Strum Machine

Looking back, it was still pretty rough around the edges. But it worked as a minimum-viable product, and I wasn't going to put off its release any longer. So I made it public and started getting people to sign up, initially at a discounted rate for my early-access folks who heard about it through my personal Facebook, then raised to the current price of $5/month later in May.

This was also the first major product that I've built—and actually finished—entirely by myself. I have a whole "product graveyard" on my computer, with all of the projects that I started (and sometimes spent years on) but never released. It felt good to actually put something out into the wild! (Scary at first, but good.)

After almost a year of listening to the Fizzle Show, I was fully indoctrinated with a new approach to product-building. I was banishing my old approach of secretly working on what I thought was a cool project in the hopes of finishing and releasing it someday, and instead was determined to put my efforts toward building something people actually wanted... and talking with them to figure out exactly what that was. So I had a few extended conversations with some friends and acquaintances in the music community. I tried to ask non-leading questions about what wanted, and while nobody suggested what I was thinking about, they did suggest solutions that were much inferior to my approach. And when I finally told them what I was cooking up, they got really excited.

Then I asked them what they felt would be a fair price for this. Keep in mind that I was thinking this might be something I'd charge like $1 or $2 a month for, like LastPass did (until they raised their prices).

They said they'd pay $100+, or $10-20 a month if a subscription. So I asked what the "no brainer" price would be, and they said $5/month.

I was overjoyed. I could charge more than I thought I could, and charge them less than they thought it should cost. Win-win.

Took advantage of my week off from teaching to hack together a prototype that was better than the 2006 one, using all of my newfound JavaScript app skills learned through my harmony-instruction product as well as the client work that I had taken on in the intervening years.

Had the proof-of-concept (working audio sequencer in the browser) working in a few days, and a full prototype to share with my students in a month. It was the definition of hacked together, but it was usable for practicing the songs I'd pre-programmed into it.

My students loved it. I loved playing along with it too. I was pumped. This was not just going to be something for my students. I was going to get the wider music community using it too.

At this point, I had been supporting myself by teaching private music lessons to a wide range of students, and a common problem was figuring out how to help them practice rhythm at home. I would record backing tracks for them on my guitar, but that was a tedious process and they were stuck with the tempos I recorded them at. I wanted a flexible, software-based solution.

And there were a few: Band in a Box, iReal Pro, and a couple crappier ones. But they were all some combination of a) hard to use, b) crappy-sounding, c) expensive, and d) not well-designed for the kind of music I was teaching.

Every few months, I would search for my dream product, but I always came up empty.

Eventually, I got fed up enough that I decided to take some time off the harmony-instruction project that I'd been toiling away at for over a year in order to see if I could hack something together for at least my students to use.

That's right, 2006. Shortly before my 20th birthday, while living at home with my parents working on books and other resources for a music-instruction business (focused on the bluegrass/old-timey music that we play), I had an idea: what if I wrote a computer program that was like a metronome, but instead of playing "tick tick" it played realistic guitar sounds by assembling individual guitar samples?

I hacked together a proof-of-concept app in Visual Basic .NET shortly thereafter. It strummed either a G chord or a D chord at the tempo you chose... and that's it. Not particularly useful... but audio-wise, it worked.

But at the time, I had several other projects on the fire, so I got distracted and didn't work on it any further. Besides, my programming skills were not very advanced at the time so I probably wouldn't have been able to make anything that great anyway.