On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Kris Kaiser and Stephen McCaul. Kris and Stephen are co-founders of Noise Engineering, a boutique musical instrument firm dedicated to making tools for any artist. We talk about turning a hobby into a business, educational content as top-of-funnel strategy, balancing innovation and costs, and so much more!
Kris Kaiser and Stephen McCaul met at a pub in Santa Monica, California, and hit it off immediately. A shared interest in sound brought them together. Kris and Stephen's professional paths were quite different, but audio was a common thread throughout their lives.
Kris's PhD dissertation studied the effects of urban noise on the breeding behaviors of frogs. Stephen developed audio software for video games. Both shared a love for spreadsheets, food, and the glorious sound and invitingly impenetrable interface of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer.
A few years later, Kris was a professor and Stephen worked on increasingly complex audio problems in his day job. As an escape, they began experimenting with home-built synthesizers and wild DIY noisemakers. Stephen developed a Eurorack module over a weekend after a dare from a friend, and the synth community took notice.
That was the beginning, and in 2016 they quit their jobs and took Noise Engineering full time. Now a staple boutique developer, their hardware and software products are used and adored by hobbyists, composers, artists, and producers around the world.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Kris Kaiser
Leaning into the value and showing the customers how much they get for their money for a digital module that can do all of these things.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And today, I'm welcoming to the show not one but two founders of an amazing, amazing company.
Today I'm bringing to you Kris Kaiser and Stephen McCaul coming to us from Noise Engineering. Welcome to the show.
Kris Kaiser
Thanks for having us.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
So for those that are unfamiliar with noise engineering, can you quickly just set the stage on the types of products you guys are bringing to market over there? What are you guys selling?
Kris Kaiser
Sure. We make modular synthesizers, which is a niche type of musical instrument. And that was where we started. Now we also make musical instruments, guitar pedals, and we make software for people that use their computers to make music.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, take me back in time and I'll set this up for you.
So in 2007, a biology PhD student and a software engineer walked into a bar.
Stephen McCaul
Yep. You want to do the start?
Kris Kaiser
Sure. So back then, we were both in completely different careers. Stephen was an audio engineer, software engineer working in the video game industry and I was a biology PhD student.
Fast forward a few years and both of us were tired of what we were doing. And we really never saw each other. And we decided that maybe we should try to make a go of noise engineering together, which had been a side project, a hobby for Stephen for a few years at that point.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
And then it sounded like there was a challenge or maybe a weekend hackathon that led to a bit more of taking it seriously?
Stephen McCaul
What became our first product came about because a coworker of mine had recently bought a modular synth, which is one of what became our main product. I was interested in it. And I actually had used them before some, but there had been a renaissance of really interesting ideas in that space recently. Or recently, 2007.
But then just by certain natures, I started critiquing all of the details that I didn't like about other people's modules. And so my friend got annoyed at me and dared me to make a module he wanted. And so I went home that weekend and hacked together something with... I mean, literally super glue and plastic and a dev CPU board that did what he wanted. And that became our first product. The Ataraxic Translatron.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
So you went almost from idea to prototype from Friday to Sunday?
Stephen McCaul
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
How long did it take you to take that from a prototype to like, you know, we're gonna sell this thing?
Stephen McCaul
Oh, that was like a year. At least a full year, because I had no idea of manufacturing. I understood the software part of it. I understood the audio part of it. But there's a lot of… manufacturing is hard. So that, just figuring out how to do that took a long time.
Kris Kaiser
But it was also kind of a golden era for our little niche industry because there was one shop that would buy 50 of anything you made. And so without that store, we wouldn't be sitting here today. But because that store was willing to take a risk and buy 50 of that first product, that was enough to pay for a run of 100.
And so then we sold through those and we were able to keep it going from there.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, can you walk me through some of the steps along the way from that initial prototype to getting the production quality that you were then going to send off to this partner manufacturer that was going to buy 50 units?
Stephen McCaul
The main thing that happened is I showed it to a lot of people and I ended up finding enough people that knew people that could solve my problems. That's really the short of it.
We… I had been talking to the owner of that store, which is in Santa Monica, which is actually right near where I worked. And he essentially committed to buying that first, not really half of the first, actually, maybe make more than that, but that's kind of irrelevant.
So that sort of satisfied my confidence that I wasn't just going to lose a lot of money on the first run, which is the first time you're doing something like this is kind of terrifying to throw a bunch of cash at something thinking about the fact that it may never come back.
