on that literally have thousands of up votes and generates a ton of traffic
Because they might be like SAS tools or other kind of very tech
focused products mine was a marketplace for music studios amazing thing from this was we did get a
Lot of people that were interested in simply signed up and you know I got a lot of feedback from other founders in the tech
industry like hey great concepts
and you know I just used the kind of astounding boards to kind of bounce off ideas about the product my vision and whatnot but
Just keep in mind. It was a side project
There was literally no real kind of big scale validation now where that came in
Was we actually got picked up by Fact because a lot of PR at the time was from music was checking product time
I'm assuming because Fact wrote an article and they and they posted it and literally it. We just blew up
I mean honestly we had thousands of people that hit the site from there
they actually gave us the tagline to the actual article, but they are the ones that calls us the air BB for music studios
So literally crazy story the rest is history from there because once fact picked us up
Then everyone wanted this story about who we are and what we're doing the funny thing is it was just
Me so I literally just built this in an evening
Canceled dinner and now I had this marketplace side project that I thought could be a big company funny enough
I actually told that story to Hypebeast I'll link down here below and probably show a screenshot here in
Get to that article, and I literally said hey cancel dinner built this website the rest is history from there
I actually used kind of a processor not kind of I did use a process around how do I build momentum?
From this initial PR in this kind of initial growth that we got from product time. We had our first few thousand users
I needed to drive actual liquidity validate and get bookings so what I did from there
I use this process of actual manually driving a lot of demand for the studios
So I had some initial inventory
I think like 30 to 50 studios that kind of trickled in but I need to go to artists and managers
I need to identify the people that were actually
intending to book a studio, and I would go reach out to them and I would kind of act as a concierge
and from that I actually booked the first few bookings
What kind of bookings did we drive and what kind of studios were those for now the crazy thing is I
Didn't know what kind of studios. We're gonna sign up for this site, so we had a lot of top-line studios
You know a few thousand dollars a day, but believe it or not we had home studios that sign up to the site
I almost deleted them because I wasn't sure that first often people actually really want to book from studios
or
Will it be good to have that kind of inventory on the site so early when it's critical to build a brand image?
Also at the same time based off our inventory. Thankfully we actually booked the first studio
I think was like $20 an hour, and it was a studio apartment that had a home studio in Brooklyn from there
I was like wow this is amazing
I talked to them and they said hey listen we can't use another site, or there's not another site that provides this for us
so at that point
I knew I was in business because I built a product that serves a need for a segment of the market which was actually
Kind of the lower level economy as the market that I could be either go to and help them grow their businesses all right
So that's the initial story of studio time and we got a first thousand users from this literally
Within a matter of hours after the product on launch still within a week of me coming up with the idea
We generated over $10,000 in revenue from bookings and some subscriptions we put
Place literally within months and we actually launched this into its own company for
Studio time I gave you a little story about this
But I actually want to know what do you want me to talk about next in these other videos is it?
About how we manage the inventory side to build Studios
Generate more demands in a market place is it how we navigated the music tech landscape. What is it?
You let me know and I will make my next video on that within a week or at most two weeks
I can't promise that super busy
I want to make more time for YouTube so hit the subscribe button below, and I'll let you know more about what I'm doing Thanks