What Killed Thumtronics?

I killed Thumtronics, as its CEO, through my own inexperience.

Two major errors — both mine — killed Thumtronics, thus preventing the Thummer from reaching the market.

These errors were:
1) Starting Thumtronics is the wrong location.
2) Failing to observe the KISS Principle ("Keep It Simple, Stupid").

Location
I started Thumtronics in a tiny hick town (Busselton, Western Australia). Great place to semi-retire, but a lousy place to start a high-tech company. I believed that the world had become flat. However, if you're trying to get a start-up off the ground, geography still matters. Your first step must be to relocate to an appropriate start-up hub.

For Thumtronics, not relocating was fatal. Most of my other mistakes, large and small, could have been avoided simply by starting up in (for example) Austin, and taking advantage of its excellent start-up infrastructure.

KISS
I was initialy attracted to the Thummer, as an investment of my own time and money, because it was "old wine in new bottles," in which the bottle provided all of the added value. All I needed to do was wrap off-the-shelf parts in a new instrument-shape, and voila! — I'd have an inexpensive, expressive new instrument that was easy to learn, fully compatible with all existing (USB-)MIDI-based hardware and software, and patentable. Everything in the Thummer would be off-the-shelf except for its user interface, which was the only remaining source of value in the musical instrument industry's value chain (everything else having been commoditized).

Even better, every performance of the Thummer — whether live or in a video — would implicitly "endorse" the Thummer's unique abilities. Further, because the Thummer would look so unmistakably different from everything else, every performance would also be an "advertisement" for the Thummer. Our marketing expenses could be very low, because our customers would advertise the Thummer for us, simply by using it. (This approach doesn't work for guitar makers because all guitars look alike to non-guitarists. The Thummer, however, looks totally unique, even to non-musicians.)

Indeed, the Thummer was a "purple cow" — a product so different that it would attract attention effortlessly (which was later borne out by the Thummer's ability to attract press from such non-musical publications as the Wall Street Journal).

With this in mind, I should have focused exclusively on "getting version 1.0 to market ASAP, while spending as little on R&D as possible," in order to (a) keep its price low and (b) jump-start the use/endorse/advertise cycle ASAP.

Why did I not maintain this obviously-correct focus?

Because I was also aware that the Internet dramatically increased the effect of word-of-mouth communications (hence "word of mouse"). If Thummer v1 sucked, then its use/endorse/advertise cycle would never start — or, worse, an anti-use/endorse/advertise cycle would begin, "poisoning the well" for version 1 and all future versions, too.

I came to belive that, in order to ensure positive word of mouse, the Thummer v1 had to be "the most expressive instrument on the planet." It had to exceed its customers' expectations by such a wide margin that it would attract evangelically-enthusiastic word of mouse. This led me to elevate expressive potential over KISS, and therefore to invest time and money in two features that required R&D: (a) motion sensing and (b) key velocity/aftertouch.

Motion Sensing
Today, motion sensing (using accelerometers and gyroscopes) is as cheap as dirt, because it's implemented in off-the-shelf chips. Such chips are in every modern console game controller, such as Nintendo's Wii Remote and Sony's SixAxis/DualShock 3 controller.

But back then, in 2003-2005 when we were developing the Thummer, there were no cheap off-the-shelf motion-sensing solutions. Because of this, we should have written off motion-sensing as "a great feature for a later version, once motion-sensing chips became available off-the-shelf." Pretty obvious, right?

The problem was that people LOVED the motion-sensing prototype Thummers. Even skeptics became enthusiasts after seeing them demonstrated. Motion sensing made musician's expressive actions visible to the audience, which was something a tiny thumb-operated joystick could never do. Motion sensing was clearly the Thummer's killer feature.

If we could just implement motion sensing in Thummer v1 (we thought), then we'd have a hit, Hit, HIT!

However, with the crude and expensive motion-sensing chips available back then, there was no way we were going to make a motion-sensing Thummer. It took us months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, to realize just how hard it was going to be to pull together a "complete solution" from those crude chips. Had Thumtronics been in Austin, I would have had access to people who knew that "complete solution" chips were just a couple of years away. Integrating the new chips into a Thummer would have required one-tenth the R&D effort by Thumtronics. Making the decision to wait would have been much, much easier, had I known that such chips were coming soon. (Chip advances are sporadic, so it's not easy to predict what the next year or two will bring, even if you know that "chips are getting better all the time.")

In any case, I should have stuck to my initial vision of "old wine in new bottles," and ignored motion sensing until it became "old wine," in the form of off-the-shelf chips. Deciding to spend R&D resources on motion-sensing was a mistake.

Key velocity/aftertouch
The harder you strike a piano key, the harder its strings are struck. This one extra expressive variable — "key velocity" — was enough to cause the piano to out-compete the harpsichord, pipe organ, and all other previous keyboard instruments.

"Aftertouch" goes a step further, by allowing an instrument to sense the pressure with which you continue to press a key after the initial strike.

Although there was ample off-the-shelf technology available to measure key-velocity in an electronic instrument that used a piano-like keys, there was none available for concertina-like button-field instruments (and there still is none today). The movement of a button is quite different than that of a piano-like key, so we couldn't use piano-based technology.

