Founder and CEO of Stagetime, the venture-backed network where singers, agents and composers finally live in one place. She got here by noticing that a cosmetics website had better branding than the world’s finest musicians.
Stagetime is what happens when someone who has actually stood in the wings decides to build the software the wings never had. Jennie Moser runs it from Bloomington, Indiana, and the pitch is deceptively plain: give a performing artist one page that carries their video, their audio, their availability and their reputation, so they never again have to be their own webmaster at midnight before an audition.
The performing arts run on relationships and short-term contracts. A singer might work six organizations in a season, none of them full-time, all of them wanting a headshot, a reel, a resume and a calendar. The tools built for salaried office workers were never built for that. Stagetime is. Instrumentalists, singers, agents and composers build multimedia profiles, post and find opportunities, and keep track of one another’s careers without paying thousands of dollars to maintain a personal website that, Moser found, most visitors abandon in under half a minute.
Her diagnosis is the sharpest thing about her. She does not think the art is broken. She thinks the shipping is. “The problem with the live and performing arts is not the product,” she says. “It’s the package.” The industry pours a lifetime into the four minutes onstage and almost nothing into the tools that get you there. Stagetime is her attempt to close that gap, and to close it beautifully, because she is constitutionally incapable of shipping something ugly.
Marketing tools should be as beautiful as our talents.
In college, deep in the Glossier website because she loved the packaging, Moser had an uncomfortable thought. A cosmetics brand had more compelling branding than the professors and guest artists performing at the highest level around her. World-class musicians were being sold with materials that captured none of the artistry. That itch became Jennie Moser Design.
She built resumes, recital posters and websites for musicians. Then a design client won a major competition, her work went viral in the classical world, and roughly 100 website requests landed almost overnight. Suddenly she had a studio, a team, and a front-row view of how artists actually present themselves online.
Reading the numbers on all those sites, she found visitors stayed about 26 seconds and viewed two pages - home and media. The messages that came through were all business: bookings, availability, management. Artists were using expensive custom websites as clumsy networking tools. There had to be a better package.
Pitching venture capitalists who had never bought an opera ticket, Moser was first filed under “the opera girl.” She refused the frame. She translated arts administration into the corporate hierarchies investors already understood, pointing out that MFA-credentialed professionals ran her industry with the same rigor as any tech company. She built the financial models herself. One investor eventually texted a colleague: “I think the opera girl might be onto something.”
The result was roughly $1.5 million in seed funding, led by Hyde Park Angels with Scott Eisen of Paceline Capital running the deal, joined by M25, Elevate Ventures and a follow-on from the IU Angel Network. She credits the investors’ emotional attachment to the arts as worth more than the capital itself.
BACKERS: Hyde Park Angels • M25 • Elevate Ventures • IU Angel Network. Last raised Nov 2021.
“I wouldn’t give up my music degrees or my financial models for anything.” The refusal to choose between art and arithmetic is the whole company in one sentence.
When we place the burden of large-scale digital problem solving on individual artists, we set the financial barrier to entry damningly high.
The problem with the live and performing arts is not the product - it’s the package.
Most solutions are not built to both accommodate artists’ needs and provide a great experience.
They didn’t teach us this in music school.
I wouldn’t give up my music degrees or my financial models for anything.
The origin of a performing-arts startup traces to a college online-shopping habit. Glossier’s packaging did what a hundred concert posters couldn’t.
She turned an unflattering analytics number - how quickly people flee an artist’s website - into the founding insight of a company.
Two music degrees, and she still built the spreadsheets that convinced skeptical venture investors. The refrain: they didn’t teach this in music school. She learned it anyway.
She has sung one of the most fiendish coloratura roles in the repertoire. Running a startup is, by comparison, a different kind of high note.
A dismissal she wore until it became a compliment - the moment an investor realized the opera girl was onto something.
Her non-negotiable: professional-grade tools should be affordable and accessible to every member of the community, not just the well-funded.
One place for people in the performing arts to gather, promote their talents, and lift each other up.