Matt Elsley and Nick Larkins were school mates who lost touch and found each other again in their mid-20s. Neither of them set out to build an audio company. QSIC now runs in over 30,000 stores and is growing nearly 200% year on year, but it took a networking business, a smart home company, and a global pandemic to get there. In the latest episode of Q'd Up, they walk through all of it.

Two Businesses Before This One

Nick's first venture had nothing to do with audio. It 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. The idea was solid. The model wasn't: no recurring revenue, and clients kept ripping the hardware out after install. Good businesses need a reason for the customer to stick around. Easy Control never had one.

From Smart Homes to Smart Stores

What did carry over was the automation and digital systems know-how, and it turned out residential wasn't the only place that knowledge was useful. Matt and Nick started digging into retail and hospitality background music and found something surprising: zero data behind what anyone was actually playing. Nobody was measuring it. Nobody was optimising it. It was just noise filling a room.

Early experiments proved the gap was worth closing. 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. Two seconds sounds small until you multiply it across every order, every store, every day.

The Pivot to Retail Media

Charging a utility fee for music was always going to be a race to the bottom. Somebody would always undercut it. So they flipped the model: audio stopped being a cost line and became a revenue stream, through in-store retail media. Transactional data backed it up, including an 8% unit volume lift for one milk brand through contextual ad serving.

The advantage over posters and static signage isn't subtle either. A poster relies on someone actually complying, walking past, glancing up, remembering. Digital audio guarantees execution and delivers data in real time. You know it played, and you know what happened after it played.

Weathering COVID

By 2020, QSIC was 40 to 45 people deep and heavily hospitality-focused, which is about the worst possible position to be in when lockdowns hit. With 85 to 90% of clients shut, QSIC adjusted fees to match store status instead of chasing invoices from businesses that couldn't pay them. That goodwill paid off in loyalty long after doors reopened.

The forced downtime became a reset rather than a dead stop. The team used it to rebuild an experimentation and demand-sensing platform designed to scale to 100,000 stores. That rebuild is a big part of why QSIC now operates in over 30,000 stores and keeps growing at nearly 200% year on year.

AI, Infrastructure, and the Edge

For QSIC, AI 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 combination they've been building towards. AI now powers IoT fleet monitoring across tens of thousands of devices, with self-healing code, anomaly detection, and automated alerts doing the heavy lifting that used to require a much bigger ops team.

The architecture is swinging back from centralised to edge too: smart agents pushed right down to the store layer, so things keep running even when the network doesn't. It's the kind of infrastructure decision you only make once you've lived through what happens when systems go down at the worst possible moment.

The Takeaway

QSIC's origin story isn't really about audio. It's about two people who kept following the data through three different businesses until they found the one where the data actually mattered. That instinct, chase what the numbers are telling you and be willing to rebuild the model when they say so, is the through-line from point-of-sale networking to a 30,000-store retail media platform.

Hear the full conversation, including the parts that didn't make it into these show notes, on Q'd Up.

Source: Q'd Up podcast, "The QSIC Founders' Story: From Smart Homes to Smart Stores" episode with Matt Elsley and Nick Larkins