A small music venue in the heart of downtown Nashville — built around immersive sound and incredible experiences.

I've been on both sides of the bar, up on stage and down in the crowd.

I've spent years watching people come to Nashville expecting the greatest music city in the world, then spend their evening in a multi-level honky tonk where the music is so loud you can't even talk, and the musicians are top-notch but the songs are generic classic or trending popular songs.

Show Stop is the room I've wanted to build the entire time. Where the sound is clear and the music is authentic and truly world class.

The gap we're filling

Nashville draws roughly 16.8 million visitors a year, generating over $10 billion in economic impact. A meaningful share of those people come specifically for the music.

And when they get here, they get two choices:

Broadway. Mega-bars optimized for volume, noise, and turnover. Bar revenue is the product; the band is the wallpaper. Nobody is really listening.

The arena. The Ryman, Bridgestone. Extraordinary, but expensive, occasional, and impersonal — the opposite of the intimate artist discovery most music travelers are actually hoping for.

There is no small, sound-first, immersive room downtown. Not one. Nashville is oversupplied with volume and undersupplied with intimacy.

That's the niche we fill. And saving a bit of Nashville's soul and credibility as Music City USA.

What Show Stop is

A 110-capacity destination listening room with juke-joint warmth and immersive audio.

We're taking a 2,150 square foot, 120-year-old building at 217 Arcade Alley — the former Back Alley Diner — inside the redeveloped Nashville Arcade project. Dedicated entrance off the alley. Main-floor seating for 72, plus a 28 seat VIP balcony with a bird's-eye view of the stage.

No televisions. No cover bands playing "Wagon Wheel" for the fourth time that night. Just the stage and the immersive sound.

The alley entrance isn't a compromise — it's the brand. Show Stop is meant to feel like a room you found, not a room you were funneled into.

The thing nobody else downtown has

We're building around Yamaha AFC — Active Field Control.

AFC creates a true 3D sound field. Every seat in the house gets studio-quality fidelity, and the acoustic character of the room can be reshaped for what's on stage that night: an acoustic songwriter round at 6pm, a full band at 9, an immersive DJ set at midnight. Same room. Fundamentally different experience.

This matters in three directions at once:

For guests — there is no bad seat. Anywhere in the room is a good spot.

For artists — studio-grade sound plus built-in streaming infrastructure attracts the kind of performers who care how they sound. In this town, that's a recruiting advantage that compounds.

For the business — the room becomes a content asset. Live captures, streaming sessions, music video shoots, branded content. Not just a bar with a stage.

It's also genuinely hard to copy. This system is expensive and operationally complex to install and run. We expect to be the only room like it in Nashville for years.

How we make money

The mistake most venues make is betting everything on ticket sales. We designed the model to monetize every room-hour instead — and tickets stay under half of total revenue in all five years, by design.

How it works

Ticketed shows

Curated nightly programming. Y1 $432K → Y5 $946K

Beverage

80% attachment, ~$25/guest. Y1 $274K → Y5 $613K

Private events

$2–8K per booking — corporate showcases, buyouts, VIP. Y1 $210K → Y5 $593K

Food

50% attachment, ~$15/guest. Compact menu, no kitchen drag

Content & streaming

Live captures and branded content built on the AFC system

Partnerships

Artist series, label and brand sponsorships

Up to four event formats per day — matinees, early sets, evening shows, late-night — means the room is utilized fully.

The team

Daniel Walker — Founder & CEO. Former Talent Buyer and CFO of Dee's Country Cocktail Lounge, a Rolling Stone–named hangout for Nashville's working musicians.

Cindy Cogbill — Programming & Industry. Current Director of Folk Alliance International, former Director of Operations at Overton Park Shell. Talent buying, sponsorship contracting, artist relations. Cindy is why our booking pipeline is renewable rather than a scramble.

Kyle Taylor — Creative & Brand. Multi-disciplined designer and marketing director; partner at Kinfolk, Bar Limina, and Hard Times Deli. Building the Show Stop identity and visual language.

Diana Azab — Marketing & Community. Promotions, outreach, partnership ecosystem. Her job is making sure Show Stop becomes a Nashville institution and not just a tourist attraction.

Founders bench: Robert Carter (Admissions / Front of House), Rick Trace (Video Design & Production), Andrew Smith (Lighting Design & Install).

And from Elliott Kyle, Developer of the Nashville Arcade:

"Daniel Walker was our first call — and our only call — for this space."

Where we are today

This isn't a concept looking for a location. We're ready to go.

1. Architectural plans complete
2. Builder lined up and quoted
3. Immersive audio proof-of-concept system assembled
4. Permits in process
5. $100,000 of founders capital already deployed
6. Lease terms negotiated — 10 years plus a 5-year option

Target opening: Spring 2027. Close capital → complete buildout → install sound and lighting → launch programming → open.

What we're raising, and what it buys

We're raising $970,000 on Wefunder for approximately 35% investor equity.

That contingency line item is there by design. The fastest way to kill a venue is to open it underfunded and then run it scared.

How investors get paid

We structured this to return cash early rather than dangle a hypothetical exit.

Step 1 — Pre-recoupment: 75% of distributable cash flow goes to investors until your capital is fully returned — after taxes, maintenance capex, and required operating reserves. Founders take the minority share while investors are being made whole.

Step 2 — Post-recoupment: distributions shift to pro-rata by ownership — 35% investor / 65% founder.

On our base case that means a modeled payback of roughly 2.9 years, a ~1.69x cash multiple, a ~19% cash-only IRR, and a stabilized Year 5 cash yield around 34%.

Critically: no exit is assumed anywhere in these projections. Every dollar modeled comes from operating the room. A future sale or recapitalization would be upside on top — not the thing holding the underwriting together.

Why this, why now

The Arcade redevelopment created a genuinely rare window: lease economics that make a small premium room viable, wrapped in foot traffic from neighbors like Urban Cowboy, Buddy's Tiny Tonk and Bar Roza.

Nashville sells itself as Music City. For a lot of visitors, the actual experience doesn't match the promise — and for a lot of the musicians who live here, downtown stopped being a place they wanted to play. I want to build a room that fixes both. Small enough to feel like something happened to you. Serious enough about sound that the artist plays differently in it.

If you love music enough to care how it sounds, come with me. Let's make some music.

— Daniel Lawrence Walker Founder & CEO, Show Stop [email protected] · 615-268-1431

All financial figures are projections based on our operating model and are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially. Please review the full offering materials, including risk factors, before investing.