MOD Insolvency and Reboot

This is indeed sad, but somewhat expected news. These are times of great change and crisis in so many parts of society and the world. We are only seeing the beginning. Let us be happy music has found us, and that we will allways be rockin and sharing peace and hope even with one string left on the guitar. our hands to clap, chest to beat and our voice to Howl :grin: . My support goes to the MOD TEAM for working, keeping this great idea and vision alive! I enjoy every day reading this forum, and learn a lot about Midi and CV.
It is true these devices ( I have the DUO & MDX and patient Tier 3 Backer) are not just plug and play, but somehow great technology invites you to go beyond the “Black Box” level of understanding and into the deeper levels of programming and hardware. This is not my area of skill, but I am constantly inspired to learn. As a Tier 3 backer I can understand the frustration of living through hope and disappointment. However I encourage you to be proud of having the guts to believe in an idea and a vision which perhaps is somewhat “counter commercial” in todays world of business, where ideas and patents are, too often, either bought or discarded. The “platform”, “network”, “community”, “technology” and “visions” which has been created will keep on evolving, however in a perhaps more decentralized form. Open source programming will prevail, grow and evolve! Just wish I could be a part of contributing in that as more than just a musician with a mouse scrolling thorugh a UI. That would make me feel even more optimistic :grinning:
Lots of love to the MOD team and the community as a whole! Lets support each other and be strong together!!

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I’m sorry to hear all of this and I just want to say, as a tier 3 backer, no hard feelings if it turns out you can’t deliver (although I still reaaally hope you do). It’s a very difficult position you found yourself in.

Round about the time of the initial Kickstarter campaign I toyed with the idea of also developing some electronic audio hardware and putting it on Kickstarter. I did some back of the envelope calculations and used the dwarf campaign as a model to estimate prices people are willing to pay and sales numbers. I concluded it would be too tight, even if no global catastrophes happened. I just hope all the best for the future of mod devices.

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The web interface is just between your PC and the Dwarf, so it should not be impacted by the service outage. The parts that are currently cloud-based and unavailable at the moment are the plugin store (if you don’t already have it on your Dwarf, you won’t be able to download/install it until the store is back up), and the pedalboard sharing site. As of this post, the wiki is still functional as well. Cheers!

As a co-founder, investor and a long-time member of the engineering team, my two cents:

I’ve read every message in this thread before posting to make sure I hear all opinions and feelings (lots of feelings going on!). This is indeed a very sad outcome, regardless of a potential second act. It’s not only the money invested but a lot of sweat and time. We can still make a living but we’ll never make the time back.

One thing in particular that I’m proud of is the community that we built around this project. You’ve stick with us during good times and definitely during bad times. I don’t expect any different now. But it’s very rewarding to see this thread in this form, so thanks for the kind words.

I feel for all of you that might end up empty handed, I really do. In the end, it is what it is. Mistakes were made as it’s always the case. Everything in life carries some risk. Companies go bankrupt all the time and it’s why the system works, I think. Old must make way for the new. Crowdfunding is one of the most risky things there is out there. Every startup is dead on arrival, until you prove otherwise. I wish they were more upfront about it.

The destination is not the reward, the journey is the reward. You guys, are the journey.

Still crossing my fingers there will be a second act…

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This a concern of mine.
I’m no coder but perhaps I can help with marketing, UX review etc.
Just as I’m getting a grasp of a good workflow to set up pedalboards, this happens.
Having a COMPLETELY open source “mirror” service to be a safety net until things clear up might be the only chance to survival: to ensure CONTINUITY.

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To all it might concern @ MOD Devices

There is not too much wrong with the product.
I still believe in it, in its future, its promise, its potential.
If you want to save this complete ecosystem, including the Community you’ve built, you’ve got to FOCUS.
Product focus? perhaps
I’m talking PEOPLE FOCUS

EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT

FOCUS on the people:
Customers: USER JOURNEY - Under promise, over deliver; try to save the solus still on the fence and work on damage control
Employees: find a way to to keep them close and they have the unwritten knowledge and experienxce
Community: as you might be surprised what you can source here if you approach them well.

You will still face great difficulties onboarding guitarists, as MOST of them will find it too hard to set up some good tones right away. I like fiddling and even I needed quite some time to set up something that was sounding well AND reliable. Gain complexity, akward tones, … Where’s the step by step, the basic primer that will work for everybody to build upon? the “in device tutorial”?
If you can load pedal board from a webpage, you can also make a JOURNEY on a webpage, having users gradually go through everything without going overwhelmed.
The fact that you guys pull off shit that is remarkeable in a technical fashion, proves you are great engineers. Yet these things that seem obvious to me never seemed to be on the table or at least feasable.

