Built by someone who's lived it.

I'm Dylan McDougle, and I've been in the studio business on every side of the equation. I've been a customer, engineer, manager, designer, builder, small business owner, and when I was 20, I literally lived in the studio. It's where I learned how to make music, how to run a commercial operation, and also was exposed to the chaos of a shared Google calendar with no accountability, the fallout from no-show bookings, and a backlog of invoicing (and the resulting cashflow nightmare), all of which was just distraction from the music.

First and foremost, I'm an engineer, with credits across almost every major label. In 2015 I co-founded a commercial recording studio in New York City and ran it for years before doubling down as a mixer. I've also worked as an MD and touring consultant, booking rehearsal studios, and even as Technical Director across an entire portfolio of hospitality properties, where I learned how to scale business and administrative processes.

But most importantly, I love technology. I watched automation transform audio workflows: restoration, editing, session prep, stem bouncing, all getting faster and smarter every year. We'd automated the craft, but the worst part of running a studio, the admin, was still being done by hand. I've done my 10,000 hours in Pro Tools, and about as many in QuickBooks, and I can say confidently that we don't need technology to make art.

We need technology to do admin, so that humans can make art.

The market had studio tools for everything except operations, so I built Headroom: scheduling, operations, and payments in one place, designed by someone who has been using software on an IBM laptop since Windows 3.0. Not a booking widget bolted onto a generic scheduler, but software for music studios running real volume.

And that's what the name really means. In audio, headroom is the space between where you're working and where things start to distort, the breathing room that keeps everything clean. That's what this gives back to studio people: their headroom. The room to stop drowning in admin and get back to what actually matters, in the studio and in their lives.