Hi everyone,
There’s a specific kind of founder story where the problem finds you before the idea does. Episode 5 of The New Build podcast features one of those — Sam Rudy, co-founder of ProStudioTime, who spent years booking studios before building a marketplace to fix the process that frustrated him the whole time.
About our podcast guest
Abhinav sat down with Sam, who spent over a decade at Miloco Studios as a studio manager and international booking agent, finding and booking studios for some of the biggest names in music. He knows the industry from the inside out, which is exactly why the problem he’s solving was so hard to ignore.
What to expect from this episode
The core frustration Sam kept running into was how opaque and manual the studio booking process is. Studios don’t advertise their rates or availability the way hotels do. Sam watched this play out thousands of times and eventually decided to do something about it.
What makes Sam’s story interesting is how unlikely the leap felt at first. He wasn’t a developer and he hadn’t run a startup before. And when his co-founder Ricky first suggested they build a platform to solve the problem, Sam’s instinct was that it would cost half a million dollars just to get started. Their resulting conversation about no-code tools changed everything.
The episode gets into what the building process actually looked like — starting with a simpler tool, switching to Bubble when they needed more flexibility, shipping a very basic prototype to get early feedback, and iterating from there. Sam is candid about the emotional side of it too: the self-doubt, the fear of putting something unfinished in front of people he respected professionally, and why he thinks most founders wait too long to share what they’re working on.
ProStudioTime is still in closed beta, but already has over 130 studios in its network and is starting to attract attention from some significant players in the industry. (ProStudioTime is part of our Launch Lab program for apps preparing to launch publicly.)
This conversation will resonate if you’re someone who knows an industry deeply and keeps noticing a problem no one has properly solved.
Where to listen
Episode 5 is live now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:
New episodes drop every two weeks. If you have a story about something you’ve built on Bubble — especially something rooted in real industry experience — we’d love to hear it in the comments or you can submit it here.
And if you’re launching soon or have already launched recently just like Sam, you can also apply to Launch Lab — our program for standout founders and agencies looking for professional storytelling support — or read more about recent founder features on our blog.
— Emmanuel