Speak direct language.
We read a lot of facts and promises but seldom REAL QUESTIONS.
Communition goes both ways.
It sometimes felt only 2, sometimes 3 guys @ MOD were able to communicate back.

ANSWER THIS QUESTIONS QUICK BEFORE YOU LOSE QUASI EVERYBODY HERE:
1: What is your solution to the undelivered DWARF’s
2: What is the solution for people being able to USE their devices and access the BETA plugins etc (in other words; how do owners get the most mileage out of their units?

For me personally?
Although the Dwarf is powerful, my documented User Journey shows implictely and explicitely what to address for (starting) DWARF users (LievenDV’s Dwarf journal

I FEEL:

  • SAD: because I sympathize with MOD
  • HOPEFUL for a reboot
  • ANGRY: for my investment of time and money is in danger
  • INSECURE: Should I continue investing time and effort in my device or is it a lost cause anyway?
    I didn’t sell my other gear of course but the DWARF was becoming the centerpiece of all my musical projects (heavy metal, acoustic solo and I was about to learn piano)
  • IRRITATED that the stuff addresses by many people here was being addressed over and over again and MOD often seemed to busy either apologizing or “being engineers” and not communicators, crisis managers and marketeers

I guess most people will feel similar and you will need to get to the core of the emotions of these people
LESS “engineering”
MORE Human

Humans make mistakes but learned that being WILLING is alsway the best option, as being READY is often a destination that keeps getting away from you.

Show WILLINGNESS, OPENNESS but don’t just flood everybody with facts. That only bores and annoys people.

You will have to cut indeed.
Lose weight.
make sacrifices

I hope you cut off the right stuff and what’s left is the RIGHT STUFF John Glenn style.

WHAT CAN I OFFER?
*** Review & consultancy of marketing material and communications**
*** Some art creation and photoshopping**
*** Continued journal of my user journey**
*** my true forte is brainstorming. The concepts. (I’m not a tester AT ALL for instance)**
*** Propagating the good word in this Community :D**

WHAT DO I WANT IN RETURN?
Something to believe in.
I can’t promise endless hours of pro bono work; I have to be realistic. but I do a lot for a good trade. Gear you have laying around?. No value in your bookkeeping? it might to me. might book my services for many hours :smiley:

I don’t know wht to think now.
I have gigs lined up from which I planned to learn but all of a sudden I don’t feel like that.
What will MOD do to be PRO-ACTIVE in this matter?

now go, go and
MAKE CHOICES
MANAGE EXPECTATIONS (and not just by blurting facts and excuses)

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Yep.
Survival of the MOD team under a new flag or whatever, production of new units is one thing. I really hope it will work somehow, but there is not a lot that regular joe without a oversized wallet can do on this topic.

Another thing is securing functionality of the already existing devices, valuable for their owners.
We might need an escape hatch, probably similar to what Rebble has done for Pebble, something more community driven.
And it would be much easier with server-side tools provided by MOD.

But some things can be done by a user on his own.
At least, it makes sense to backup all the existing repos and available wiki documentation just for the worst case scenario. Preserve firmware files you have downloaded. Backup your MOD device filesystem to keep your already downloaded plugins. Et cetera.

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well, not too much bad… I mean, I love my Dwarf but, being honest, it’s far, really far from perfect in its actual state. It’s kinda uncomfortable if you’re a guitar player to create patches, the connection to the pc isn’t really stable and you can’t create even simple pedalboards directly on the device, it has some noise issues, there is a real lack of some plugins in the guitar department and a huge amount of not really good sounding ones or really repetitive… I mean, obviously it’s a cool and good device and with some time, resources and updates it would have grown to be truly competitive, but let’s be honest! it is lacking in some departments.

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true, noise and hard to use pugins are a big issue still.
I’m still disappointed that there never was a decent and deceisive campaign to tackle the noise issues and a better way to hold the hands of users that could benefit of interactive tutorials and some REAL solid vanilla patches for acoustic, clean, mild drive, crunchy and metal.
You have to be an optimist to “feel” the opportunity where others get frustrated in their experience.

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MODFather
Any guesstimate on when pedalboards DOT moddevices DOT com and downloads DOT moddevices DOT com might be back up?

