Willow Smith – The Invisible Storyteller: Crafting Magic Through Audio Engineering

QSIC co-founders Nick Larkins (Chief Product Officer) and Matt Elsley (CEO) sit down for the origin story. From point-of-sale networking to smart homes to becoming an audio company, they trace the winding road that got QSIC here, how COVID nearly ended it all and then remade it, and why AI is the tailwind they've been building towards for a decade.Before QSICNick and Matt are school mates who reconnected in their mid-20s. Nick's first venture was a point-of-sale networking business, servicing around 300 businesses across Australia. Next came Easy Control, a home automation and smart home installation business. Great idea, bad model: no recurring revenue, and clients kept ripping out the hardware post-install.From Smart Homes to Smart StoresThe automation and digital systems know-how carried straight over from residential to commercial spaces. They started digging into retail and hospitality background music and found zero data behind what anyone was actually playing. Early experiments proved it: higher BPM and louder tracks sped up table turnover in cafes. They even got McDonald's to test kitchen music, ramping tempo with store busyness and shaving 2 seconds off drive-thru times at peak.The Pivot to Retail MediaCharging a utility fee for music was a race to the bottom, so they flipped it: audio stopped being a cost and became a revenue stream through in-store retail media. Transactional data proved the model worked, including an 8% unit volume lift for one milk brand through contextual ad serving. Unlike posters that rely on someone actually complying, digital audio guarantees execution and delivers data in real time.Weathering COVIDBy 2020, QSIC was 40-45 people deep and heavily hospitality-focused, right as lockdowns hit. With 85-90% of clients shut, they adjusted fees to match store status instead of chasing invoices, and that goodwill paid off in loyalty long after doors reopened. The forced downtime became a reset: they rebuilt an experimentation and demand-sensing platform designed to scale to 100,000 stores. QSIC now runs in 30,000 stores and is growing nearly 200% year on year.AI, Infrastructure, and the EdgeAI isn't a threat to the business, it's rocket fuel. A decade of field data plus foundational models at the application layer is exactly the combo they've been waiting for. AI also powers IoT fleet monitoring across tens of thousands of devices, with self-healing code, anomaly detection, and automated alerts doing the heavy lifting. The architecture is swinging back from centralised to edge: smart agents pushed right down to the store layer, so things keep running even when the network doesn't.Time Stamps[00:00:00] – Intro[00:01:18] – Where it all started: The early hustle and first businesses[00:08:24] – Bringing music into retail and shaping the in-store experience[00:12:27] – From background music to retail media: Why measurement changed everything[00:20:00] – COVID hits: The strategic pivots that kept the business moving[00:30:11] – The AI revolution and why edge computing matters for what's next[00:42:18] – Building it right: Infrastructure and execution excellence

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