AudioStack is an AI-native platform that's revolutionizing how enterprises create audio content at scale. Founded on the principle that AI should augment human creativity rather than replace it, they've built proprietary models that generate thousands of audio variations from a single creative brief.
Their platform serves Fortune 500 companies across media, entertainment, advertising, and podcast production, generating 10,000-30,000 unique audio assets monthly for individual customers. Think personalized advertising spots for every store location, or podcast intros tailored to different demographic segments—all produced at a scale that would be cost-prohibitive with traditional audio production methods.
Enterprise customers expect startup reliability
As AudioStack scaled, its incident management approach needed to mature alongside its technology. CTO and Co-founder Peadar Coyle understood the evolving expectations: "When you sell to the Enterprise. They don't want to accept any downtime. They're very concerned."
Enterprise customers weren't just buying AI audio technology, they were integrating AudioStack into their critical production workflows. When a retail chain needs 15,000 personalized audio ads updated with new pricing by tomorrow morning, platform reliability becomes paramount.
The challenge was particularly acute because AudioStack's customers often discover the platform's value during high-stakes campaigns. A media company might trial its service for a major product launch, or an advertising agency might depend on it for a time-sensitive campaign. First impressions matter enormously in these scenarios.
Knowledge concentration created organizational stress
Like many growing startups, AudioStack found its incident response capability concentrated in a small group of senior engineers. "You don't want to put all the load on one or two engineers," Coyle explains.
This knowledge concentration meant the team's incident response capability was highly dependent on specific individuals. While this is common in early-stage companies, it created stress for those key engineers who felt the weight of being constantly needed, and frustration for other team members who wanted to contribute but lacked the context to be effective.
The situation became more complex as AudioStack's engineering team grew. New hires were eager to take on responsibility, but the ad-hoc nature of their incident management meant there was no clear path for them to develop the necessary skills to respond effectively.
Tool fragmentation made coordination challenging
AudioStack's incident management stack had evolved organically, resulting in information scattered across multiple systems:
- PagerDuty for alerting, which Coyle describes as having a "woeful user experience"
- Notion pages with runbooks that weren't consistently updated or organized
- A separate status page that required manual updates and had no integration with their other systems
- Slack channels and email threads where critical information often got lost in the noise
During incidents, engineers found themselves jumping between multiple tools, trying to piece together context while also working to resolve the underlying issue. This fragmentation was particularly problematic for their customer-facing teams, who struggled to get timely updates to share with concerned clients.
The challenge wasn't that any individual tool was broken, but rather that the lack of integration made it difficult to maintain a clear picture of what was happening during incidents.
Selecting a new incident management platform
Rather than conducting a formal RFP process, AudioStack took a practical approach to evaluating incident.io. "I think the way I framed it internally was, let's give it a try for two weeks. And see how the engineers feel about it," Coyle recalls.
This approach reflected AudioStack's broader engineering culture: test things with real workloads and let the results speak for themselves. The timing worked out perfectly—during those two weeks, they experienced three genuine incidents that provided authentic test scenarios.
The evaluation wasn't about feature checklists or vendor presentations. It was about whether incident.io could handle their actual workflow needs during the stressful, time-sensitive moments when incident management tools matter most.
Pattern recognition and knowledge sharing
The turning point came during the third incident of their trial period: "One of them, the more junior engineers, was able to resolve the third incident because he just looked at the previous incidents and then noticed there was a pattern."
This moment was significant not just because the incident was resolved, but because it demonstrated how incident.io's design naturally promotes knowledge sharing. The junior engineer didn't need to interrupt a senior colleague or hunt through various documentation systems—the context was readily available and searchable.
For Coyle, this represented exactly the kind of organizational resilience they were trying to build: a team where incident response capability wasn't dependent on specific individuals being available.
