BEACN CELEBRATES ITS 5 year anniversary

Can you believe it’s been five years? From showing the world how powerful a dynamic USB C Mic can get, to app overhauls, to our first XLR audio interface for streamers, we’re so grateful for your support and feedback over all these years.

To honor this special occasion, we sat down with our CEO Craig Fraiser to talk through some special memories, reflect on BEACN’s journey, and give us some insight into where BEACN is headed this year.

a trip down memory lane

Take us back to BEACN’s first year as a company. What was it like having your own office for the first time?

"It was a bit of a wild time because, little did we know, we’d be smack in the middle of a pandemic within weeks of starting the company!

We knew we needed a space to get together, since working on hardware needs all the bits and bobs to do testing, prototyping and all the other related stuff. So, we got a one-room co-working space and tried to make it as comfy as possible, while also recognizing that we’d be working remotely a lot of the time too.

Overall it was 'kinda weird' on all fronts. Having our own company, with our own office, but not being able to be there much, but building cool things... all kinda weird... and of course super exciting and terrifying at the same time!"

The team has had the opportunity to travel to quite a few conferences & conventions over the years. Tell us a little bit about some of your favorite events.

"When people ask how we develop our products or come up with new features, my answer has been the same for pretty much the whole time I’ve been in product development... just talk to people.

It’s really that simple. You’d be amazed what you learn by having a 5 minute chat with the people who actually do the thing you’re making products for!

To me, it doesn’t matter if you have 10K CCV and 20 million followers, or stream to 6 people. Your experiences and challenges are likely more common with each other than you’d think. Folks just explain those challenges differently, or maybe don’t know exactly how to explain what they need or want. It’s up to us to kind of synthesize a bunch of conversations into a light bulb moment of 'Oh! Thaaat’s what they are trying to do/fix' and then go about trying to create a solution that works for people from the most tech savvy to the least.

One of the best places to have the conversations is at trade shows like Twitchcon, PAX, Dreamhack etc. Sometimes it’s at a booth or on the show floor with users/customers and sometimes it’s at the hotel bar having a beer with a streamer we met that day. It’s really great when a lot of people with the same shared interest are all in the same place for a few days. You never know what will come out of it, but there is ALWAYS something great."

From recording BEACN Mic tutorials in 2022 to now in 2025, how has BEACN evolved over the years?

"Overall, the core of 'why' we started BEACN and continue to do the things we do has remained constant. We exist to help streamers connect with their community. But, as I heard on a podcast recently, we have also 'paid the stupid tax' for making mistakes along the way. But, that’s all part of growth. I think the best example of how we needed to shift gears and evolve is when we realized we had to take some of our tech basically back to the drawing board in order to make things more reliable and stable.

Our ethos, though we don’t always succeed at it, is 'do no harm' to the stream. We don’t want our gear or tech to be the cause of a problem ever. We want it to 'just work' and become a background support for what really matters, which is the streamer and their content. So when we learned that our system was less reliable than we wanted it to be, we decided to basically rewrite our USB subsystem from the ground up. It took the better part of a year and slowed down all the new fun stuff we wanted to do, but it was a necessary decision in order to keep that core ethos as our driving motivation."

How do you think the landscape has shifted over these last 5 years?

"Personally, I see the breadth of content expanding a lot, which is great for streaming. When Twitch made the changeover from Justin.tv it was because gaming was clearly a huge and growing category for them, so they decided to make that the focus. In the past couple of years, you see 'Just Chatting' on Twitch often with the most live channels and viewers outside of a big game release or tournament type event going on. I think that speaks to a widening of audiences who want to 'watch people do things in real time and interact with them' that is pretty exciting for the world as a whole."

What's next?

Late last year, BEACN released its first XLR audio interface for streamers, BEACN Studio. What can we expect to see from BEACN going into 2025?

"BEACN Studio was a great example of the result of conversations with our users. Pretty much as soon as we released BEACN Mic, folks asked 'Hey I really like the idea of the processing, software and stuff, but I have my own mic. When are you going to make an audio interface?'

We knew it was a risk making a product that is well established, in the sense that there are a billion audio interfaces in the music space. That said, based on seeing things that streamers were really struggling with, like 2PC setups and not having robust software to compliment other available interfaces, we thought we could bring something different and useful to the market.

That approach will continue in 2025 and beyond. We’ll always try to take our expertise with audio and turn it on its head a bit to make things that specifically help streaming and content creation. Personally, I think what we’re working on now is going to be really exciting for both our existing and new customers alike."

Sounds like we'll all need to keep our eyes peeled for more info later this year. Craig, thank you so much for your time and here's to another great year!

Check Out BEACN Studio here!

Check Out BEACN Studio here!