Studio Crux = mostly Audubon Dougherty
Studio Crux was originally the production name I used for short research documentaries I created at MIT – with the name inspired by the Southern Crux star constellation I adored when filming in the Peruvian Amazon. More recently, I use Studio Crux as the entity under which I produce children’s songs (via AI), but it’s also an LLC I run with a commercial growth strategist. At one point, Studio Crux was the entity under which I and a business collaborator advised startup founders on validating their product viability. Sometimes I still collaborate with others on various projects, but of late this has shifted from tech projects with AI strategists, design thinking SMEs, and data scientists to creative collaborations with musicians and actors.
I’m a Philly person who spent many years in Boston and the latter half of adulthood in NYC.
Personal profile
I am a producer at heart, with a researcher mindset and a passion for innovation. I am constantly – and I mean constantly – devising new products, services, and identifying market opportunities: how to create them, how to take them to market, how to monetize them, whom to hire to execute and scale them.
Some examples of this annoyingly constant production mindset that almost plagues me, daily, include:
2024: The kid’s songs informed by conscious parenting principles and composed by AI started as instructional jingles that I wrote for my daughter, to help her to learn lessons like not running into the street. I shared this jingle with a parenting expert, who shared it with his quarter million followers, and realized I was onto something. Writing poetry and songs is easy, fun, and fulfilling for me, so I pumped out two albums worth of songs very quickly. But I took a user-centric approach, first polling 10 or 12 parent friends about desired song topics, then turning their input into a larger survey for more parents, asking them prioritize all ideas and letting that determine which songs I wrote first. While the goal was and still is to have an actual human singer record these, most of my singer friends were, you know, busy paying the bills with their musical gifts, so I discovered suno.com and used that as a stopgap. I may or may not be collaborating with a Swiss teenager to record human versions of the songs. Stay tuned! And check out Audubot online or on music platforms if you’re interested.
2019-present: Watching really subpar children’s videos on the internet with my young daughter spiraled me into mapping the characteristics of top children’s production channels, tracking their creators’ net worth and trajectory to success, identifying repeatable patterns in their content, and figuring out where there are glaring opportunities for new and better content. I also couldn’t help but notice some patterns in engaging or successful children’s books, so I added these to my research spreadsheets and would ultimately like to publish my own books – an evolution, perhaps, of my AI conscious parenting songs – to test some of my hypotheses on what a successful model includes. Please get in touch if you want to collab around this!
2023: A solidly mediocre but faithful pottery hobbyist, I signed up for a membership at a new ceramics studio and remembered that there’s still a huge product/market gap someone needs to fill: a ceramics studio management application. Presently, managing the workflow of a single piece of pottery is complex, manual, and prone to fault. A student or studio member creates a piece, and has to either remember, write down, or physically check on when that piece will be bone dry for trimming; then they put it on a shelf to be bisqued in the kiln, with no way to identify the piece is theirs other than inscribing their initials underneath it, or keeping track. It might take a week or longer to be loaded into the kiln, and days to come out and cool down, and it’s up to the potter to check repeatedly to see if their piece has been unloaded and ready for pickup. This process is identical when a bisqued piece is glazed and put back into the kiln; there is no digital workflow management process. When pieces are finally finished, the studio manager often has to harass students and members to come pick them up, not knowing whose piece is whose. Many end up abandoned, and some are accidentally taken by other potters, broken during firing, or overglazed, ruining a kiln shelf (which often results in a penalty fee). Payment in general is another huge headache – there might be simple, online ways to pay for a class or membership, but paying for clay and firing pieces is often separate. In my studio, members manually measured each piece and calculated the cost for bisquing and glazing, then Venmo’d the studio manager. A piece of paper stuck into each piece confirmed the size and price. This entire process was highly inefficient. I began thinking of solutions: sensors that trigger alerts to the potter when a piece is out of the kiln? A more sophisticated ID system to track the whereabouts of a piece, and whether firing has been paid for? A more efficient shelf management system? Literally every aspect of the ceramics creation and studio management process is a mess, and the only apps that exist are for individual potters to keep track of the pieces they make and the glaze they use (plus their UIs are terrible). One studio management product could be piloted in a specific city or studio and rolled out to others over time. It’s a niche market, but a worldwide one, with no effective digital solutions. I began creating a backlog, created a brand name and purchased URLs, but did not have the time to devote to full product development. Who wants to co-found this product company with me?
2022: Discovering that my kid was a gestalt language processor (GLP), I learned a ton from her amazing speech therapist – who helped my kid go from almost no original language to articulate speech in less than a year. I also learned that the type of speech therapy that’s both necessary and extremely effective for GLPs is a model from created in the 1970s called Natural Language Acquisition (NLA) that’s been recently rediscovered, but is still very niche. If you can find a speech therapist trained in this method, chances are they won’t live near you. Therefore, there’s an incredibly dire need for parent coaching, remote training, and language sample analysis. So of course I scoped an MVP + scaled version of this imaginary app that ultimately would incorporate machine learning, AI and NLP for auto-analysis and real-time assessment of a child’s GLP development stage, plus offering remote coaching services and a directory of NLA-experienced SLPs. If you want to see the backlog for this NLA parent coaching speech therapy analysis app that I very much wanted and still want to create, in collaboration with this SLP, please hit me up.
2017-18: When pregnant, I dove into pregnancy apps, pregnancy communities, and post-birth online mom groups. These were, by and large, all pretty awful – and dare I say, often misogynistic in terms of propagating stereotypes around what it means to be a woman and a mom. And yet women desperately need camaraderie, advice, and actual scientific/medical facts during the process of pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood. I miiiiight have spent nearly all my trimesters scoping and sketching a more desirable prenatal knowledge sharing app, including partnership models and revenue strategies, but having a baby kind of put dev on hold. Permanently.
2016-18: Renting and later owning a home, a friend and I scoped a holistic renter experience app for both tenants and landlords. We wrote roadmaps and backlogs and created early non-functional prototypes and even spoke to three VCs, all of whom were interested in chatting again. But at that stage, we weren’t ready to quit our dayjobs, which would have been necessary. That friend is now CEO of her own successful consulting firm, but I’m hoping once she retires early we can actually put this into production.