Is this a matter of hosting space? If so, I, like others here, have hosting space I am wiling to donate for as long as is needed to ensure that the boards and plugins can be made available either by you or independent devs who want to continue creating plugins or code updates for the device.

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@Lou0151, MOD isn’t truly an open source project. If you or someone else, in ‘the community’ were to host their system(s), you’d become privy to their intellectual property (IP). Btw, IP is pretty much the antithesis of open source …

In my view, this is emblematic of many things here. A lot could be said about this alone, but suffice it to say, there are philosophical issues here which underlay what’s occurred.

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Just a strange idea “out-of-the-box”, what about trying to sell your idea/end-product to Music Tribe as they have the capacity to carry out such productivity as they have a more linear ownership to their production-line?

  1. The product can be carried out and you may even be able to expand production-line with their support.
  2. You could throw a condition that required the new “parent” company to deliver the product to backers.

@Lou0151

No. Not yet. As I wrote in a reply above:

At the moment the accounts are blocked and I cannot put them back on because I am not authorised to release any payment nor make decisions regarding the old company.

Hence, I am focusing on making the reboot happen so that I can simply reactivate the servers with the new company.

If the reboot does not happen, then I will get back here to speak about how we can release things in another manner.

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count me in!

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I’m absolutely gutted by this news!

I backed the MOD Duo with the extra foot switch and expression pedal. I was so impressed by it that I later took part in the Seedmatch funding (nothing big, but I believed in the product that much) and it didn’t take me long to decide to also back the Dwarf.
I haven’t received my expression pedal and Dwarf (tier 3 backer) and I was willing to wait it out, because I knew that, when it would finally show up, it would be good!

That’s one of the things that amazed me most about my MOD Duo: the quality of the product, both hardware and software. Something not many companies manage to do well both! Either their hardware is top notch, but the software sucks, or it’s the other way round! And of course, there is still a lot of room for improvement, but also only that: improvement, I never had any show-stopping issues, it never let me down.

I don’t blame any of you guys, because I’m sure you tried everything possible to keep the boat afloat. But sometimes thing just don’t work out… I also don’t understand some people’s remarks about it being obsolete when it will arrive: it’s an FX unit, not a laptop! People are still merrily using FX pedals from the 80’s and 90’s (I do, at least). It won’t stop working, because someone else makes an FX processor with a more powerful CPU…

I also think that not fulfilling the outstanding crowdfunded units would be a very bad mistake (and not just because you still owe me 2 pieces): it would leave a very bad taste in people’s mouths and it would be something that would be following you for a long time. If you fulfill them, you would instantly have created a very good reputation. Don’t fulfill and your reputation has the risk of being damaged beyond repair… Wrecking a good reputation is easy, building one is something else entirely: you can throw all the money in the world at it, it won’t become any better if you don’t keep your promises.

So I really hope this reboot works out, even if it’s under a different name: as long as the quality of MOD is there, I’ll be more than happy.

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I really thought IP and Open Source were going hand in hand. For instance with the GNU GPL, the author of the source is still owning the IP on the source. And they precisely use that IP to impose the strict rules of the GPL on the source code to control what is done with it. Open Source is different from simply having something in the public domain.

That said, I understand that the costs of producing something like the Dwarf are quite high. Wouldn’t it have been a good strategy to add an cheaper-to-produce entry level product to the MOD catalog in the first place, that would have been a source of income and at better tool for penetrating the market ?

Something based on easy to source off-the-shelf components ? Sort of better packaged MODEP sort of thing ? That would have exposed the excellent MOD concept to larger consumer base and created a larger market for upper hand Dwarf and MODX. I suppose you thought of that @gianfranco

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Absolutely, that’s was the Dwarf :sweat_smile: at that time it was a lot cheaper to produce than anything MOD had made before

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True.

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@LievenDV first of all thanks for your really to-the-point yet complete feedback, showing all your feelings in a respectful and super understandable way, as always.

I will not go in to answer you on everything just after reading even because a lot of the questions, doubts and/or suggestions that you are giving are not really up to me to decide. Rest assured that I personally share your opinion in quite a lot of them.
I will only answer now to this one…

The device will not stop working, simply the plugin store and any updates are currently not available. What is in your device is in your device.
If it gives you any trust, I will have quite some gigs during September with a particular project of mine and the core of my setup in that project is a Dwarf and a DuoX. Actually, we will even add more functionalities to the DuoX and (now with the SPDIF separated out) we will use it also for some backing tracks. I’m not sure if this gives you a bit more trust or not really on using it, but nothing should be wrong with that.

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