CREATED BY MUSICIANS,
FOR MUSICIANS
We are Brandi, Krista, Katie, and Tara, and we dreamed up BANDIE while working together as members of the award-winning Canadian country band Nice Horse. As a band pushing hard to make it to the next level, we survived by dividing tasks and working around the clock to make it happen. But even with the whole band, our management, and the rest of our team all working hard towards our success, we still struggled to keep the business side of our band organized and thriving while also finding time to practice, songwrite, rehearse, and, you know, maybe see our friends and family once in awhile.
The biggest time-sucks for us were advancing our shows and managing our touring and day-to-day activities. Not only was this time consuming, but often answers to our questions about upcoming gigs would come from a bunch different places to a bunch of different people. Trying to compile all of the information efficiently (and avoid asking the same question to promoters three different times in ten different ways) was an ongoing challenge. Pair that with having to constantly deal with a plethora of different concert promoters at varying levels of professionalism and communication without a full-time tour manager, and the task of advancing and tour managing at a high level proved to be nearly impossible. As a “B” level band trying to build up our reputation enough to play in the “A” game, this sort of disorganization was not something we were willing to accept.
From that, BANDIE was born.
We started BANDIE as a very comprehensive spreadsheet, with a multitude of plug-ins and formulas, to keep the band, our hired guns, and our entire team on the same page. When our ambitions for BANDIE outgrew the spreadsheet, we partnered up with the teams at Trading Fours Software and Duck Labs (including some musicians-turned-developers!) in order to transform our creation into a mobile app and web platform that we could share with artists, bands, and tour managers who are just like us: people with too much stuff to do and not enough hours in the day to do it.