We figured that, if the Thummer v1 didn't implement key velocity, then it would suck, and ruin our word of mouse. Therefore, we decided to reverse-engineer the pressure-sensitive buttons of the Sony PlayStation video game controllers, which would give us both key-velocity and aftertouch. However, reverse-engineering this button-system turned out to be beyond the capabilities of our back-of-beyond, hick town company. It soaked up much more of our resources than we could afford. By the time we realized that the end of this R&D task was not in sight, the end of our capital was.

Attempting to implement key velocity/aftertouch was a mistake for three reasons. First, it required R&D, and the "old wine in new bottles" game plan was specifically designed to minimize R&D. Second, it simply wasn't necessary. An alternative feature, called "channel pressure," would have been (a) good enough, and (b) brain-dead simple/cheap/fast to implement. We were focused on key velocity/aftertouch because we listened too hard to our piano-playing beta-testers, who said it was a "must have." Third, even if the Thummer needed more expressive power to succeed, the "killer" way to get that expressive power was through motion sensing, not key velocity/aftertouch.

Bad Decisions => Lack of Cash => Death
These bad decisions cost Thumtronics time, and time is money. If I had not made these bad decisions, Thumtronics would have been able to bring v1 of the Thummer to market by Christmas 2005, at which time it still had enough capital to live cheap and market hard while sales ramped up.

Having made these errors, however, I had to attempt to raise more money. This fund-raising effort failed. Presumably, potential investors decided that if I hadn't brough the Thummer to market after a $1.5 million dollar investment — which should have been ample — then perhaps it was simply a bad idea, or I was simply a bad entrepreneur. They were probably right, on the latter point, at least (although I'd say "inexperienced" rather than "bad").

Bad Location => Bad Decsions
Had I started the company in the right location, and thus been able to assemble a board of directors (and suppliers, partners, employees, etc.) with the right experience, then they are very likely to have been able to help me (a) resist the temptation to elevate "excellence" over KISS, and (b) stick to my "old wine in new bottles" game plan, thereby getting Thummer v1 onto the market by Christmas 2005.

Purple cows don't need to be excellent, in their first version. They just need to be very, very purple...and commercially available. The Thummer would have been very bright purple indeed, even without motion sensing or key velocity/aftertouch. All it needed was to get to market, so that it could find its niche. Each subsequent version could have"sucked less," growing the niche, and climbing the Long Tail into the mainstream.

I never should have elevated "expressive potential" over KISS. Darn it.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda...
Let's imagine for a moment that I had not made either of these two major errors. How would the Thummer have worked out? No one can know for sure, however, but here's one possible scenario.

Thummer version 1 would have been available for sale in time for Christmas 2005, without motion sensing or key velocity/aftertouch. Although sales would not have been explosive by any means, v1 would have sold enough over the next 12 months to make Thumtronics cash-flow positive by the end of the year, with a clear growth curve. (This is especially true because we would never have employed the staff that we hired to implement motion-sensing and key velocity/aftertouch, thereby keeping our costs lower.) Sales of the open-source Monome, and of Yamaha's Tenori-On, show that demand existed for alternative instruments such as the Thummer. A history of real, proveable, black-and-white sales growth would have allowed us to attract growth capital. Growth capital is much easier to get than start-up capital, and there was no shortage of growth capital in the USA back then.

With that growth capital, we could have accelerated sales in 2006. Also, motion sensing chips became widely available in 2007, so we could have added motion-sensing to version 2 for Christmas 2007.

Thummer v2 would have been a truly excellent product, not only due to motion sensing but also due to lots of little refinements that users would have suggested after using version 1. As you can see from Ken Rushton and others, the very idea of the Thummer creates "evangelically enthusiastic" supporters. Think how much stronger this enthusiasm would be, and how much more broadly-based, if Thummers actually existed, so that one's enthusiasm could be based on experience (which Ken's now is, more or less, using his excellent DIY jammer) rather than expectation.

With motion-sensing driving the sales of Thummer v2 in 2008, we would have had the cash-flow to add channel pressure to Thummer v3, probably in time for Christmas 2008.

At least as importantly, with Thummers actually being available, the development of open-source software synths that exploited Thummer-only effects (such as dynamic tonality) would have proceeded much faster than they have in today's real time-line. By mid-2009, it is quite possible that dynamic tonality would have started showing up in pop music. (Consider this use of a Monome, or this use of a Reactable. Creative artists LOVE new gadgets.)

The more the Thummer was used by pop musicians, the more rapidly it would have ascended the Long Tail into the mainstream. That's when we would have started seeing Thummer-players being invited to join mainstream bands, or bursting into the commercial music business with Thummer-based bands. That's also when Yamaha, Fender, Roland, etc. would start considering offering their own Thummers, which Thumtronics would probably have encouraged through a patent & trademark license and reference design package.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Sigh.

It was all there, in the palm of my hand, but I screwed it up. By starting Thumtronics in the back of beyond, and by placing "expressive power" above KISS, I wasted my own and my investors' capital, and quite literally the opportunity of a lifetime.

A skeptic might say that Thumtronics' experience proves that "new musical instruments always fail," no matter how much "better" the new instrument might be. This is absolutely the wrong interpretation of the facts, however. The Thummer has never had the chance to succeed or fail in the marketplace. Commercially speaking, it is completely untested.

What's really frustrating is that today, motion sensing could be incorporated into the Thummer for next to nothing. Version 1 of such a Thummer, with motion sensing and channel pressure (but not key velocity/aftertouch) could be a hit product from Day 1. I've still got the key patents. It's still doable. But now I'm broke, angel investors are broke, VCs are broke, and it's just not going to happen. Argh.

