Open Labs is a Texas-based company responsible for a relatively new DAW called Stagelight, which was recently demoed at a Dell/Intel event in New York that I attended. Prior to the demo, I had the chance to chat with Open Labs CEO, Cliff Mountain, about his company and its flagship product.
– Hi Cliff. Was there any trepidation when entering the DAW market seeing as it’s so saturated?
We don’t view Stagelight as just a DAW. There are a lot of DAWs out there with similar features, yet none of them seem concerned with taking their users through the stages of beginner, semi-pro and professional. A lot of them start with a professional product and strip away features to cater to users with less experience. They’re not really starting from the ground and working upwards. When I look at those DAWs, they look like the cockpit of a Boeing 747. If you’re a hobbyist musician, it’s overwhelming from the first screen. You only learn to use it by being dedicated, not because the program is helping you grow as an artist. We wanted to compete in that space. We’re not trying to replace Pro Tools – our goal is to compete with GarageBand. There’s a percentage of people that start using musical toy apps and later move into something more robust. We want to be there for those users.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu2-_hYFzNE
– In the 2000s, Open Labs became popular for its successful hardware synths like the NeKo and Miko, so people may find your product shift to be strange. Why this move from hardware to software?
Well, I bought Open Labs two years ago, and though our hardware products were very good, it was unfortunately a boutique business that wasn’t making money. You need to sell large volumes to scale a hardware business. Given the price point of our keyboards, the ability to generate volume was questionable to me, so we’ve had to make changes.
One of the deciding elements behind launching Stagelight was that its software went through five years of development on Windows touch-screens. It had 150,000 lines of code and had been tested in very robust environments like the Oscars, Emmys, and Super Bowl Halftime Show. So my thought process was, “Why don’t we take the core of something that’s very powerful and put a different user interface on it? “.
Initially, I didn’t like it when Wired magazine called Stagelight the “GarageBand for PCs“, as I think we’re quite different from GarageBand. But I came to like it since everybody understands what GarageBand is, and it has a very big market. If we can have some of the success that Apple had, using a very different business model, I think we’ll be happy with what our business becomes.
(Below: Cliff Mountain)
– In what way will Stagelight to be different from other DAWs in the market?
There’s two challenges that face today’s hobbyist musicians. Firstly, making music is hard. By this I mean that some people have to take two-semester courses at music school: one to learn Ableton Live and another to learn Pro Tools. Typically, these aren’t things everyone learns easily, which is a barrier of entry. One of the things that makes Open Labs different is that we’ve focused on making our interface easy to use. We spent a lot of money and did a lot of testing to ensure that people are comfortable learning how to make music on Stagelight.
Secondly, DAWs like Ableton Live and Pro Tools are expensive. Our baseline price is $9.99. We’ve found that many professionals use our product as a sketch pad to get an initial idea down because opening multiple windows in another program isn’t really helpful for putting ideas down. What if Stagelight could offer half of what other DAWs do, but for $9.99? That’s a big difference from paying $400.
Also, you’ll find functionality and sounds in Stagelight that you can’t get anywhere else. For example, we’re the only place where you can get Linkin Park sounds. We have another announcement coming up for a sound pack that will be dropping soon.
– How is it possible to sell a DAW for only $9.99? If other companies are charging hundreds of dollars for similar software, how are you able to sell yours for only $9.99?
There are different answers to that. Honestly, I think you should ask those companies why they charge so much (laughs). But jokes aside, we’ve got a different business model, which is to engage a much wider universe than Ableton or Avid aim at. They have a certain number of users that they multiply by a certain price, and that equals the revenue for that company. We have the same model, but our user-base is exponentially larger than theirs, which allows us to have a much lower price. I’m sure their strategy works well for them, but we want to do something different, which is proving to be more disruptive in the market than we thought it was.
– How do you think piracy will affect StageLight’s chances for success?
