Our Story

Built From the Stage Up

We have been in bands since school. We have engineered shows, run festivals, and co-owned a venue. We built Stage Portal because we lived the problem for fifteen years and decided to do something about it.

Stage Portal was not built by a software company that spotted a gap in the market. It was built by two brothers who have spent the last fifteen years inside live music, doing every job it has.

We have been in bands since school. We ran our own production company together. Dave was the sound engineer. Ben was the lighting engineer. We built up from small shows to larger festivals and events. Ben co-owned a grassroots venue. Between the two of us, we have sat on every side of the stage door, and we ran into the same problems from every angle.

The question we asked was what if the tools that the big venues, the major touring operations, and the festival production companies take for granted were available to the bands playing their first proper run of shows? To the grassroots venue trying to programme a season of live music with a team of two? To the sound engineer arriving at a new venue every weekend to find out what the night requires by talking to the band at load-in?

The answer became Stage Portal. A gig management platform built specifically for grassroots live music. Not a tool adapted from conference centre software or event management systems designed for corporate clients. Something built from scratch by people who had spent a decade and a half doing every job in live music and running into the same problems in all of them.

Why We Built It

After we closed our production company, we found ourselves with fifteen years of accumulated frustration and, for the first time, the space to do something about it. We started talking about the problems we kept seeing over and over, whether we were organising the band, running an event, or managing the venue. The same issues. The same root causes. The same friction, every time.

What made that conversation different from all the previous ones was what we both brought to it from our careers outside music. Ben had spent ten years developing startup ecosystems. He was used to looking at industries not as collections of individual problems but as systems, finding the structural causes rather than treating the symptoms.

Dave had spent a decade as a software developer working on large-scale ERP systems, the kind of integrated platforms that let large organisations manage everything in one connected system rather than across dozens of separate tools.

When we put those two perspectives together and applied them to live music, what came back was Stage Portal. Not a feature list. A philosophy: one connected system, designed specifically for grassroots live music, that gets the right information to the right people before they need it.

Why Grassroots

We could have built Stage Portal for larger venues and scaled down from there. Most software companies try to move upmarket. We chose to stay.

The passion is in supporting the grassroots level. Not because it is the easiest market to serve, but because it is where we had spent years experiencing the problem first hand, where the right tools are most absent. The capabilities that larger venues and touring operations take for granted, proper advancing systems, connected crew management, integrated financial tracking, have never been available to the grassroots level at a price that makes sense.

We built Stage Portal as a platform rather than a standard SaaS product specifically so we could change that. The tools are now available to the two-person venue team, the self-managing band, the festival organiser working without an agency behind them.

These are not abstract numbers to us. We have been part of this world. We know what it looks like when the pressure of running a venue on a tiny team falls on one or two people who are holding everything together with WhatsApp threads and a shared calendar.

Stage Portal was built to relieve that pressure. So the venue manager can spend Friday afternoon building the programme rather than chasing tech specs. So the sound engineer arrives knowing what the night requires. So the band can walk into a venue and have everything sorted.

Our Guernsey Test-Bed

We are based in Guernsey, which acts as a microcosm of the UK. Guernsey has a thriving, self-contained music scene that has given us the ability to build, test, and refine Stage Portal in a community where we can see the effects from multiple angles. One where we know the venues and the bands and the engineers, and where the feedback is immediate and honest. That proximity has shaped the product in ways that building in isolation from an accelerator could not have.

There is also something that feels right about building a platform for the overlooked parts of the music industry from a place the music industry tends not to look at. We know what it is to be outside the centre. We built something that does not require you to be at it.

What It Looks Like in Practice

The Vault is a grassroots music venue that has been using Stage Portal for the past three months. In that time, their booker Carrie used the platform to book 65 events, locking in six months of programming in a matter of weeks.

For anyone who has not tried to programme a grassroots venue, that might not sound remarkable. For anyone who has, it is immediately legible as something significant. Sixty-five sets of artists to coordinate with. Sixty-five sets of technical requirements to collect. Sixty-five shows to brief crew for. All of it done, in most venues, across email, WhatsApp, spreadsheets, and phone calls.

Stage Portal completely transformed the way we manage our bookings and connect with performers. What used to be a time-consuming process of messages, calls and endless back and forth is now streamlined into an easy-to-use platform.

When we heard that feedback, it was not just a good result for the business. It was the confirmation that what we had built was capable of doing what we hoped it would do. Not just saving time. Reducing the stress on the people who keep these venues running.

The Team

Stage Portal runs on three people. Ben leads the business and marketing. Dave handles all technical development. Lucy Kirby joined recently as head of partnerships, bringing experience in event organising and a background in technology adoption and partnership building.

All three of us are genuinely passionate about grassroots music and about supporting the people who make it happen. We each have experience inside the industry and careers outside it that we have brought to the platform. That combination is not accidental. The problems in live music are structural. Solving them properly requires perspectives from inside and outside the industry at the same time.

We have been recognised along the way. WebSummit selected Stage Portal for its Alpha Programme and Startup Showcase. We won the Véyaon Award for Innovation in Customer Service. We took the top prize at the Guernsey Venture Challenge and became founder members of Music Technology UK.

None of that is the measure of whether this works. The measure is whether the grassroots venues are running better shows with less stress. Whether the bands are arriving at venues where everything is ready. Whether the sound engineer has the rider before they get in the van.

What We Are Building Towards

In five years, if Stage Portal does what we hope it does, the answer is straightforward: more gigs. A better experience for venues, for crew, for organisers, and for artists. A grassroots music ecosystem where the administrative friction that currently consumes so much of the time of the people running it has been reduced to the point where they can focus on the things that actually matter.

That is the mission. Not a market share number. Not a valuation. A live music scene where the tools available to grassroots venues and self-managing artists are as good as the ones available to the operations with the biggest budgets.

We built Stage Portal because we believed that was possible. We are still building it for the same reason.