Ah, well. Thumtronics is dead. Long live iGetIt Music! :-)

It's over

Thumtronics is dead.  :-(

For years now, I've been trying to raise money to finish the Thummer's  design and to manufacture its first production run. In that time, I received many promises, but no checks. Now, the global financial crisis has dried up all funding for early-stage companies. Thumtronics is now in bankruptcy.  It's over.

To Thumtronics' investors, I offer my sincerest apologies. I did my best. I put everything I had into it -- every penny, every hour, every effort.  I'm sorry. I hope that you will forgive me, and more importantly, that you won't hold my failure against the next guy who comes to you with a great idea.

I've tried diligently for years to license Thumtronics' patents to other companies, with no success. Most of Thumtronics' (pending) patents will fall into the public domain due to non-payment of fees.

Once Thumtronics' bankruptcy is final, I'll place the design documents for the Thummer prototypes on the web, as the basis of an open-source hardware project. Completing the Thummer's design would be a great team project for an electronics/mechanical engineering class. Once an open-source reference design was completed, anyone who wanted to make Thummers could do so.

For example, a firm like Hong Kong's Medeli to work with HK UST's students to finish the Thummer's design, then to collect partially pre-paid orders online until receiving enough orders to justify making the initial production run. If nothing else, this would be a great way to identify (and hire) the university's best students.

Hopefully, through an open-source approach, Thummers will someday become available.  I hope so, because I want one!  :-)

In the meantime, I've started a new company, iGetIt! Music. It has no website yet (although I've registered the domain). iGetIt! is just me and an Internet-connected computer in my bedroom -- a classic micro-ISV. iGetIt! is focused on developing online music education courseware using the computer keyboard (and possibly iPhone) as its input device. iGetIt! doesn't have the potential to rake in the big bucks that Thumtronics had, but if I'm lucky I ought to be able to make a living out of it. In these troubled economic times that's a whole lot better than nothing.

My biggest challenge now is getting back into the swing of computer programming. It's been 22 years since I got my Computer Science degree, and 17 years since I last programmed for a living. I was on the cutting edge of object-oriented programming back then, and mostly I'm finding that today's tools make it very easy to do things that required lots of hand-coding back then.  I'll start a new blog shortly to document my progress and share what I've learned.

So...Thumtronics is dead. Long live iGetIt! Music!  :-)

Project BarBQ

I spent last weekend (October 19-21) at Proejct BarBQ, billed as “The World’s Premiere Interactive Think-Tank.” As in all eleven previous annual incarnations, its sole topic was “Influencing music hardware & software over the next five years.”

Proejct BarBQ was, without a doubt, the coolest conference I have ever attended. Ever notice how the best part of every conference happens outside of the session rooms? It’s the informal exchange of ideas and the networking that makes conferences so productive – the actual sessions are usually pretty boring. Project BarBQ has no sessions, aside from a couple of introductory keynote sessions. Instead, the attendees – limited to 50 per year – decide for themselves what the top four problems facing the audio/music technology industry are, and split up into groups to work out solutions to those problems. Many significant advances in technology & business models have come out of these sessions. Sound boring? Hardly! Not only is it a gas to engage really smart people in heated debate, but it’s even MORE fun to do so when exchanging volleys from rubber-band guns or toasts from seemingly-bottomless margarita pitchers. These ancillary activities loosen people up to approach their shared problems in a fun and creative way.

I had hoped to get the attendees to agree that one of the top four problems to be solved was “increasing the success rate of music education,” but I was unable to attend the first day of the conference, and therefore was not able to make my case. Rats! The closest topic agreed upon was “user interface” – a rather broad topic! – and that topic’s members decided to focus on the needs of the prosumer audio engineer rather than the novice musician, so I was not able to contribute as much as I would have liked.

I got two main benefits from attending Project BarBQ. First, I got a lot of excellent feedback from its attendees on ways that I could make the Thummer even better (the top request: including an old-fashioned “MIDI Out” jack, even if the Thummer’s expressive power is clipped to worthlessness due to the MIDI cable’s anachronistic 31.25 kBaud data rate). Second, I made some excellent connections, some of whom agreed to help me make some connections to move Thumtronics forward. For example,

• George “The Fat Man” Sanger, organizer of Project BarBQ and music technology legend, agreed to introduce me to some top-flight engineers once Thumtronics gets funded, and
• Tom White, head of the MIDI Manufacturer’s Association, agreed to introduce me to some OEM manufacturers who might be interested in partnering with Thumtronics.

All in all, well worth attending.

Who Cares?

Is there independent verification of claim that consumers care about the benefits develiered by the Thummer & ThumMusic System?

Yes.

In a study of 3,500 consumers conducted during the last global recession (Stimulating Consumer Demand through Meaningful Innovation, Accenture, 2002), Nunes & Johnson found that consumers most often singled out two problems as needing “better” solutions:

• Improving their physical health and sense of well-being, and
• Helping them learn or providing intellectual stimulation.

Clearly, learning to play the Thummer with the ThumMusic System can help consumers "learn and provide intellectual stimulation.” But what about improving consumer’s physical health and well-being? Can the Thummer do that, too?

Yes.

