Stagecast Timeline
A Startup Journey 2016-2022
Stagecast is a B2B2C SaaS company founded by a group of innovators, product nerds, event-specialists and optimists. Ultimately, Stagecast was sold to Stockholm based vVenues & OneMotion IMC and taken over by new management, where it is still operated. We served hundreds of customers and touched the lives of millions of users around the world. We are immensely proud and thankful for everyone who supported us along this journey and is still using Stagecast today.
Sincerely,
The founders of Stagecast
Some of the brands we worked with
This is the Story of Stagecast
Stagecast was founded with the vision to make the physical world a more interactive place. Our story started back in 2016 ... Strap in.
Skip Timeline(Go to summary & learnings)
Stagecast began as a University concept at The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden with the vision to create a more interactive physical environment using mobile phones.
The original team was made of Markus Wallentin, Jonas Hermann, Hedvig Ahlgren and Robin Bugdahn.
Our first concept video was released and helped us gain some early traction within the live events industry.
While developing the concept of Stagecast, we finished our studies.
After an extensive period of research within the live industry, we started the company "Stagecast AB".
With a passion for live events, Stagecast was born. We saw that many artists started banning mobile phones from concert venues. An approach that we thought was never going to be successful. Rather than banning phones, we wanted to give event organizers tools to make use of phones and create better live experiences.
Our business purpose was originally to "develop, provide and market engaging & interactive advertising space within live events."
To fund the business ("bootstrapping"), build a community of like-minded people and attract talent to our team, we launched a community event called LiveHacks.
LiveHacks grew fast to become one of Sweden's largest Hackathon communities with close to 1.000 members. We were sponsored by brands like UniversalMusic, Telia Company, ZoundIndustries, Accenture and many more.
First LiveHacks Aftermovie, taking place 25 meter underground in Sweden's first nuklar reaktor hall.
Stagecast gained traction fast. And so we were invited to participate in the prestigious KTH brighter program which included an educational trip to the Silicon Valley and Stanford. After the trip, Stagecast became a KTH Innovation Startup & Incubator member.
“Stagecast is on a mission! By letting concert goers use their smartphones to engage in the show, they revolutionize the concert experience. After joining the Brighter Program in 2016, this KTH Innovation alumni company is gearing up.”
KTH Innovation official
The Stockholm Innovation Scholarship aims to promote innovation in the Stockholm region and rewards innovations within Simplify everyday life; Creative industries; Life science and health; Travel and tourism; Social impact and sustainability
"In the meeting between people and technology, this year’s scholarship-winner puts people first. Just as the islands of Stockholm are connected by bridges, this innovation connects us together, as co-creators, in the human desire to gather around music."
Stockholm Innovation Prize Jury
Stagecast was invited to become a member of the first cohort of the Stockholm based Amplify Music incubator program - and with it we move into the first office outside of university.
"Amplify is Sweden’s first MusicTech-oriented startup incubator. We're taking musical creativity & technology, remixing it with entrepreneurial excellence! We are excited to help bring Stagecast to the world. "
Martin Gemvik, CEO Amplify Music
With limited resources, we developed the alpha version of Stagecast and tested it with a selected number of customers and users.
In total, we created 3 separate concerts with 50-100 "friendly users" each, to observe user behaviour and learn for our product development process and launch the Beta version of Stagecast. We applied design-thinking and lean development methodologies that we read about during our studies and the trip to Silicon Valley.
With a number of successful cases in the pocket, we were able to raise funds from industry leaders and governmental organisations. A total of around 4.5MSEK (425.000€) enabled us to build Stagecast 1.0 and bring it to the market.
Stagecast Seed Round & Participants
ALMI INVEST
VINNOVA
ANGEL INVESTORS
INDUSTRY LEADERS
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Our initial marketing strategy was to grow within the artist and live performer community via mouth-to-mouth endorsements. We produced a number of videos to help spread the message.
The Bongo Club, Sweden-based, award winning indie rock brand.
Jackie Tech, Swedish newcomer of 2016.
Shortly after closing the Seed round, we started working on Stagecast full time and extended the team, which allowed us to launch Stagecast 1.0 and close our first paying customers.
Stagecast 1.0 was tailored for large live entertainment event organizers, such as festivals, concert producers and corporate events.
The Moment Group AB & Thomas DiLeva - an institution of Swedish Schlager - was the first paying customer of Stagecast.
"Stagecast helped us create a more interactive, engaging and personal live experience."
Thomas Di Leva, Swedish Artist
After the success with Thomas Di Leva, more and more customers started to adopt Stagecast. While on the role, we were accepted to the Telia Startup accelerator program "Scale Your Business".
Telia helped us acquire our first international customers - among them Denmark's second largest music festival, called "Smukfest".
First customer cases showed the need for an integration of Stagecast into third party apps. With the launch of the Stagecast SDK & APIs, we were ready to do just that.
