The Audios Story

Co-Founder Erik Young created the original concept for Audios in 2015. He discovered the problem by accident while helping a DJ friend set up an event in San Francisco at the Cigar Bar. He recalls the lengthy time for set-up, running wires around the club. Erik joked with his friend, teasing him saying he couldn’t afford good wireless speakers. His DJ friend enlightened Erik, by replying that nothing in the market existed to connect DJ speakers to each other without running cables. So this really started Erik’s inventor mind working.

Erik had another situation arise while on a trip to Lake Tahoe with some friends. They all had personal bluetooth speakers, but none of them could connect to each other. This was another opportunity to invent. He saw a business opportunity.

Erik began working on the idea part time initially. Then, in 2016 began working on Audios full time and has maintained full time status ever since. The Audios co-founders, Erik Young (computer engineer) and David Engler (electric engineer), built Audios from scratch, literally in their garages. David created the electronic boards and Erik wrote the software for the boards and built the physical speaker. The first iterations of the Audios speaker looked more like a smart home speaker than a DJ speaker. Through trial and error and prototype after prototype, the current version of the Audios speaker was finally born.

Next Audios needed to build up its team and verify product-market-fit. Erik was introduced to industry and finance titans Charles Huang and Andy Rachleff. Charles and Andy are key pieces to the Audios strategy, advising us on how to best build, launch and sell our products. 

We started with the customer discovery method developed by Steve Blank. Erik took his prototypes and literally shadowed DJs in five cities around the US, and verified through real usage of the speakers that the problem with the speaker cables exists.

Audios has letters of intent from famous artists such as: Naughty By Nature, DJ Sam Sneak (Rick Ross’ DJ and producer), and Marshawn Lynch. 

Audios has been steadily building traction and gotten a lot of practice pitching Audios. Erik took Audios to AfroTech in 2019 and was a top three finalist. More proof of Audios meeting an untapped demand.

We validated that our solution is real by achieving product-market-fit. Our lead advisor, Andy Rachleff, is also the creator of the 'product-market-fit' concept and he verified that Audios has achieved PMF. There is no one better to confirm this than the man himself. 

We have a an exceptional team working on Audios, along with an invaluable advisory team. In addition to Andy Rachleff and Charles Huang, we also have finance and business beasts Ashley Johnson and Jonathan Speed. Without their guidance, Audios would not be where we are today.

We have been steadily building a database of 6,500 interested customers for the past year, consisting of audio rental companies, DJs, event planners and business owners. They tell us they need this product and cannot wait until they are available! 

In 2020, Sherrie Perkovich was added to the team heading up the Audios marketing, advertising, communications and PR. She has helped Audios tremendously in defining the brand and helping build messaging to the different audiences. She has also been essential in the creation and launch of our first crowdfunding campaign. 

In 2021, Audios successfully raised needed capital through this crowdfunding campaign, gaining over 2,100 investors, many of which are DJs themselves.