A study (Kigoa & Tims, 2001) of mature students taking music lessons, compared to a control group that did not take such lessons, found that among those taking lessons:

• Blood tests indicated a 90% increase during the test period in levels of Human Growth Hormone (hGH, which increases energy and sexual function, while decreasing the occurrence rate of illnesses), and
• Anxiety, depression and perception of loneliness all decreased.

These improvements in physical health and well-being did not occur in the control group. This is just one of a host os similar studies on music and wellness. Clearly, learning to play a musical instrument is good for you.

Indeed, learning to play the Thummer can address many of consumers’ other stated needs, too.

Here’s the full list of benefits sought by consumers from Nunes & Johnsons’ study:
Learning to play music with the Thummer can help consumers satisfy many of these perceived needs. You want more free time? Learn to play an instrument that’s easy instead of one that’s hard. Want to make the most of your free time? Learn to play the Thummer, which requires less practice to get an equivalent amount of enjoyment. Want help pursuing your interests/hobbies? If your hobby involves making music, then learning to play the Thummer can help you more than learning any other instrument. Want to connect with your friends & family? Get together and make music with the simple, flexible, portable Thummer.

In short, the Thummer offers a simple, cheap, and effective way of acquiring each of the benefits most sought by consumers.

Value Map

One way to compare product strategies visually is to draw a Value Map, invented by Kambil & Ginsberg in 1997 (Kambil is Global Director of Deloitte Research) and improved by Osterwalder in 2004.

The Value Map for Thumtronics looks like this:

Figure 2: Value Map

Caveat: In the Value Map above, Thumtronics’ various competitors are placed to indicate their overall value proposition, not to make fine distinctions as to which is slightly leftward or rightward of the others at each given price level.

The music products industry today has a well-defined Value Frontier – the solid grey line sweeping up from left to right in Figure 2 above. In the middle are most of the companies you’re likely to recognize – Yamaha, Fender, Gibson, Kawai, etc. Their products follow a trajectory of sustaining innovations along dimensions of price and functionality that customers expect. These sustaining innovations keep their products from being completely commoditized, so that they can be sold at market prices or slightly higher.

At the upper right of the Value Frontier are those firms whose products earn a premium price for excellence. Steinway and Baldwin pianos, Paul Reed Smith guitars, and Buffet-Crampon wind instruments are indicative here.

At the lower left end of the Value Frontier are firms who have found new ways to earn a profit from the sale of commoditized products at economy prices. Examples include First Act, which sells commoditized band instruments and guitars through Wal*Mart, Fender’s low-end Squire brand, and Pearl River, the first Chinese manufacturer to sell large quantities of “good enough” pianos under its own brand name in the USA.

The introduction of the eMotion Thummer shifts the industry’s Value Frontier decisively rightward, to the dashed grey line. The eMotion Thummer offers unique and disruptive advances in expressive potential, creative potential, and ease/depth/breadth of learning that no other product can offer – and does so at a Market price.

Thumtronics can then ride its new Value Frontier down and leftward by introducing the Pocket Thummer at an Economy price. Although the Pocket Thummer’s portability and low-cost polyphony are potentially disruptive to Thumtronics’ competitors, it is sustaining with regard to Thumtronics’ newly-established Value Frontier – hence its being categorized as a Sustaining Innovation.

Finally, Thumtronics’ QWERTY Thummer is an implementation of the Thummer’s note-pattern on the standard computer keyboard, offered absolutely free. Because the Thummer’s note-pattern is, by this time, “expected” on Thumtronics’ new Value Frontier, it is neither a sustaining nor a disruptive innovation from Thumtronics’ perspective, and so is categorized as offering “Me-Too” value – albeit at the all-important “Free” price level.

Once Thumtronics’ new value frontier becomes the industry’s new status quo – perhaps a decade hence – the eMotion Thummer and its related products will lose their disruptiveness and migrate leftward on the Value Map. The installed base of Thummer players (which should by then be quite large) should then allow Thumtronics – still protected by its numerous fundamental patents – to introduce a “quality” brand whose excellent products can attract premium prices (the way Toyota created the "Lexus" brand to differentiate its new low-volume, high-margin cars).

As with the Strategy Canvas, the key point of the Value Map is that Thumtronics' strategy delivers a disruptive leap in functionality at a low price through novel channels – exactly what is required to deliver rapid, profitable, sustainable sales growth.

Strategy Canvas

In a previous post, I mentioned Kim & Marbourgne’s 2002 book “Blue Ocean Strategy.” One of the tools introduced in their book is the “Strategy Canvas,” a graphical tool that makes it easier to compare & contrast the strategies of different firms or products.

Here’s the Strategy Canvas for the Thummer, comparing it to the keyboard & guitar:

Fig. 1: Strategy Canvas

Across the horizontal axis are characteristics of comparison & contrast, and the vertical axis provides the scale for comparing & contrasting them.

Tradition: To support the deepest Western traditions of tonality, Thumtronics is breaking the superficial traditions of musical instrument design, music theory, music notation, sound generation, etc. As the French might say, “C'est la vie – plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” – or, “such is life; the more things change, the more they stay the same” (to translate this phrase into today’s lingua franca). Hence Thumtronics will doubtless be perceived as threatening or devaluing tradition (as shown in the graphic above) despite the opposite being the case.

Craftsmanship: Craftsmanship is the manual labor of skilled workers. Such skilled labor is expensive; most people can’t afford it. I want to make the Thummer affordable by everyone –including everyone in the Third World, eventually – so I’d rather have Six Sigma quality standards on the automated manufacture of a cheap electronic instrument than the dubious benefits of craftsmanship.

