The press kit nobody asked for outgrew Stagent | Building Products [Mischa Sigtermans](https://mischa.sigtermans.me) Menu Close [Thoughts](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) [Books](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/books) [Consultancy](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/consultancy) [About](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about) [← Thoughts](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) August 30th, 2026 · Product Startup The press kit nobody asked for outgrew Stagent ============================================== For three years the press kit was Stagent's door-opener. In August I tore it out and gave it its own product. A door-opener that works eventually outgrows the house it opened the door for. On 27 August I deleted the press kit from [Stagent](https://stagent.com). The form, the save action, the page. The commit message was 'Tear out the Stagent press kit and hand every act the TAP card'. The next day I put part of it back. That's the short version of how a feature nobody asked for became its own product. The long version starts in January 2023. The door-opener --------------- The first press kit commit in Stagent is from 5 January 2023. No booking agency had ever asked for one. They had PDFs, Word files, Dropbox links, and a rider last updated two years ago. It worked. It was ugly and it worked. We built it anyway, because every demo went the same way. Invoicing got a nod. Contracts got a bigger nod. The press kit made people pick up their phone and show a colleague. When I wrote [the painkiller test](/thought/the-painkiller-test), the press kit was my one exception. Strictly a vitamin. An artist can book shows without a nice press kit. But it was the thing that got an agency to try Stagent at all, and once they were inside, the painkillers kept them there. 'Some vitamins are the door into the painkiller stack.' It did its job for three years. 926 acts built a press kit inside Stagent. Artists added Linktree links, Mixcloud links (the worst icon in the business, according to one commit), riders, photos, and bios. And the whole time, it lived in the wrong house. The press kit belongs to the artist ----------------------------------- Stagent is software for booking agencies. The press kit is the artist's. That mismatch was invisible until you looked at who's actually behind an artist. A manager. A tour manager. An agent. A publisher, a label, a publicist, a crew. The booking agency is one of eight roles, and the press kit sat in that one role's software. Meanwhile the same bio lives on the artist's website, their Linktree, their Spotify profile, their label's page, and in three promoters' inboxes. Every copy drifts. Nobody owns the source. A door-opener that works turns into something people depend on. Once they depend on it, it has to live where the owner lives. For the press kit, that's with the artist, not the agency. So in August we rebuilt it as [TAP](https://tap.fm), The Artist Passport. One profile, kept by the artist and their team. The website, the links page, the EPK, and the music page are generated from it for free. Connected apps read it and always have the latest version. The artist maintains it once. The positioning line I keep coming back to: 'Cancel Linktree, your source tool ships it.' Stagent is an integration, not a feature ---------------------------------------- The hardest decision wasn't building TAP. It was demoting Stagent. The easy move would have been to keep TAP as a Stagent module. Share a database. Add a few special cases. Stagent is my product, TAP came out of it, why pretend otherwise? Because the moment Stagent is special, TAP is a Stagent feature with a different domain name. Other booking tools won't connect to a profile owned by a competitor. And the artist has no reason to believe the profile belongs to them. So one of the first lines in TAP's decision log reads: 'Stagent is an integration, not a feature; nothing in code may treat it as an exception.' Stagent signs in with TAP like any other app. Each agency gets one key per act. Stagent is named in TAP the way Shopify is named in TAP, as an app. And the provisioning path that moved press kits across gets deleted once every Stagent press kit is on TAP. I'm the person who built both products, and I wrote a rule that stops me from giving my own product a shortcut. It felt strange for about a day. Then it felt like the only way TAP could ever be bigger than Stagent. Why I put part of it back ------------------------- Tearing out the press kit in one commit handed every act the TAP card at once. For the 926 acts that had built a press kit in Stagent and hadn't moved yet, that was a visible break. Their page just changed under them. The fix the next day was 'Keep the press kit here until an act is on TAP'. Migration stopped being a batch job and became a decision per act, with a button in our admin instead of a command in a terminal. Going live should cost an agency nothing they notice. I was excited about the split and moved faster than the people depending on the old version could follow. Same lesson I've been learning since [Pixelstart](/thought/why-perfectionism-was-my-worst-enemy), from the other direction: shipping fast is fine until someone else's workflow is the thing you're shipping over. How it spreads now ------------------ The press kit was a door into Stagent. TAP is a door into TAP. Every free page TAP generates invites the next artist to claim theirs. An EPK sent to a promoter, a links page in an Instagram bio, an artist website: each one is a way in. The free side stays free. Platforms that read artists at volume are the ones who pay. That's the same mechanic the press kit had inside Stagent, except it no longer has to stop at booking agencies. A merch store on Shopify already reads it. Stagent was the first app. It won't be the biggest. Door-openers outgrow the door ----------------------------- I still believe what I wrote in the painkiller test. Some vitamins are the door into the painkiller stack. What I didn't see then is what happens when a door-opener works for long enough. People stop walking through it to get somewhere else. They start depending on it for its own sake. At that point it isn't a door anymore. It's a room, and it needs its own house. The press kit nobody asked for didn't stay a feature. It became the thing I'm building next to the thing it was built to sell. *thanks for reading* Hi, I'm [Mischa](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about). I've been *shipping products* and *building ventures* for over a decade. First exit at 25, second at 30. Now Partner & CPO at [Ryde Ventures](https://ryde.ventures), an AI venture studio in Amsterdam. Currently shipping [Stagent](https://stagent.com), [TAP](https://tap.fm) and [Steddle](https://steddle.com). I [write](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) about what I learn along the way. [More about me](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about). Keep reading: [The MCP server that can't see who you are](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/the-mcp-server-that-cant-see-who-you-are). [← Thoughts](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) Connect ------- [X](https://x.com/mischamartijn) [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/mischasigtermans) [GitHub](https://github.com/mischasigtermans) © 2026 Hold My Beer B.V. · [RSS](feed:https://mischa.sigtermans.me/feed)