Opt-in geographical map of MOD Duo owners for emergency loans, trials etc

Hi all, I was recently having an interesting discussion about how the Duo stacks up against more mainstream digital multi-effects boxes such as the Line6 HX Effects, one big advantage of going with a mainstream brand like Boss or Line6 was pointed out to me which I couldn’t deny:

If you’re on tour and your unit breaks or gets stolen before an important gig, you have a reasonable chance of resolving the emergency by finding the nearest electric guitar shop and buying a replacement, or if you’re even luckier, renting it.

Since the Duo is currently nowhere near mainstream, sadly this is unlikely to be an option. I don’t tour much currently, but this does make me nervous for when I do. However I had an idea which might address this:

Build a crowd-sourced, opt-in map of Duo owners who would be willing to loan their Duo to help out another Duo owner in an emergency where they needed one but didn’t have their own available. For example, I live in London UK, and I’d happily loan my Duo to another owner who was on tour in London if theirs broke or was stolen, especially if I knew that that person would reciprocate if I was ever in their shoes near their home town.

This could be implemented with something as simple as Google My Maps.

What do you think? Of course this would be an entirely optional thing, and the details around equipment insurance (or maybe a deposit scheme) would probably need to be worked out, but I think it would take an already awesome community to the next level of helping each other out!

In fact, the map could also even track owners who are happy to let prospective buyers try the Duo out before ordering from MOD’s online shop.

I think this would really help bootstrap the MOD customer base, so I’m cc’ing @MOD_Ronny here as I think this would be very much in MOD’s interest to organise.

By the way, if you want to see the full Duo vs. Line6 HX Effects discussion, I’ve linked it from Comparing the Duo with its rivals.

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I love this idea!

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To me, the discussion over in Comparing the Duo with its rivals reaffirmed the importance of prospective MOD customers being able to “try before they buy”. And surely whilst MOD devices are generally harder to find in local guitar shops, the ability to try out one belonging to an existing customer could be a big help in this respect. But you’d need to provide motivation for existing owners to let prospective customers try out their device - so @Camille how about setting up a referral / affiliate scheme?

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Now that we’ve shed our money to buy our Duo, we are all in a big boat and what make the Duo so special is the community we are making part of.

I’m in for that !

What would make this idea maybe more appealing would be the ability to quickly snapshot/restore all the current state of a give Duo so that a “guest” could rapidly install all their pedalboards and settings into a given unit without compromising whatever the owner had in there.

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couldn’t you just use the backup function for that?

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I know some guy in my region who is selling a Mod (second hand), as he’s not using it due to lack of time and the device is not what he was looking for apparently.
So to give the device a ‘new home’, he’s selling it.
And I’m going to test this evening.
If I buy, it’s at a lower rate, but I probably won’t have the warranty anymore… However, if it works, it will be a joy. And I hope to be able to contribute somehow to the community afterwards buy building some nice pedalboard and sounds.

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I am not sure the backup/restore works across different versions of the OS etc… but I may be wrong. The idea is that both users could feel entirely at home, even if the owner has installed experimental/development stuff on their MOD. A bit like a live Linux distro for a PC.