Casting Calls America

Brian Jagger did not set out to build software for the film industry. He came to it from marketing development and community theater, then was cast in TV productions after meeting people on set. Within a year he was working as an actor full time, and his daughter's involvement with the web series Smosh led him to become that show's casting director.

The pain point came quickly. Submissions for a music video arrived as emails with resumes titled "my resume" and headshots named with camera filenames. Jagger had to rename every file and reformat it before forwarding the shortlist to the director. It took hours. He called a longtime friend, database engineer Brian Heath, and asked him to build a tool to make the review process easier. Halfway through development, the two realized the tool could be sold as a SaaS product instead of just used for Jagger's own projects.

The first version was built for Sacramento, where Jagger was casting a project. He and his partners had already learned from eJobFairs, a 2006 online job fair they built, that scaling too fast on uncertain technology could sink a company. This time the team kept things narrow. The core product was a regional casting platform: casting directors post roles with criteria like age, gender, and location, and actors registered in that market receive notifications and submit through the software.

Pricing started at $5 per month for actors. Over time the team added video and audio audition features, which brought hosting costs with them. The price rose to $7.95 per month, and the team also explained that a paid subscription signals commitment to casting directors working on bigger projects.

In Sacramento, Jagger's own network made the launch easier. As both an actor and a casting director, he knew many people in the industry, and Bay Area casting director Tony Stanowitz became one of the first users.

New cities required a different approach. The team learned that actors had to be signed up before casting directors would bother posting, so it ran pre-registration campaigns to collect emails and reach a threshold before launching each site. About 90% of outreach ran through Facebook, with Jagger messaging people directly in each local industry. The team also recruited brand ambassadors, active members of each community who received demos and then introduced the product to peers. Those one-on-one conversations also revealed misconceptions, such as actors thinking they were being charged to audition, and the team had to explain that the software does not pay or guarantee jobs.

Mass-market tactics failed. Jagger said terrestrial radio was far too expensive for the targeting it provided, and the ROI was not there. Google Radio, which had once been a strong channel for eJobFairs, had been shut down years earlier. What worked was finding people already active in each community and offering them a tool that made their work easier.

The regional model itself was also a deliberate response to the earlier failure. Jagger noted that a national site launched too early would have required a lot of money and would have been hard to market. Building one market at a time let the team learn and fix problems before scaling. He compared the model to franchising, with a single core software product deployed to every site.

Casting Calls America now runs over 30 regional sites, with plans to reach 44 by the end of the year. The company has four full-time employees plus Jagger, two partners, and a few part-time staff, and it is run from essentially two locations. It has been bootstrapped, and hiring was delayed until revenue could support it. Jagger said the team wanted to raise prices and hire at the same time so that support could improve.