From Project Work to Product Business

Every AV integrator knows the moment when the project asks for more than the industry can deliver. Some teams work around it once and forget it. Others build a private toolbox: templates, drivers, scripts, and workflows that cut costs and improve efficiency. Most of that know-how never leaves the company. AVStudio is an example of what happened when one residential integrator developed an internal tool and asked a practical question: what if this could help other integrators like us?

The project that revealed the opportunity

The team could finally exhale. The project was over. Months of pressure and uncertainty, driven by customer expectations, had paid off. The risk of bringing unfamiliar technology into a demanding project had been justified.

But it could have ended differently.

The client did not want “good enough.” They wanted the kind of experience they already knew from iPhones, iPads, and modern mobile apps: sharp graphics, smooth movement, intuitive navigation, clean responsiveness. It was the level of UX the available pro AV UI tools could not deliver.

On smaller projects, you could still maneuver: handcraft a few screens, explain the limitations, or replace a professional touch panel with an iPad where possible. In a large luxury project, those compromises became dangerous. The interface was not a cherry on top. For the customer, it was the system: the part they saw, touched, judged, and remembered.

The option of delivering a mediocre UI was completely out of the picture. The team would either lose the customer altogether or look for a solution that did not yet exist but could satisfy the customer without overloading the engineering team.

You know what an AV engineer does in that situation. They dive into the unknown, research, test, and look for emerging technology. Vadim’s engineering curiosity led him to HTML5, a proven web technology standard for building modern, dynamic… websites. Turning a website into a control panel UI. What could be more exciting?

The decision, though, was as risky as it was tempting. It meant new skills and new workflows would have to be applied to a large, demanding project. The untested technology added uncertainty.

Yet, after months of sleepless nights, AVGator delivered what the customer expected and received the kind of payment that makes bold decisions look reasonable in hindsight. And the value was not only in the invoice.

The team had gained expertise very few integrators could claim: modern HTML5-based UI inside a complex control system project. Vadim saw the opportunity, but he also saw the trap. If every future project required the same amount of labor, their know-how would quickly turn into a burden.

Around the same time no-code tools were reshaping website development. Why not apply the same logic to control system GUIs?

Within a few months, AVGator’s hybrid AV and web-development team had a working prototype: a no-code HTML5 GUI configurator that let AV engineers build modern interfaces without coding or design knowledge. Live preview, WYSIWYG editing, fewer compile-recompile-debug cycles, responsive design. More than just better-looking screens, the HTML5-based workflow helped shrink commissioning from months to weeks. That kind of time saving changed the project economics. AVStudio began as an internal tool built to protect margin, save time, and make the next project less painful.

Setting Out to Build a Product Business

The more AVStudio was used inside AVGator projects, the more other integrators started paying attention. Vadim shared the experience with peer Crestron Service Providers. Questions followed. Could they use it too? Could it solve the same UI problem for their teams?

Keeping the tool private was an option. A rational one, even. It could remain AVGator’s absolute advantage, helping the company win a few more large lucrative projects. But that path had a ceiling. Integration business is difficult to scale when every dollar depends on project labor. A product, if packaged well, travels further than one team.

Learning What Product Business Really Means

So it was decided, the team set out to bring their internal tool to market.

The engineering side looked strong at first. AV engineers knew control systems, the new team brought web development skills. But aligning those experts around one vision was not automatic. As Vadim described it, web developers could look at the project and ask why a Crestron controller was needed at all if everything could be controlled from a web interface. They knew how to put a web project on a server, but the logic of an AV system was not native to them. The AV team understood controllers, but web layouts, styles, and frameworks sounded like a foreign language. Someone had to make both worlds work together in order for AVStudio to succeed.

Another part of the product business demanded a different kind of leadership. As Vadim puts it, integration is built around one customer, even when that customer has many decision-makers. A product has to listen to many customers at once, find what their needs have in common, and turn those patterns into something scalable. Those two shifts — aligning the team and building for many — became the hardest changes for AVStudio at the beginning

With requests piling up and a small team split between product development and integration work, AVGator could not treat every idea as a project task. AVStudio needed a center of gravity: someone to hold the vision, set priorities, challenge both AV and web teams, and decide what belonged in the product roadmap. Vadim Chekirka took on that product-owner role. Feature requests became backlog decisions; custom work had to be resourced, paid for, or rejected. AVStudio started moving from engineering improvisation toward professional product management.

Borrowing Speed Through Outside Help

In the early stage, AVStudio grew inside AVGator, and the boundaries were messy. Vadim describes that period simply: everyone did everything. Later, AVStudio had a dedicated product team, but the founder’s load did not get lighter in the same way. AVGator was still in the integration business. AVStudio was becoming a product. Vadim was financing it, holding the product vision, managing priorities, showing it at trade shows, talking to partners, and trying to understand why users and interest were not yet turning into predictable revenue. The product had activity. The business model was still catching up.

That is where AVStudio started outsourcing growth instead of trying to invent every missing skill internally. At that point, Vadim brought in outside expertise for a focused three-month go-to-market (GTM) engagement to turn scattered market signals into decisions. The work helped AVStudio clarify its first customer profile, test value proposition and pricing, prioritize technology partnerships that could accelerate adoption. AVStudio already had registered users. What changed was behavior: active users grew by 42%, paying users by 57%, and average monthly revenue grew threefold. While the numbers were still modest, they signaled early market validation.

The GTM engagement also made the next bottleneck clear. AVStudio had enough demand to validate the direction, yet customer interviews showed that larger integration teams would need more before adopting it: version control, desktop or offline options, team roles, and stronger workflows built into the HTML5 GUI editor. The product could already serve freelancers and smaller residential integrators. Moving upmarket would require more product maturity, and more funding than AVGator could comfortably support from the side.