At first, our integration was provided in React Native, but later we switched to a simple iFrame solution that enabled any developer in the world to embed Stagecast in their app or website within minutes. This integration was what the entire later Stagecast infrastructure was based on.
“The Stagecast Integration is such a great time saver. What would take us months to build, Stagecast makes possible within minutes."
GameDay Developer Team
Stagecast engaged nearly 35.000 fans in Friend's arena at the Melodifestivalen 2019 event.
An interactive light show, a pre-show voting as well as a fan picture feed was used at Sweden's largest live event to engage fans - all within the official Melodifestivalen app, powered by the Stagecast integration.
Through hundreds of customer conversations & cases, it became clear that the most value Stagecast provided to event producers was as a digital sponsorship activation tool.
Therefore, from here on out, we refocused our business on the sponsoring market and opened to the sports & business event market. Soon, Stagecast was part of events like the Handball European Championships, the German DFB Pokal Finals, the Golf Opens and even the Champions-league Finals.
“Stagecast helps us provide more value to our sponsors and keep up in an advertising world that is becoming more and more digital.”
Stefan Lövgren, CEO Handbollslandslaget
After the success with Melodifestivalen and the commercial refocus of Stagecast, our team started to grow.
Over the course of Stagecast, we were privileged to work with 41 outstanding talents. At the peak, we were 12 people working to make live events more interactive.
With the release of Stagecast 2.0, we went all-in on the digital sponsoring and live advertising market, optimising our platform for the needs of live marketers and sponsors.
Advanced analytics, more branding options in the product and common marketing features like programmable Call-To-Actions manifested the next iteration of Stagecast.
With our new focus, we started to make waves in the sports industry. We were accepted to the Bluecom & Bizmaker accelerator and started conversations with even more sports leagues around the world - among them Handbollslandslaget, SHL, NFL and many, many more.
Moreover, we started working with partner sales and established resellers within Germany, France and Canada.
“We are excited to welcome Stagecast to the Arena Experience Accelerator - Stagecast helps event marketers create meaningful interactions with fans and new sponsorship opportunities for event partners.”
Cecilia Nordlund, BizMaker
Within one week, 90% of our customer base disappeared and all our progress within the industry vanished. Our first reaction was to focus on ourselves and improve our systems while we "wait the storm out". Today, we know that COVID was here to stay and we were later forced to change everything about Stagecast.
At the end of May 2020, it became clear that COVID-19 would not be a thing of the past for the foreseeable future. Without much choice, we had to downsize our team and focus on a new market. Stagecast was already a marketing tool for in-person events. With events moving online and more and more audiences becoming "online audiences", Stagecast focused on becoming mostly an online marketing & gamification tool.
With the pivot to marketing tech, we focused on bringing features to the platform that helped marketers increase online engagement on all online channels and released a major update to the platform.
We noticed that more and more business accounts started to use Stagecast for employee engagement and virtual corporate events. Hence, we launched "Stagecast for enterprise" with a number of corporate features. We signed companies like Spotify, Oriflame, Google, EpidemicSounds and others who used Stagecast for internal events & communication.
Stagecast for Enterprise
- Centralised control with Single Sign On (SSO), Advanced privacy control and more
- Premium support with a dedicated success manager & business impact review
- Centralized control with Streamlined branding, backend-to-backend authentification and more
We supplied Mercedes-Benz and supported them in their brand activation campaign at the League-of-Legends World Championships 2020. Within 21 game days, over 350.000 fans played over 3.7 Million Stagecast quizzes and answered over 23 Million eSports related questions, making the LOL World's the largest event Stagecast has ever seen.
After the event, Stagecast supplied all LOL eSports activations with Mercedes-Benz for the coming years. The projects were carried out with our partner agency, Apollo 18.
“Modern sponsoring is all about adding value to the fan experience rather than just showing a logo - for 21 days, and 10 hours a day, Stagecast helped Mercedes-Benz achieve just that, with an interactive quiz during the official LOL World's Twitch broadcast.”
Apollo 18 Agency, Stagecast partner
With users from around the world and over 130 countries, Stagecast achieves an astounding milestone: Over 2 million users who were engaged using Stagecast quizzes, votings, photo collages and more.
While we made some incredibly fast progress as an online marketing tool with great brands using Stagecast around the world, the repercussions of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis hit the marketing world hard. Budgets were cut, employees were let go and campaigns canceled. Simultaneously, our efforts in the employee engagement & virtual corporate events market were picking up.
We were forced to pivot and refocus once again.
Stagecast was invited to become a member of the prestigious London Mayor business program. We joined the program to prepare an expansion to the UK & US.
Improved user interface, enhanced data analytics, new Stagecast "activities", 100s of new templates ... Stagecast 3.0 was by far our biggest update to the product.
With all the pivoting of the month prior, we found ourselves in a situation in which we needed more flexibility of the platform. Unfortunately, we never had the luxury to fully focus on one vertical after COVID-19 (a circumstance, which - in hindsight - probably was our biggest issue post C-19).