Dedicated Repertoire: The pieces in a dedicated repertoire are specifically optimized to take advantage of the unique features of the instrument for which they were written. Consider for example the piano’s ability to glissando across the diatonic notes of C Major. That precise effect can’t be captured on any instrument other than the piano-style keyboard. The Thummer has the expressive power to develop innumerable unique musical effects such as the piano’s glissando, but because the Thummer is new, there are not yet any pieces written specifically for (i.e., dedicated to) the Thummer.

Dedicated Channel: This is the worldwide network of brick-and-mortar retail stores which sell music products exclusively or primarily. To sell a new musical instrument through this channel, Thumtronics would need to train salespeople to stand around in these stores demonstrating to passers-by how to play the instrument. This would be phenomenally expensive, which would require that the Thummer be phenomenally expensive, too. No new musical interface has ever survived the attempt to "cram" it through traditional retail this way. In its early low-volume days as a niche product, the Thummer needs a lower-cost distributipon channel: online direct sales, supplemented by customer-created music videos on YouTube, live performances, etc.. Once musicians have created sufficient demand among consumers, the Pocket Thummer can be sold through mass-market retailers, booksellers, and video game stores. Once a sufficiently-large installed based of Thummer-players exists, a high-status Thummer can be sold through the dedicated retail channel, because for such a high-status product, the dedicated channel's high service costs are perfectly warranted. But only then, not now.

Expressive Potential: The piano has one degree of freedom: key velocity (how hard you strike a key, basically), and a few binary foot-pedal switches (una corda, sostenuto, & sustain). The electric guitar has more degrees of freedom: string bending, the whammy bar, tone dials, effects pedals, etc. But the Thummer absolutely blows them away, with thumb-operated joysticks & motion sensors that offer ten degrees of freedom,, with the potential for more.

Creative Potential: When the piano-forte was new in the 1700’s, it enabled creative musicians to do things that had never been done before; so was the electric guitar when it was new in the 1950’s, and the keyboard synthesizer in the 1970’s. Since then, however, generations of musicians have dedicated themselves to exploring every novel possibility offered by those instruments. As a result, today there are no new musical effects unique to those instruments which have not already been beaten to death. Their creative potential is now zero. On the other hand, the Thummer is chock full of creative potential. Its unique expressive power, combined with the novel musical effects made possible by Dynamic Tuning (which only a Thummer can control) expand the framework of tonality, presenting a vast frontier of creative possibilities. Someday, after future generations of creative musicians have mapped out this new frontier, it too will be drained of all creative potential – so beat the rush! :-)

Success Rate: Of a hundred musical novices, how many will reach a level of competence that allows them to play music with and for their friends, to improvise confidently, and to write their own compositions for special occasions? That’s the level of musical competence that most music students seek, and would be satisfied with. But with traditional approaches to music education, the percentage of students who attain this level of success if pathetically low. It is Thumtronics’ primary objective to deliver the highest available success rate in music education. The Thummer note-layout and the ThumMusic System apparently have the potential to accomplish this objective.

Ease of Learning: Students will have a higher success rate when learning is easy than when it is hard. The combination of the Thummer (including the computer-keyboard-based QWERTY Thummer) and the ThumMusic System make music dramatically easier to learn, by exposing music’s underlying structure in a logical and systematic way. The piano and guitar don’t even come close.

Depth of Learning: Music students do not sacrifice depth to gain the Thummer’s ease of learning. The logical elegance of the Thummer and ThumMusic System not only make it easier to learn the basic concepts of music, but also to understand what would otherwise be considered to be “advanced concepts” in music theory. Traditional approaches to music education make these “advanced concepts” so difficult to understand that music students’ primary and secondary educations are focused almost entirely on performance, ignoring theory almost completely until the senior secondary or even tertiary (college) level. Even then, “music theory” is often presented not as a unifying theory of how music works, but rather as a long sequence of individual musical practices to be memorized. The Thummer and ThumMusic System can give students much greater depth of understanding, more easily.

Breadth of Learning: Music education today is focused very narrowly on 12-tone equal temperament, the tuning system that’s been in vogue most recently in the Western world. But other cultures use other tuning systems, and so did the West until quite recently. These tuning systems from other times and places are very difficult to teach, learn, and play using traditional Western instruments, but they are trivially easy to use on the Thummer and with the ThumMusic System. Just wiggle a joystick, and voila! You’re playing in the tunings of Pythagoras, Mersenne, Scarlatti, Handel, Bach, Hadyn, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. Wiggle it a different way, and you can explore the tunings of Thailand, Indonesia, Arabia, Turkey, or Mandinka Africa. The Thummer and ThumMusic System offer an unparalleled breadth of learning.

Cheap to Acquire: All of this simplicity and power would be valueless if it were unaffordable. To make an impact on the world, Thumtronics’ products must be affordable. Thumtronics’ potential products run the gamut from the free QWERTY Thummer (a free software implementation of the Thummer’s note-pattern on a standard computer keyboard) through the Pocket Thummer (and economically-priced entry-level instrument for consumers) to the feature-packed eMotion Thummer – and even this high-end model is expected to be priced affordably. The key to “blue ocean strategy,” after all, is in offering a product that is (a) highly differentiated in ways that consumers value (b) at a low price, thereby delivering exceptional value to the consumer. Overprice your offering (as Apple did with its Macintosh computers) and you are just creating a market opportunity for your competitors (Microsoft Windows). This Thummer will always be affordable.

