Right, these thing surely go on. However, it’s adventures in legal-land. It’s fiction … My main point is chiefly this, and not only that, it countervails reality in so many ways.
For instance, here in the west, patents and copyright are generally enforceable. Yet, try to go to China and have them observe the same laws and claims thereof. It’s very hard.
Even still, whether in the west or east, these protections only have jurisdiction over events which take place in commerce. What if we simply want to rip something off for non-commercial purposes? It becomes very hard to enforce.
I personally think we can do something better with ourselves than stake our value/worth on IP.
See, when companies regard a product roadmap, or their marketing plan as undisclose-able, precious IP, that’s when I think there’s a problem. The reason being, is that a brand’s success isn’t really about innovation, or outsmarting the competition; it’s about trust. A brand can weather all kinds of things if it’s customers have trust in it.
Right now, I’d say this is your main problem. At least it surely is for me.
So here’s the big question:
If you were to do it all over again–reboot, let’s say–what would you do?
Would you continue down this path of creating an ecosystem that relies on hardware you’re not able to produce? Rather, would you do something different?
“We believe that we always have the backers in mind but I understand if it doesn’t always feel that way. How do you feel that the ground root supporters have been sacrificed? what can we do better?”
From one of the mods in the previous thread that I can no longer reply to on…
Here’s the final example of sacrificing your ground root supporters and especially the tier 3 people who were willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and help the cause. We are left with nothing while you took our cash and sold our devices to new retail users so you could get more cash.
It’s pretty damn hard to try and be supportive anymore when this has happened. Sure, some of you who at least have your device can be all supportive to try and share patches etc which is great to see! ModDevices have also stopped me from risking my money on any more innovative crowdfunding companies. This is the first one out of quite a few that I’ve supported, have taken my money and given me nothing including at least one covid times project. It just goes to show you can’t trust companies that appear more established as opposed to solo creators doing it all off of their own back.
Sorry, my support for this company has run dry after years of waiting, their dubious business decisions and now this is the outcome. Never again. Will I get my Founders Edition one day? Would be something at least but I’m not hopeful. Lesson learnt.
I just ran through the investment papers. What is missing is a sense of realism and tangible info. There is no reference to what went wrong (mea culpa?) and how this can and will be avoided in the future. No assesment / reference underpinning sales (realistic?) and profitability (cost structure?). I adore my Mod Duo X, but as someone with quite some experience in financing structures - the way this is presented now seems like shooting the breeze … I really hope you can do a better job and keep the Mod model alive in the future.
** Opinions expressed here are my own for the sake of discussion and not those of the company **
The OS and a lot of plugins can already be implemented on other hardware and they already are so it does not rely on mod hardware.
However, the thing that I think is missing from the experience on other hardware is access to the store and sharing. I would love to see in the future, the ability for other hardware to run the OS with the user having a MOD account that they can use to authenticate plugins from the store and to share content. Much like how smartphone manufacturers can implement android and their customers have easy access to all the apps in the Google play store.
This would still require the company to still exist obviously to host the store and would require a significant amount of development to get everything working that way so here’s to hoping that MOD can get back on its feet and make this happen sometime in the future. I don’t see a way that can happen with just the community since hosting these platforms costs a lot of money. Though what is being done already without the plugin store can easily continue with the community and other ways of sharing can be used but they will likely be a bit less user friendly
I see a lot of suggestions made in this thread like “why didn’t you just do this?”. Well most of them are really good ideas and almost all of them were things we already thought about exhaustively. The fact is, everything takes time and money and in most cases, we wanted to do those things, they just hadn’t been done yet
I don’t want to diminish your frustration because it’s totally valid.
I just want to explain that the “cash” that was taken was use to develop and produce the product, the problem is that it turned out later to not be enough cash because everything became more expensive, so the choice had to be made. Does the company spend the remaining cash making a few more devices and go bunkrupt? or does the company start selling to retailers, to make more cash, which can be used to make enough devices for all of the kickstarter backers.
That’s the reality. The money from kickstarters was NOT enough to make everyone a device. So you need to raise more money. If the investment fell through, and you can’t sell to retail, then how do you propose raising the funds to make the devices?