Piracy is a big problem and a growing one, but there’s many software companies like Ableton and Image Line who have been around for years and they’re doing well in spite of piracy. Hopefully, what Open Labs is trying to do will reduce that motivation. Everyone can afford $10 – it doesn’t matter who you are. $10 is the price of coffee at Starbucks.
Apple is known worldwide for the ease-of-use of its products, yet people abandon GarageBand at an unacceptable rate because Apple hasn’t paid attention to their user interface. We’ve done side-by-side tests with GarageBand and discovered that people have problems getting started with it. With StageLight, you can produce a sound with just two clicks when it could take twenty clicks with other DAWs, so we’re trying to provide positive reinforcement.
As hobbyist musicians go in search of more features for their DAW, we want to be there for those people as well. There could be a slight charge to add more features in Stagelight, but we think it’s a much better approach than demanding $400 out of the gate.
– What have been some of your biggest challenges in getting Stagelight off the ground? Or has it been smooth sailing throughout?
Anybody who tells you that their business is only smooth sailing is lying (laughs). I’ve been really fortunate. When I bought Open Labs, I also received a team that had been around for a while and had written every line of code in the application. They all knew what they were doing, whilst I was the business guy coming in with money and a different strategy, so it was a good match. We didn’t have to hire 50 new people with different personalities. There was already a working team in place who just needed a better strategy for success.
I was also fortunate that both Timbaland and Linkin Park were Open Lab customers. When we sat down with them and explained what we were doing, they were incredibly supportive. How many new start-ups are able to partner with a band like Linkin Park? We also had good relationships with a number of technology companies. But to be honest, the main reason we were able to leverage Stagelight to those companies was that Windows 8 had just come out and 65% of its features are touch-screen. So being at the right place at the right time is very important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWvKtP5Dcw
– Stagelight seems to have lot of users spread across different counties. How did you go about achieving such a widespread base?
We have users in 117 countries. StageLight has only been out since November of last year, but we have relationships with companies like Dell, Intel, Acer, Microsoft and Lenovo which has helped spread awareness about us. We have a larger user base than many would suspect and it’s going to get larger going forward.
– Have you received any user responses that indicated Open Labs was on the right path with Stagelight?
Yes, we have. The two things people say a lot are, “I can’t believe how easy it is ” and “I can’t believe how inexpensive it is “. That’s across different levels of skills, from hobbyist to professional and semi-professional.
If you’re looking for a statistic, one of the most amazing stats is that the average session length for our users is 56 minutes. So people aren’t just using Stagelight in a casual way. There’s a significant passion surrounding the product since it’s being used for such a long amount of time.
– How will you move forward with marketing Stagelight?
We’ve taken a very different approach than many other companies, and I think this contributes to the success that we’ve had. Part of it originates from my tech background. We’ve had our banners up on Lenovo’s website, and if you look at Dell’s website, they’re bundling Stagelight with a number of their PCs. Intel is talking about it, as well as Microsoft. I think the music industry is great, but it has the tendency to talk to itself rather than talk about the broader universe of its consumers. So we’ve been biding our time by working within the consumer market, before we expand into talking to websites like yourself.
– Ableton has built a brand of being suitable for electronic musicians whilst Pro Tools remains the industry standard for professional studios. Do you guys have any strategies for associating StageLight with certain genres or audiences?
We’ve been overwhelmed by the success that we’ve had in Western Europe, which has historically been the breeding ground for electronic music. It appears that our approach has resonated well with people in that genre. We’ve got some relationships that you’ll see within the next six months with EDM artists who feel we have a product for them.
I have four kids and I made them all take piano lessons, which I’ve found is relatively rare. A lot of kids want to make music, yet they’ve never taken any music classes. Instead, they study the EDM format and think of music in terms of loops, samples and formats that are consistent with Stagelight structure. So I think we’ve got something good that we need to capitalize on since people seem to like it. You’ll see a lot of work around it in the next six months.
– Sounds great. Thanks for chatting with me Cliff. What’s next for you?
I think the next big thing is to see what this interview looks like on Speakhertz (laughs).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oBnT_ovzrE