Cheap to Learn: The cost of any product includes its acquisition cost, its implementation cost, and its risk of failure. The risk of failure was addressed above in “Success Rate,” and cost of acquisition in “Cheap to Acquire.” Being “Cheap to Learn” embraces not only the success rate, but also the cost of that success. Thumtronics expects to provide free music lessons online to beginners, charging only for the intermediate and advanced lessons. Thumtronics can afford to do this by delivering its lessons primarily online, and by having these lessons be developed primarily by volunteer developers using open source methods. The student’s time is also a cost, but students should progress to a given level of competency much faster due to the ThumMusic System’s ease of learning, so the “time cost” of learning should also be lower. Finally, because the students’ can expect to succeed at a higher rate, fewer will experience the cost of failure, lowering its average cost per student. Every way you slice it, the Thummer will be cheaper to learn than any other musical instrument…without sacrificing depth or breadth.

Discussion
Thumtronics' product innovations and business strategy deliver a highly-differentiated "value innovation" to the mass market of non-musical consumers – exactly what is required to deliver rapid, profitable, sustainable sales growth.

Blue Ocean Strategy

In their book Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim & Mauborgne describe typical marketplaces as “red oceans,” whose inhabitants rip each other apart in a frenzied struggle for market share, staining the ocean red with their blood.

They argue that the wise company (or investor) does not waste its resources in such a fruitless struggle, but instead seeks to implement “blue ocean strategies,” by simultaneously pursuing differentiation and low cost, with the goal of creating a totally new market space that is unstained by the blood of competition.

You’d think that investors would avoid emerging red oceans like the plague – but that does not appear to be the case. Here’s an example. Redbox is a joint venture between McDonald’s (yes, the burger joint) and Coinstar. Late in 2005, Coinstar invested $20 million in Redbox for slightly under half the company, giving Redbox a de facto post-money valuation of just under $40 million. For that kind of valuation, you’d think that Redbox must be growing into a pretty nice blue ocean, wouldn’t you?

But it’s not. Redbox is fighting tooth and claw for a share of the DVD rental & sales market. Its competitors – including NetFlix, Blockbuster, & Hollywood/Movie Gallery – are all slaughtering each other in a vicious struggle for market share. This market was worth about $35 billion in 2006 and is expected to grow to about $38 billion by 2009 (according to statistics I found in the Austin Statesman (Sunday July 15th, p. H1), in an article by Jennifer Mann of the Kansas City Star). That’s a growth rate of just 2.8%. In short, the video sale and rental industry is a “red ocean” of vicious, profitless competition.

Wise investors would not be pouring money into this “red ocean.” None of the various competitors has such a wide advantage in cost or differentiation that it can earn attractive margins over the long term. Red oceans are a sucker bet.

But surely blue ocean strategies are riskier than red ocean strategies? Quite the contrary. Blue ocean strategy is all about minimizing risk. Red oceans are the riskiest place a firm or investor can possibly be.

With that in mind, consider Thumtronics. The current music products & lesson industry is worth nearly as much as the DVD sales and rental industry – about $30 million – and growing faster, at 3.5%. Yet the blue-ocean market of non-musical consumers is even larger, with the potential for even faster growth. By targeting the mass market of non-musical consumers with a uniquely simple, cheap, and powerful new musical instrument & music-learning method, Thumtronics has the potential to establish an entirely new “blue ocean” market, far removed from the bloodstained waters of the musical instrument industry’s intense competition.

Thumtronics’ strategy is all about creating a deep blue ocean, because blue oceans are the only way to bet.

How?

How will Thumtronics make its innovations successful?

In the long run, Thumtronics’ innovations in the display and control of musical information – the ThumMusic System – are likely to have the biggest impact on the world, by making it possible for essentially everyone to understand, play, and create music. However, the ThumMusic System is going to be a tough sell, because its benefits are hard to communicate in a 30-second “elevator pitch.”

On the other hand, the benefits of the Thummer are obvious from a 30-second demo video (such as this one, and this one). Musicians playing the Thummer in a band, in live performances, or in YouTube videos will be “advertising” the Thummer for us, making the Thummer extremely viral, which is likely to lead to very rapid exponential growth sales growth.

How rapid? ThumClub members tell us that, if the Thummer lives up to their expectations, they expect to be able to convince an average of five other people to buy one. If they can do that in six months, with those five each “selling” five more, and so on, then Thummer sales will simply explode. Even if each Thummer buyer convinced only 1.4 additional people to buy Thummers, then from first year sales of just 1,500 units, Thummer revenues would exceed $10 million within three years and $100 million within six years (all else being equal). It’s the self-advertising, viral nature of the Thummer that makes it such a compelling commercial opportunity.

The success of the Thummer can pull the ThumMusic System along in its wake, just as the increasing popularity of the guitar made guitar tab popular. Once the ThumMusic System gains a foothold in the market, its growth rate can exceed that of the Thummer, because the ThumMusic System is also applicable to the standard computer keyboard and to the human voice.

At that point, the commercial opportunity of the ThumMusic System should be considerable – online lessons, sheet music downloads, certification exams, etc..

But first we have to make the Thummer successful.

