Family-first
We design for parents and dancers before we design for studios. If a feature doesn't make a parent's Saturday morning better, it doesn't ship.
About
Built by a dance dad who needed a better tool.
StageSide started on a Tuesday morning, sitting on my couch, with the email for the next competition arriving in my inbox. I pulled open the competition's website to check what the adjudication awards were, opened up my spreadsheet to write down the entry number, the estimated time and dance name for each of my daughter's 11 dances. Started making a picture for the lock screen of my phone so I could follow along. An hour later, the "updated" schedule came out. I thought: there has to be a better way.
I'd been doing this for years. Dance comps, recitals, costume orders, tuition autopay, photo releases. Every season the same thing happened. The studio communicated through whatever was easiest for them (email, Facebook group, paper). The parents kept up however they could. The software the studio paid for (Jackrabbit, Studio Director, the rest) either didn't have a real mobile experience, or the parent portal was an afterthought designed by someone who didn't have a kid in classes.
My day job is public health emergency preparedness. I plan for the worst thing happening, and I plan for the people on the receiving end. Watching the way studios handled day-to-day communication, I kept thinking: this is solvable. If a hospital can route the right alert to the right nurse on the right device, a dance studio can tell a parent their kid is on deck in eight routines.
So I built StageSide. It started as a comp-day timing app: the running order, the on-deck push notification, the share-link for the grandparents following along at home. It grew into a full studio management platform because every studio owner I talked to said the same thing: "I'd switch for that. But only if you handle billing. And registration. And messaging. And reports."
StageSide is what I wish I'd had from the get-go. Mobile-first, family-friendly, with a recorded history every dancer carries with them. We don't think the studio owns the dancer's record. We think the dancer does.
Tim Blanchard
Founder, StageSide
What we believe
Three principles. Non-negotiable.
Safe by default
Minors are protected at the database, not at the toggle. Adult-to-minor 1:1 messaging is impossible. Photo releases are granular and per-dancer.
Permanent records
The dancer owns their history. Awards, attendance, milestones. Recorded forever. No platform, no studio, no future buyer can quietly delete them.
Building something better, together.
Early-access studios shape the roadmap with us. If that's you, we'd love to talk.