But through him, I met a manufacturer who ended up doing the surface mount parts of the assembly. Our products are pretty, in many ways, pretty simple to construct. There's a panel and there's a PCB that has all the electronics and you bolt one into the other.
And so, I had most of the electronics done by this company and I actually hand soldered the parts that needed hand soldering for the first 150 myself. I wish I would never do it again. That's not fun.
And yeah, I boxed them up and shipped them. Actually, my friend and I handmade all the cables for that first run too. So, it was pretty in a living room sort of construction for a lot of it.
Kris Kaiser
Which is honestly not that uncommon in our industry. A lot of the companies in our little market are one or two people building things in their living room or their garage.
Stephen McCaul
Yeah, the barrier to entry for this sort of custom electronic design is actually historically low at this point. And that base feeds a whole lot of people throwing interesting ideas into it because they can make a product, they can spend not that much money and get 100 made and sell them.
And so there are hundreds of these little one person, two person brands in the Eurex base, which is interesting. And also, just the market is definitely not like some of the other markets we're in.
Kris Kaiser
It's also weirdly collaborative because... So it's modular. Specifically, that means that you build a case out of these different modules to make a musical instrument. And all of the brands pretty much work together. So it's great because if you're a one-person company making one product, nobody can make an entire case out of your one product.
But they can work with all of these other manufacturers, all these other brands. So there's just a world of ways that you can put together a synthesizer with this. And all these brands really help make it an interesting landscape.
Chase Clymer
That's a great segue into a question about marketing.
So would collaborating with other manufacturers and co-marketing with them, either on a product you're both building together or co-marketing similar or compatible products? Was that one of the levers you were pulling to grow the business?
Kris Kaiser
Early on, not exactly. We would often have videos that included other brands' products in our cases. But it was really nice to use that to show off how these things work together. But it was rarely a talk to the brand and say, “Let's do this together.” There was one or two of those. One that was just wildly successful.
And so everybody bought these three modules that were in this one video that we worked with another company for. That was wildly successful.
But usually, it's harder to... Look, we're all one or two people. We're a little bit bigger now, but with one or two people, it's hard to nail people down because everybody's doing everything for a business like this. And so marketing is historically kind of hard in this industry when it's a one person endeavor.
Stephen McCaul
Well, certainly at first, I don't know, five, six, seven years, there’s just sort of a very lively Instagram community, and our modular synths are really suited.
But you could actually have a longer format. Once they got over 10 seconds, Instagram is just uniquely suited to this sort of synth because you can spin an hour, patch up, make a little bit of a song. It looks cool because the synth with a bazillion wires in it and all crazy colors and blinking lights and stuff. And you do a little quick video of the little song you made.
So that's like a really powerful format. These days, things are more complicated.
Kris Kaiser
But we still use a lot of user generated content.
Stephen McCaul
Oh yeah. We do a lot of reposting because people are doing cool stuff with our stuff.
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Chase Clymer
So with these products, how do you approach pricing for your products to stay competitive while ensuring profitability?
Kris Kaiser
It's a challenge. It is an ongoing challenge. Particularly recently as between the part shortage, which just hyper inflated the price of all of our parts. And just trying to keep active and competitive with, as Stephen said, there are literally hundreds of brands out there. So it's always a challenge to balance all of these things.
Most of what we do is digital modules. That means that there's a microprocessor on it. There's software that has to be developed for it.
So there are generally some expensive parts on these, so it's hard to say we could ever be competitive with some of the more budget brands.
And so I think part of what we've been realizing is we need to just own where we are. We're not going to be ever, ever able to compete with the very, very inexpensive brands who are doing just very small analog things with very inexpensive parts. But we are really good at what we do.
And so leaning into that identity and not gouging the customers, we're not making huge profits on most of these. And the industry standard is not particularly high for this niche. So I think just leaning into who we are and trying to show the customers the value and showing the customers how much they get for their money for a digital module that can do all of these things.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Stephen McCaul
Another important point is that we manufacture in the US. We do it in California even. So our manufacturing is just not cheap. It's great quality.
Kris Kaiser
And we work with a factory that pays a living wage to their workers, certified living wage, which is important to us.
Stephen McCaul
So yeah, a lot of factors make us... Essentially, unable to compete for the cheapest price, which is fine. It's not what our strengths are anyway.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
And I think that a lot of those choices blend into your culture of the company, but then also the types of customers that you attract and also probably just plays into the marketing as well.