As you can see from the update, the management were working for no salary and the team were working with months of late salary. Nobody was putting cash in their pockets. Everything was being put towards trying to make more devices. I’m sorry it wasn’t enough. If anything, I would think you would hope that the company could have sold a lot more devices to retailers because then there would be more money to make your device
Thanks for the reply and look, I totally understand the decision. It’s just rough that the initial supporters of the cause and the ones most patient were burnt. Seems very unfair.
Working for no money sucks ass too but yes, as the end consumer, traditionally this should not be part of the equation.
Let’s see what happens but the track record, I’m obviously dubious. Sucks I no longer feel comfortable supporting creative start ups as a byproduct.
It would have been unfair if we were selling brand new units now at the same price we sold to backers.
If that was the case, backers would have made a pre-purchase purely based on goodwill and belief.
But the case is different.
Units were pre-sold at half-price or even less in many cases. That is the bet made when crowdfunding.
The company needs to overcome a challenge to reach the shelves. It is not just money. It is also engineering, coding, marketing, supply, and production.
The company then offers the chance to get the product at a small price in exchange for entering the risk of failing the challenge. The heavy discount is paid by the backers with their assumed individual risk.
The fact is that, since we opened the campaign, the world became a different place. And the conditions to overcome the challenge changed a lot as it all became more difficult and prone to failure.
When conditions changed, we did not ask for more money from the backers. We asked for more time and patience and we, the shareholders, put the money ourselves.
We could have closed down in Q1.2021, once the fundraise collapsed. 75 beta units would have been shipped and that is it.
Instead, we opted to contact the community and expose the new conditions in which we considered we had a working plan. That plan included the private shareholders and founders making further investments and employees sacrificing part of their salaries to keep the company running, buying materials, and selling to higher-paying customers in parallel to the delivery of the crowdfunding units.
Unfortunately, the conditions kept worsening and it did not fully work out. But at least, instead of shipping only 75 crowdfunded units, we shipped more than 500.
Don´t you think this is a partial win for the backers?
It’s not true. We presented the tier options so that we could have time to fulfil all the orders. We didn’t know we couldn’t do it, we believed this would allow us to do it.
Nobody intended for that to happen to the tier 3 backers. Also, for context, most of the team had to apply for unemployment including me
We didn’t really have a choice. There were no guarantees or promises of any reward. We were just doing our best to make it happen for the community
That’s a good suggestion. I just wanted to try to dispell any ideas that we acted at the expense of the backers. We just did our best and conntinue to do so
Dude, these people worked for months with no salary, just lost their jobs, and the end of the world is still going on.
A little perspective wouldn’t hurt…
It’s very sad that such good project could die. I wish you will solve problems and make same as cool projects in the future. Btw, for those who have units, are the cloud going to work? And just an idea from the post before (about live-usb image) - since all the software already written then why not use personal computers as the end device (just pack the software as some convenient executable), and sell the keys for the cloud with pedals. Then the guitar processor would be just a running service in the personal computer.
Similar to @ildus, for the last few years, I’ve dreamed of having MOD available within a VST/AU plugin. Similar to Amplitube, BiasFX, NeuralDSP, Helix Native, GuitarRig, etc. Having my MOD pedalboards available in my DAW, not as individual (DAW routed) LV2’s which I already can do, but the full MOD routed pedalboard in a single VST/AU. I realize that the MOD-UI would have to re-coded as a plugin UI, and I’m sure wrapping MOD-Host as a plugin is no small task. But think of the market opportunity there! And no supply chain issues! MOD is way more flexible, expandable and hackable than any of the commercial solutions. And for those of us who have MOD compatible hardware (Duo, Dwarf, pi-Stomp, Zynthian, etc.) to be able to use the same pedalboard for both live into an amp/PA, and for recording within our DAW of choice.
I’m a kickstarter supporter of the MOD Duo, non-owner of the expression pedal and a tier-3-dwarf selector. I shared criticism of the communication and some decisions on quite a few occasions but the energy and community orientation of the team have been flawless. Some fights cannot be won but I am deeply grateful that you fought them anyway. You can therefore count me in on the investment.
Things will get better. Best wishes to all of you!