We’ll do this by raising the capital needed to finish the design, engineering, and testing of the Thummer; selling the Thummer directly to consumers over the Internet from Thumtronics’ website; encouraging the independent development of associated websites (like Amazon Associates) through revenue-sharing; leveraging the free PR that we’ve already been offered by FOCUS, I Want That!, and other relevant media; and accelerating the viral marketing process through a variety of means, such as “discount for a friend” coupons, online video contests, and aggressive promotion of those musicians and bands who best show off the Thummer’s unique abilities. The incredible new possibilites presented by Dynamic Tuning – which only works on a Thummer – will tend to accelerate this process, once creative artists show the world how powerful Dynamic Tuning can be.

That’s the plan, anyway – loose and flexible, allowing us to respond to the market as we go along.

Where?

Thumtronics started in Busselton, Western Australia, because that’s where I happened to be living when I thought up my first musical innovations. Busselton is a very pleasant seaside resort town – but it’s a lousy place to start a new high-tech company. It’s three hours’ drive south of Western Australia’s capital city, Perth, which is “the most isolated major city in the world.” It’s as far from the next large Australian city as LA is from New Orleans (about 1700 miles), with absolutely nothing in between but sand, salt flats, and stranded Japanese tourists. Perth is a great place to raise money for a new nickel mine, but a lousy place from which to launch a high-tech disruptive innovation.

Australia’s venture capital community is absolutely clueless. This is not just an opinion; it’s a demonstrable fact. Over the decade from 1995 to 2005, American venture capitalists earned a whopping 41.4% Internal Rate of Return (IRR) on their investments (overall). Over that same decade, Australian venture capitalists earned 0% – that’s right, zero, nada, zilch. Even the top quartile only earned 2.7%, which was less than inflation. Whatever else people might say about American venture capitalists, they know how to pick companies that earn incredible returns – and, demonstrably, Australian venture capitalists don’t. Australian venture capitalists wouldn’t recognize the next Google if it hit them in the face.

So, I couldn’t get funding in Australia, despite the recognized disruptiveness of Thumtronics’ innovations. To get funding, it became clear that I would have to move Thumtronics to the USA.

But… where in the USA should Thumtronics go? Perhaps a high-tech center, like Silicon Valley, Boston, or Raleigh? Or perhaps a center of the music industry, such as New York or Los Angeles? What I really needed was a single city that had successful industry clusters in both electronics and music.

Austin has both. Although its much-touted claim to be the Live Music Capital of the World is somewhat dubious, there is no doubt that Austin takes music – and the music industry – very seriously. Whereas in other cities, having a CEO play live gigs in a local band would be considered somewhat flaky, in Austin it is normal and well-regarded. Austin’s live music scene is mentioned repeatedly in Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class as being one of the hallmarks of, and contributors to, its success as a high-tech city.

Likewise, Austin has a deep local electronics industry, with numerous large firms such as AMD, Applied Materials, Cirrus Logic, Freescale, IBM, Intel, National Instruments, Samsung, Silicon Laboratories, Sun Microsystems, United Devices, and others having headquarters or major facilities there, and thousands of smaller electronics firms. Importantly, Austin also has a deep and broad infrastructure of service providers such as lawyers, accountants, patent attorneys, etc., that understand the needs of innovative high-tech start-ups. Austin’s rapid growth has also spawned a host of high-tech millionaires, who are ready and able to invest in the Next Big Thing.

Austin is Texas’ state capital, giving me access to Texas’ government decision-makers and influencers. This will become important as Thumtronics’ innovations start to move into government-funded educational institutions. With 23 million people, Texas is the USA’s second-most-populous state after California, so influencing Texas can influence the USA, which can influence the world. Furthermore, Austin is still a relatively small city (at 1.5 million, about the same population as Perth), so it’s relatively easy to gain access to Austin’s movers and shakers.

Austin is also a remarkably nice place to live, which has attracted (and will continue to attract) top talent from elsewhere. Finally, its cost of living is low enough to allow Thumtronics to minimize its burn rate.
Fortunately, Austin’s investor community understands disruptive innovation, so I am quite confident that, one way or another, Thumtronics will get the funding it needs to disrupt the $30 billion musical instrument & lesson industries from its new home here in Austin.

Who?

Thumtronics’ innovations have been a team effort with contributions from a lot of people.

The Thummer Prototypes
Bussleton, Capel, Bunbury, & Eaton Designs
These early prototypes were developed in Busselton, Western Australia. The prototypes were named after a string of towns running north from Busselton along the Indian Ocean.

Bruce Wahler contributed to the Busselton’s electronics, but the lead electrical engineer on all of these prototypes was Matthew Darke. A man of diverse talents, Matthew also implemented the Bunbury’s motion sensors, and performed most of the demos on the gold-colored Capel and Bunbury prototypes. The Eaton’s ThumSetup software was developed by Leigh Smith. All of these prototypes were designed by Mike Dixon, who also did the heavy lifting on the size, shape, and spacing of the Thummer keyboard’s buttons. Andrew Lavorgna was invaluable in organizing beta testers for these prototypes, and Gavin Healy was great at demonstrating the red-colored Eaton prototypes.

ThumLine Staff Notation
ThumLine notation was the result of collaboration with many contributors, including Thomas Reed, Founder of the Music Notation Modernization Association; Ron Gorow, author of “Hearing and Writing Music;” and Recordare’s Michael Good, inventor of MusicXML.