Kris Kaiser
For sure.
Chase Clymer
Could you share any more about the marketing of the business, how you started to acquire customers that weren't friends and families or referrals in that regard. I know there's a lot of people out there, maybe not necessarily starting synth modular companies, but they're out there trying to figure out how to get those customers that aren't related to them.
Stephen McCaul
Our early customers came from going to trade shows and events and me standing there showing it to hundreds, if not thousands, of customers.
The story I mentioned earlier that we had bought our first units also at that time was, had a booth at NAMM. NAMM is one of the largest trade shows in the world and it's the annual music and instrument trade show basically. It's gigantic at its peak. It was seeing 100,000 people come to it.
So like the early days, we were really going to those shows, talking to individual customers, talking to stores, of course, getting wholesale sales. And Instagram. And that was really it for I would say the first 5 years. But that got us into a whole lot of stuff, certainly as much as we could cope with manufacturing.
Kris Kaiser
And that coincided with the explosion of shops that sell these modular synths. So it was kind of the right place, right time.
A couple of the things that we've done to try to sort of set ourselves apart is we started early on, like 2017, I think it was we started a blog and we've since handed that to one of our employees, Markus, and we hired Markus initially just as a tester and it turns out that they were really good at all of the things that we gave them.
So they now write the blog for us. And it is a weekly blog. And we have an entire series on just getting started in a modular sense, because it's often an overwhelming and confusing thing to start.
Because where do I buy them? What do I build? What are these modules? So Markus writes a weekly post on the blog. The rest of us will write the occasional post. But it's been a huge educational resource. And it's sort of our top of the funnel approach.
The other thing that we do a lot of, well, we're getting back into now that where things are open again. Historically, we've done a lot of outreach, and education is one of our core values. We do workshops, introduction to modular.
What is modular synth? We did one with a composer group a few weeks ago now. That was just working with a composer. So we did it. I did an introduction to how you use a modular synthesizer because no matter what the brand, the concepts are the same. And then the composer that we worked with did this really incredible demonstration of how he uses these products while he's scoring the film.
Those sorts of outreach things have been really, really great for marketing to meet some really awesome people.
Stephen McCaul
We're very much a boutique product, and as with most boutique products, people really want to know the story and the people behind it. So those face-to-face things are always very powerful for us.
And you know, we're not... We're a relatively high-priced, low-volume product as well. So it doesn't take... If you win someone a fan, if someone becomes a lifetime fan of yours, then it represents a pretty substantial amount of income for us.
Kris Kaiser
We're also lucky to be based in Los Angeles. So our team is entirely remote, but most of us are here in Los Angeles. And it's really nice to have the music community of LA because it really provides a heck of a lot of opportunities to talk to people and meet people.
And then our main marketing person is in DC. So we also have somebody on the East Coast who can do these sorts of outreach events.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Just to parrot what you said about some of the tactics that you use to grow the business.
First and foremost, being authentic, being yourself. People want to buy from people, not necessarily faceless entities out there like Amazon.
But also, doing the things that don't scale is something that comes up a lot in these interviews. Going to the trade shows where you know your customer is. A question there would be, what sort of feedback did you get from these real-life events? And did that help to change the product over time?
Stephen McCaul
Well, certainly in the early days, we're a lot different than today. When it was early days, it was just me and it was still just a hobby. I wasn't even treating these events as a way to get customers or whatever. It's just a way to take my ideas and show it to the people who are interested in them.
So I would just regularly take prototypes, half-baked stuff, show it to people, talk to them about what they thought of it, and just get actual real-time feedback about the product on the floor of NAMM. And that product would come out six months later or whatever.
These days... Well, everything has changed. The events have changed. We've changed the way we do things. We're a lot better at actually finishing things and making them better than I was by myself when it was a part-time hobby.
We don't do as much. We spend a lot of time talking to musicians though about what they want and what they need, what they don't have. So I feel like it's sort of taking a step back, that sort of interaction.
Kris Kaiser
But we still send Patrick, our marketing guy. He loves to go to trade shows. And so he'll go and talk to everybody and get feedback. And he's really wonderful about just engaging with people wherever they are and whatever trade shows. We send him to a lot of them.
