Thank you all for the huge amount of feedback. Be it frustration or empathy, excitement about the potential of the platform or harsh criticism about unmatched expectations: It’s all valid and understandable. In this very special moment we are grateful to see the future of MOD is a concern for most of you.
To reboot, we need to look at the foundations which have been achieved, the learnings we paid a high price for, and what the MOD platform can become. As of now, we are aware of many shortcomings. We could be scared by it, leave the market to the big players and accept there is no space for our approach.
I’m not quite there yet.
Please take into account that MOD has been in survival mode since the end of 2020. We had to let go basically half of our staff since then, including a full time plugin developer, a software QA engineer and a hardware QC specialist in the products team. The tasks were covered by the rest of the team including management. Everybody remaining worked part time for certain periods, in order to get some other income from freelancing or government support in Corona time (called Kurzarbeit in Germany). On top a way too high amount of the engineering capacity was occupied with alternative parts or supplier qualification, including even @falktx making an alternative system-on-module work for the Duo X. While I’m not claiming that everything you desire would be in place in an alternative well funded history, I think it’s safe to say the impact would be huge.
Some of you lost confidence MOD has capability to produce the remaining crowdfunded units. I would like to give a different perspective. Most crowdfunded hardware projects which fail to deliver don’t get a prototype to a mass producible state, engineering wise. Including the retail units we shipped more than 1k Dwarfs, so we are beyond this challenge. There are still improvements for sure but our peak production output in brief moments of proper cash and with all components in place was already >150 Dwarfs per week. So it’s funding and sourcing parts that will be decisive for delivery.
Now, we would not ask investors to fund the reboot if we would not have any idea how to sort out production within the projected runway. We had some sourcing success which could not make it to shipped devices due to the financial situation. Plus we made the decision to focus. Let me give some more details:
As of today, production of the MOD Duo X is blocked, and there is no cheap way to overcome that.
For the MOD Dwarf the situation is quite different. It had priority already before and there are 1600 sets of custom long lead time parts left at the contract manufacturer in Germany, including the enclosures of the already fancy coated Founders Edition. Our contractor has more than 1200 sets of the full custom electronic BOM in stock and sees currently a relief in certain scarce components. Unlike with the Duo X where we faced a dry spot market for hard to replace components, spot buying of certain Dwarf components was also possible with multiples of 2-10 only. The system-on-module for the Dwarf, which we purchase just-in-time as it’s the most expensive single component, is the only major part not yet at the factory. But the supplier procured key parts based on our forecasts some time ago and confirmed the availability for the projected runway. So the preconditions to deliver all the Dwarfs we owe are pretty much there. Since we have the special coating for the tier 3 backers, we can’t even be tempted to ship this inventory to retail.
The thing is, nothing of that is of any help for the backers at this very moment. The inventory from the insolvent MOD Devices GmbH is not under our control any more and needs to be bought from the insolvency estate as well as all the non-GPL immaterial assets.
I believe a MOD reboot would be the best outcome for basically everybody here, be it Dwarf-, Duo X- or Duo-users or backers who did not receive their Dwarf or Expression pedal. Please acknowledge that we are not asking backers for investment to finally get their pledge, as it was stated several times here. We opened an investment option for those in the community who have the free cash and wish to participate in this opportunity, but this is not related to unfulfilled backers. The focus is professional investors who are able to bring enough funding to do it right.
Until proven otherwise I’m staying optimistic that we can close that in time.
still loving your project.
Wait! 