Stagecast 3.0 gave us the opportunity to keep serving our customers within marketing but also acquire new customer within the employee engagement / virtual events domain.
With the refocus on employee engagement and virtual events, our customer group changed from B2B first to B2C first. With that we also had to change the entire user-acquisition approach and sales funnel: A move to online sales first.
In order to acquire users and deliver our service entirely online, we had to move the whole user journey online. From acquisition, to delivery, purchase & after-sales - everything had to be designed and made available as a self service. Moreover, we reworked our pricing model and started investing in google & Social Media advertisement.
New, B2C friendly pricing plans.
The most important milestones in the new Stagecast user acquisition & purchasing journey.
Within a few months, our online funnel started to pick-up speed. With over 2.000 monthly new signups and only about 0.52 € spent per user-acquisition, we were on a good track to get the online model started.
However, while our retention rate was decent (12%), our free-to-payed user conversion was unsatisfactory (0.25%).
When it comes to online sales, we learned that it all comes down to retention and conversion rates.
We spent the next few months optimising our funnel and increasing conversion rates. From sign-up optimisation to onboarding improvements, layout AB-testing and implementing product-led-growth principles. We continued to optimize all parts of the funnel.
We iterated all parts of the user journey.
Example: Improved sign-up journey led to 42% less dropouts during the sign-up process.
Example: Improved Onboarding led to 50% less dropouts during the onboarding process.
Our cash reserves that we built up Pre-Covid started to become smaller and smaller over the years prior. We did receive some more financial support from our investors and we tried to raise another investment round, however, as the world became more and more uncertain, we failed to attract sufficient capital.
Hence, at this time, we were depended on consulting projects from some of our largest clients. With the Ukraine war, some of these projects fell flat, leaving us with only a couple of months of runway.
Albeit the Stagecast 3.0 and online-sales efforts were progressing, the pace was not enough. With only months in cash reserves in the bank, the board of Stagecast decided to sell the company to Stockholm based vVenues & OneMotion IMC. We are immensely proud to have found a strong partner who is taken over and is able to give Stagecast AB the future it deserves.
The impact of COVID19 - A summary
We had great trajectory and leads with organisers and leagues all around the world - we were on the verge of becoming a “scale up”. However, from one week to the next all of that vanished. Our first reaction was to “wait it out” and refine our product offer. But after 6 months of waiting, we had to realise that we are running out of time.
We decided to pivot: To new opportunities that arose from the pandemic, to new markets, to “the new normal”. We changed our entire business model, we re-designed the Stagecast product, we iterated and rebuilt our sales-funnel from a high-touch to a low-touch online funnel with an entirely new go-to-market strategy and in August 2021 we launched Stagecast 3.0 - a solution designed to create more interactive meetings and online events.
Yet, it was not enough. Our conversion rate from free users to paying customers was too low and with inaccessible venture capital, we simply ran out of cash. We are immensly proud to have found OneMotion AB as a partner who can take Stagecast to new heights.
Stagecast milestones in numbers
Active Stagecast users: ∼ 21.000
Engaged participants: ∼ 3.600.000
Users' & customers' origin: ∼ 150 countries
Funds raised (total): ∼ 500.000€
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): ∼ 170.000€
Part & Full Time employees: ∼ 41
Startup awards & prizes won: 8
Team of advisors & investors: 7
Years Active: 6
Some of the brands we worked with
Some of our key learnings
As founders & lifelong learners, "learning" has always been one of the key motivations to start Stagecast in the first place.
We like to share our lessons learned with other, like-minded individuals who embark on a similar journey.
Don't raise funds too early
Your consecutive financial rounds will depend on your progress since the last round. Make sure to raise funds only after the initial concept phase.
Kill your
darlings
Innovation is about progress. And sometimes progress means changing your mind. Make sure to not let your past ideas get in the way of new learnings.
User-test your assumptions
It's of most importance to base your product / business development on user needs. Do not build before understanding the customer.
Don't raise too little
When you start out, it's easy to think that you can do a lot with a little capital. But you need user data and marketing. And in today's market neither comes for free.
Solve a real problem
Solve a problem or cater to an unmet need of a very specific target group is the guiding star of finding product-market fit.
Choose cofounders wisely
Apart from having supplementary skills, it's important to be on the same level of commitment.
Focus on sales early
A company without customers is not sustainable. Make sure to not just build a product, but to build a sustainable sales funnel early on.
Realize the game you play
Most startups fail. You are the underdog trying to make it against all odds. Act like it. Don't go the safe route. You have to take risks. It's ok to fail.
Don't reinvent the wheel
Innovation does not have to happen on all levels. As a startup it's not your job to be different. It's your job to put existing wheels together in a new way to solve an unsolved problem.
Interested to read more? Visit the blog of our former CEO & Cofounder Jonas or reach out directly.