Thoughtful rollout across 8 weeks
The implementation was deliberately measured, reflecting AudioStack's careful approach to operational changes:
Weeks 1-2: Initial trial with enthusiastic early adopters among the engineering team
Weeks 3-4: Expansion to additional engineers and first incidents managed entirely through incident.io
Weeks 5-6: Gradual inclusion of the commercial team with basic training on how to observe and understand incident status
Weeks 7-8: Parallel running with PagerDuty while migrating alerting rules and completing status page integration
This timeline allowed the team to build confidence with the new system while maintaining their existing safety nets. It also gave them time to develop new protocols and documentation without the pressure of a hard cutover date.
The results: A complete transformation in incident culture
From knowledge silos to team-wide empowerment
The most significant change was in team dynamics. Junior engineers who had previously felt hesitant to engage with incidents now had the context and tools they needed to contribute meaningfully.
The searchable incident history meant that patterns became visible across the team, not just to senior members who had been around long enough to remember similar issues. This created a more collaborative approach to problem-solving and helped distribute the cognitive load that had previously fallen on a few key people.
New team members could observe how incidents were handled, learn from the approach of more experienced colleagues, and gradually take on more responsibility as their confidence grew.
Commercial teams became active participants
"The customer-facing team loved it. Because they could get the information from Slack themselves," Coyle reports.
This change had cascading effects throughout the organization. Customer-facing team members could now provide proactive updates to clients instead of waiting for engineering to remember to communicate status changes. They could answer questions about incident resolution times and demonstrate AudioStack's professional approach to handling issues.
In one particularly telling example, a commercial team member presented incident.io metrics during a company sprint demo, highlighting it as a source of customer value. This wasn't engineering celebrating their tooling—it was the entire company recognizing how transparent incident management strengthened client relationships.
Built for how engineering teams work
These transformative outcomes weren't accidental; they resulted from incident.io's specific approach to solving incident management challenges.
Slack integration eliminated context switching
"There's something with that Slack workflow. So you got to realize that the average engineer just spends a lot of their time in Slack," Coyle observes.
Rather than forcing engineers to adopt yet another tool that lives outside their primary communication platform, incident.io met them where they already spent their time. The Slack integration meant that incident updates, status changes, and resolution notes all flowed naturally into the team's existing communication patterns.
Knowledge democratization over pure automation
While traditional incident management tools focus heavily on automation and alerting, AudioStack found that their bigger challenge was making incident response knowledge accessible to their entire team. incident.io's approach to surfacing historical context, maintaining searchable runbooks, and providing clear incident timelines addressed this need directly.
Consolidation that actually works
Many incident management solutions focus on specific aspects like alerting or status pages, but incident.io provided AudioStack with a unified platform that eliminated the need to maintain integrations between multiple tools. For a growing company, this consolidation meant fewer vendor relationships to manage and less time spent on maintaining integrations between systems.
Startup-friendly approach
As a startup, AudioStack needed a solution that could grow with them without requiring significant upfront investment or complex enterprise negotiations. incident.io's transparent pricing and generous free tier allowed them to start small and expand usage as they saw value.
Equally important, the incident.io team's background in scaling engineering organizations meant they understood the specific challenges AudioStack was facing, rather than treating them as a smaller version of an enterprise customer.
The cultural shift continues
Beyond the tactical improvements, AudioStack experienced a fundamental cultural shift in how they thought about incidents. Instead of viewing them as disruptions to be minimized, they began to see them as learning opportunities that could benefit the entire team.
The visibility provided by incident.io meant that successful resolution patterns became organizational knowledge rather than individual expertise. This created a positive feedback loop where each incident made the team more capable of handling future issues.
Looking forward: Building organizational resilience
For AudioStack, incident.io represented more than just a tool upgrade—it was a step toward building organizational resilience that could scale with their growth.
The democratization of incident knowledge means their capability is no longer dependent on retaining specific individuals or hoping that key engineers remain available during critical moments. Instead, incident response has become a shared competency across the team.
As Coyle reflects on the transformation: "Enterprise customers evaluate reliability as part of the total product offering." incident.io helps startups like AudioStack meet those expectations while building internal capabilities that support sustainable growth.
The cultural shift from reactive to proactive incident management has also influenced how AudioStack thinks about other operational challenges. The transparency and knowledge-sharing patterns they've developed around incidents have begun to influence their approach to documentation, onboarding, and cross-functional collaboration