Stephen McCaul
And trade shows here are maybe worth noting, like, some of these are just like sense shows where a whole lot of enthusiasts show up. It's not even necessarily… some of these stores don't even really go to…They are like enthusiast shows.
But it's a very attentive market.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
And the last note that you said on your marketing–I guess–playbook, was that you invest a lot in educational content and top of the funnel through your blog. A lot of listeners out there are, I would say, scared of content marketing because it doesn't have that direct response that paid ads, for example, has.
How long do you think it took you guys to realize that the blog was worthwhile? Or was it like an instant gratification?
Kris Kaiser
It started in fits and starts because when I started it, it was just the two of us and neither of us really had the time to do it justice. And so it wasn't really until Markus took it over and showed the thing.
They know every module that has ever been made. They know so much about production. So I think it was around the time that Markus really started to grow the blog that it was really obvious that it was a good thing.
We did a workshop a few years back at a local shop making techno music with our products. And we had a couple of blog posts about that specifically on our site.
As we were talking to the people that showed up for this workshop, a lot of them had no idea who we were, but they realized all of a sudden in the middle of the thing, like, “Oh, this is the company that wrote that blog post that I read.” And so we were able to make those connections.
That's just one case in point, but I think people are finding that content and it goes beyond the... A lot of places have the one single introduction to modular synth posts, but ours goes a lot deeper.
Stephen McCaul
We have hundreds and hundreds of blog posts at this point that span a tremendous amount. It helps that our topic is really deep. It's a combinatorial complexity. You can put any number of modules together in any different number of permutations and there's something interesting you can do about it.
So, we sort of have this infinite fodder for showing off interesting things that possibly no one has actually ever tried before.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's the power of content marketing. And hint, hint. That's why I started this podcast. I didn't like writing but podcasts were pretty easy for me.
Before we go, you guys have expanded beyond modular sense, which is what you started with. And I would love to talk a bit about the software products that you released. And I know that the guitar pedal products are on the horizon. Are they out yet?
Kris Kaiser
Not quite.
Stephen McCaul
Very soon.
Kris Kaiser
Yeah, so plugins came... One of the joys of modular synthesists is that it's incredibly ephemeral. You put all those cables together, you turn it off and turn it back on again. It may not sound the same. Some of the modules don't have any memory. If you change the knob at all, then what you just did is it may be completely different. And a lot of people find that very inspiring and really enjoy that.
But there is a band of our customers, particularly the film and TV composers, who need to be able to record something. And then when the director comes back and says, “Could you do it without distortion?” or, “Could you do it a little bit more like this?” They need to be able to recreate some music really quickly and really easily.
So Eurorack modular synth does not lend itself to that in any way, shape or form. So we talked to a lot of composers and everybody wanted software, so we moved into the plugin world.
But it hasn't been... It's not a huge market for us. It's an extremely competitive market. But what is nice about it is that there's no build cost, there's no manufacturing, there's none of that. Once you actually finish the software, which is non-trivial, but once you finish the software, it's free to make. And that has been a very nice little ad.
Guitar pedals are... Well, you can talk more about pedals.
Stephen McCaul
Well, they're not out yet as of this moment, we are actually just about to ink a distribution deal. And it should be in manufacture basically at this point. It's just another market that I've always been really interested in trying to hit. By market, I really just mean an instrument that I like, I guess, is the guitar.
We've been wanting to do this, or I've definitely been thinking about it since the very beginning and we've been really trying to making or taking steps to do it since really 2020, I think is when we really formalized like, well, a plan that of course then went completely haywire because we're not releasing those until four years later.
But yeah, we've done a lot of development. They're really interesting. I feel like I bring our brand strengths to a completely different ethos of music, really. And I'm really excited for them to come out.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now if I'm listening to this in the near future, maybe not necessarily the week it comes out, these pedals are probably going to be out. So where do I go if I want to check out the synths, the pedals, software? What should I do?
Kris Kaiser
Our website is noiseengineering.us. All of our products are there. Our blogs are there. You can get any of the products we sell directly. We also have links to our retailers, particularly for international folks where it's a little bit harder to deal with taxes and all of that.
All of our retailers are listed on the website as well. Our retailers do a tremendous service for us because a lot of the customers can never actually put their hands on these except in a shop, so we always welcome people to support their local retailers as well.
Stephen McCaul
And the website is a Shopify site too.
Chase Clymer
We do appreciate that around here. Kris and Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Kris Kaiser
Thank you.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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