Partnerships became the second way to borrow speed. As Vadim recalls, users first pushed the team for specific modules, widgets, and licensing. The team was contemplating doing some custom requests if resources were allocated and paid for. That was an early form of market pull. The GTM engagement also reframed partnerships as a growth lever: drivers could help AVStudio GUIs work with different control systems; a partner program could turn touch-panel sales into AVStudio access; and control system vendors could, in theory, white-label AVStudio software. Vadim was not building a full hardware ecosystem or every channel alone. He chose partnerships to extend adoption, deployment, and sales reach.

This path, however, exposed the structural problem. A product sold to integrators cannot remain buried inside an integration company forever. Integrators need to trust that the tool exists to serve them, not compete with them. Vendor-platform partnerships also need clean contracts and partner-status compliance. Crestron’s technology partner requirement became the final push: AVGator, already a Crestron Service Provider partner, could not sign a separate technology partnership agreement for AVStudio under the same company. The growth path required a cleaner structure. After InfoComm 2025, the decision to spin out was finalized, and AVStudio Inc. was registered as a standalone company.

Searching for Industry Support

At that stage, AVStudio did not need another badge scan. It needed the kind of industry support that helps an early product company become real in the market: credibility, partner access, product feedback, co-marketing, and a shorter path from curiosity to adoption. For an SI-born product, this support matters even more. The founder is not just selling a new tool; he is learning how to move from project work to product business while still funding development, educating users, and proving the category.

That is what Vadim started looking for across the professional AV ecosystem, first through familiar industry channels, then beyond them.

The first hope was vendor-platform support. AVStudio made control systems more user-friendly, so support from the platforms it complemented would have made sense. But, as Vadim put it, “the magic did not happen.” Being useful to an ecosystem did not automatically make AVStudio supported by that ecosystem.

Trade shows gave mixed answers. InfoComm and CEDIA were useful for presence, meetings, and staying visible, but Vadim did not find there a real early-stage path for a young product company. ISE felt different. What stood out to him was the startup area: a cheaper, more accessible format where people came specifically to see “what’s new.” It was still not a full support system, but it gave emerging products a place to be discovered before they could afford the usual trade-show game.

The search for support also had a financial side. Software sales alone were not bringing enough revenue to fund AVStudio’s development at the speed the product needed. Integrators liked the tool, but paying for software is still less natural in AV than paying for hardware that can be specified, marked up, and explained to the customer. Touch panels became a practical answer. Vadim’s priority was still to make AVStudio vendor-agnostic and able to run on different panels, but without an obvious financing path, hardware gave the software platform a revenue carrier the market already knew how to buy.

After testing the familiar professional AV route, Vadim started looking beyond just AV. Consumer electronics and IoT were not random detours. AVStudio was built around user experience: the visible, touchable layer between people and complex systems. At CES, through the IoT angle, and especially MQTT-related use cases, AVStudio attracted Siemens’ attention and was invited to apply to its accelerator. On paper, it sounded like the kind of support an AV startup would need: marketing help, product-development help, access to a larger Siemens ecosystem. The application did not go far. Their response was “no clear understanding of what this is and why it matters.”

The next doors opened by the market pull. A customer using a Siemens controller and Node-RED wanted MQTT support. Once AVStudio implemented MQTT, Vadim saw what he calls its “complete freedom” compared with more restricted vendor-specific approaches.

That shift changed the product’s horizon for AVStudio to become a UI layer for automation. IoT and automation are full of intelligence hidden behind the scenes. But the user still needs something to see and to touch. Someone still has to make the experience visible, intuitive, and usable. For a company born from the pain of outdated control interfaces, that blind spot looks like a great opportunity.

AVStudio is now moving beyond its original HTML5 GUI editor toward a broader vendor-agnostic platform for AV, IoT, and automation workflows with the goal of helping integrators create an interface once and deploy it across different devices, platforms, and control ecosystems.

Where the Next Product May Begin

AVStudio’s story is not a fairy tale about a product that appeared fully formed. It is a story about field-born innovation: one demanding project, one repeated pain point, and one founder who wanted the idea to travel beyond his own integration company. You may have seen the same pattern in your own projects. In this industry, product ideas often begin in the solutions teams create because the existing tools are not enough.

Vadim’s advice to AV innovators is practical: “Do not start with the technology. Start with the problem.” More specifically, look at the problem your team keeps solving manually. If the same pain appears again and again, the solution your team created may be more than just an internal trick. It may be the beginning of a product business.

Taking that step is not simple. AVStudio had to move from solving for one client to building for many users, and that required new skills and a shift in the founder’s mindset. Starting a product business is hard without product management. Scaling it is impossible without partnerships, finance, and legal structure. Some of that support is starting to appear inside AV, but much of what young product companies need still has to be found outside the usual AV path.

Professional AV already has the talent and the problems worth solving. Now more of its repeatable solutions need the courage, structure, and support to reach the market.

Catherine Archer

For more than two decades in AV, Catherine Archer has worked at the intersection of new technologies and markets launching new products and applications, entering new market segments and territories, and occasionally building entirely new businesses.
That experience later expanded into teaching go-to-market strategy and technology business development at leading universities in Russia, as well as mentoring tech startups and corporate teams through acceleration and digital transformation programs.
Her research into how technology, workplace design, and management practices shape employee experience and performance led to the 5-Factor Hybrid Work Environment Model, presented and published through the Higher School of Economics in 2023.
Today, she leads GST Consulting and Pro AV Booster, bridging the Pro AV industry with the startup ecosystem to accelerate customer-driven innovation.