How We Started

Wednesday, February 1, 2017
We're back and revved up for the 2017 dance season! To kick off the year we are doing a four part series on the evolution of DanceComp Genie. This first part will provide a macro overview of our company, products, and services. Then we will dive into some history in parts 2 and 3 and wrap things up with a look into the future of dance competition technology.
 
Part 2 - How We Started
Part 3 - How We've Changed the Game
Part 4 - The Future Trends We're Working On
 
 
How Did We Get Started Building Software for Dance Competitions?
 
Almost 10 years ago, we were approached by a national competition that was headquartered in Vancouver. At that time, we were a boutique software company focusing on highly secure database systems for corporations and government bodies. The competition hired us to build them a registration system for their events. The system had to be very secure to protect the children of their clients and extremely user-friendly. We built them a beautiful registration system and they were blown away by its power and simplicity. DanceComp Genie Registration 1.0 was launched in 2007!
 
What Happened Next?
 
We researched the market and started contacting competitions that were not offering online registration. The reason they weren't offering online registration was mostly due to the cost of developing one, or the fear of studios not wanting to move away from paper registration. DanceComp Genie sold like hot cakes once people caught on. Our pricing was, and still is today, very reasonable and fair.
 
But DCG Registration wasn't enough; our clients were quick to let us know that they needed a complete software suite to manage all aspects of their business. The next logical step was DCG Scheduling and DCG Tabulation. We built and launched these for our clients and the core DanceComp Genie suite was complete. But we didn't stop there ...
 
Then Came DCG Video
 
We were shocked when we found out what companies were paying to have a video team come in for video judge recording. We knew it would be much more affordable to do in-house with the right software. DanceComp Genie Video was released in 2009 and is now used by over 100 dance competitions. It's such an easy way to record and send videos to studios. Our clients were the first competitions to provide online critique downloading and streaming. As of 2016, you can even stream and download them on the Dance Events app!
 
Then Came the Dance Events App
 
The future is on mobile and we're leading the charge! You can do so much with an app and your customers are hanging out on their phones ALL day long at your events. Why not take advantage of this to give them the experience of a lifetime? We created the app 2 years ago and have almost 100 competitions using it this season. We built a solid foundation of features that covers the core needs of your events and we offer it for free for any competition, even those not using our other products. This year we are taking the app to the next level and may begin charging future competition companies to use it. Now is the time to get on board if you haven't already!
 
Stay Tuned!
 
In the next edition we will dive into the many ways we have changed the game and altered, for the better, the methods competitions, studios, and dancers do business within the dance competition market.