The X_System
Dynamic Tuning & Dynamically-Tempered Timbres
Andrew Milne of The Tonal Centre was the lead contributor to the X_System. His deep knowledge of music theory and mathematics was essential to identifying the novel elements of the X_System and proving their correctness. Bill Sethares’ recognition of the relationships among tuning, timbre, spectrum, and scale were, along with the Wicki note-layout, the seeds from which Thumtronics’ innovations have sprung. Bill also made major contributions to the mathematics, music theory, and computational aspects of the X_System, also helping whip our scientific papers into proper academic form.

Thumtronics Pty Ltd & Thumtronics Inc
Any entrepreneur will tell you that coming up with an idea is easy, compared to successfully commercializing it. Lots of people have helped Thumtronics move its ideas closer to reality. Bob Gaskins, the creator of Microsoft PowerPoint, has been a veritable fountain of useful advice. George Spix was an early investor, as were many of the friends and family of Scott Horsburgh, Thumtronics Pty Ltd’s excellent CFO. Watermark went well out of its way to be helpful with Thumtronics’ many patents.

Nonetheless, Thumtronics had to move to the USA to further its commercialization efforts, landing in Austin, Texas. There, many noted Austinites have been very supportive.

When?

I started working on Thumtronics’ innovations in September of 2003. Since then, as my long-suffering family can attest, I have been obsessed by the challenge of developing and commercializing Thumtronics’ innovations.

Shipping an affordable, expressive Thummer is Thumtronics’ one and only mission at present. Only after it reaches a high enough level of sales to make Thumtronics profitable can we consider devoting additional resources to commercializing Thumtronics’ other innovations, such as the ThumMusic System, Dynamic Tuning, or Dynamically Tempered Timbres.

Currently, Thumtronics is raising capital to fund the final design & engineering work needed to get the Thummer to market. It is expected that the Thummer will reach the market within approximately nine months of this capital becoming available.

At the moment, I’m collecting quotes from credible folks in Austin and beyond about the market potential of the Thummer. Although everyone knows that disruptive innovations can make huge profits, investors usually approach a given potentially-disruptive innovation with great skepticism. Because disruptive innovations redefine the market, exploit new channels, and attract new customers, it’s very hard to prove that the disruptive product will actually sell – until it starts selling. The quotes that I’m gathering are intended to reduce this perceived market risk, by establishing that experts in the relevant fields believe that the Thummer will sell.

I expect to start approaching potential investors in a couple of weeks. It’s hard to predict how long the capital-raising process will take. One smart guy with money, and I’m done – but more likely, I’ll need to find a half-dozen, and they’ll all debate the valuation & term sheet, so it’ll take months.

So don’t expect to see any Thummer for sale until mid-2008, at the earliest.

What?

Thumtronics’ musical innovations, taken together, abstract to a higher level both (a) the structure of musical sounds, and (b) the higher-level forms of music arising from that structure. This higher level of abstraction is both simpler and more powerful that that used in the Western musical tradition.

Thumtronics’ first breakthrough is the combination of a concertina-like keyboard with tiny thumb-operated joysticks (like on a video game controller) and motion sensors (like on Nintendo’s Wii game controller), thereby delivering the most expressive polyphonic musical instrument ever: the Thummer. This expressive power is needed to control the many new expressive opportunities enabled by Thumtronics’ other breakthroughs.

Thumtronics’ second breakthrough is the combination of the Wicki note-layout, a chromatic staff, a tonnetz, tonic solfa, and the computer keyboard, thereby producing an easily-deployable system for the display and control of musical information – the ThumMusic PLUS System – which makes music easier to teach, learn, and play.

Thumtronics’ third breakthrough is its recognition that generalized note-layouts (such as the Wicki) have the same fingering not just in every key, but also in every tuning of a given temperament. That enables Dynamic Tuning, in which the performer can change the Thummer’s tuning in a smooth continuum while retaining the same fingering. Dynamic Tuning enables tuning bends, temperament modulations, and new chord progressions, all within the time-honored framework of tonality.

Thumtronics’ fourth breakthrough is Dynamically Tempered Timbres (X_Spectra & X_Timbres), in which the partials of a given timbre are adjusted, in real time, to align with the notes of the current (dynamic) tuning, to which they are related. This can deliver perfect consonance all across a given temperament’s tuning continuum, with additional real-time effects such as dynamic dissonance, primeness, conicality, and richness. These novel musical effects can make dynamic tunings sound pleasing and familiar, while giving composers an entirely new means of creating “tension and release.”

In Thumtronics’ approach, what matters are the relationships among intervals – that is, temperaments – but not pitches. A musical composition can be specified completely, yet leave the choice of key (i.e., tonic pitch) to the needs of the performing group (to reflect its current tessitura). Computer scientists will recognize this as an example of dynamic binding.

Taken together, Thumtronics' innovations hoist the description and control of musical information to a higher level of abstraction which is both simpler and more powerful than the traditional view.

These innovations also generalize music theory beyond the Harmonic Series, to embrace a wider set of timbre-structures. This widening consequently broadens music theory beyond Just Intonation to a wider set of tunings which are related to those timbres (or vice versa -- same thing).

Why?

With the help of many people, I've made what appear to be a significant scientific breakthrough which has implications to musical instrument design, music notation, electronic music synthesis, and music theory. I am attempting to bring these innovations to market through a start-up company -- Thumtronics Inc. of Austin, Texas. People keep asking me "how's it going?" This blog is the answer.