Tonic Audio

A few months ago our third co-founder mentioned he knew a friend of a friend who was really compelled by our proposition to make audio collaboration stupid easy. Insert record scratch... yeah, I almost glossed over that didn't I? So in April Allison's brother, Mike Jennings came to us with a proposition. He had just retired from Airbnb, as their Head of Global IT and was looking for his next mountain to conquer. We had tried for months to give him and his partner ideas of things to do while they were traveling across the country visiting national parks and taking a breather after decades of hustle. But, unbeknownst to us he was compelled to join our team and inspired by our vision. That was the beginning of the end of our self-funded, bootstrapping journey. And we couldn't be more thrilled. He adds so much to our team and balances Allison and me out really well. He came on board as our COO and the company is so much better for it. If the company could talk it would whisper in my ear at least three times a day, "thank you." We already knew he was a good fit, but we also always have our team members take the Gallup Strengthsfinder test. Mike holds most of his strengths in the execution vertical, Allison in the strategic vertical, and me in the influencing vertical. We each have a splash of relationship-building strengths. We cover so much ground together, that we couldn't wait to get started on the next phase of our journey.

So back to the reason I created this update... 'we added our first industry advisor' after months of designing and coding and then pivoting from a hardware startup to a software startup. We had finally talked to enough customers to feel comfortable in the direction we were headed. We knew that collaborating remotely on music and podcasts was crufty and frustrating and that it surely wasn't helping audio creators to output more of their creations. And that was when got our first Advisor. He came to Mike and asked him if he could be a part of the team, in any way possible. And that's how we added Alex Coronfly to the team. He is an industry professional who was a VP at the top three labels, working his way up from secretary. He is a consummate professional who has worked with everyone from Alanis to Pat Benetar to Katie Perry. He has fostered relationships with key stakeholders in the music industry for the past 30 years. If there was such thing as a full-stack promoter, the way that we have full-stack engineers, he would be it. His excitement over our product road map was both invigorating and terrifying. We now have our team, and we've made a connection. Somebody other than us gets it. They get why we're chasing down this problem. And they came to us. It was a good week, y'all. That is all. Thanks for reading!

First, a little background. We were pretty dead-set on bootstrapping from the get-go when we started this in Jan 2020. However, when when it took us a year to learn what to build, we realized that we were almost out of our savings and needed a little more fuel to keep going before we would need to get day jobs. When we initially built out our first product which was a stand-alone hardware device that helped songwriters finish their songs, we had no idea if it would sell or not. Months later, in the middle of a pandemic, we had an epiphany. Even if we had the most extraordinary Kickstarter Campaign ($1m. +) we would still not necessarily have a sustainable company. So, after 8 months of working on that product, we pivoted to a SaaS model. We got smart. But we were also behind the eight ball. Fast forward to Feb of 2021.

My co-founder's brother had just retired from Airbnb and was looking for something else exciting to work on. He had spent almost a year traveling and was bored and crazy like us. He asked to buy in and be a part of the founding team. He is an operating founder, and brings a ton to the table. We were marketing/sales/engineering heavy. So, we took a 'friends and family' round to extend our runway. As a Director of IT and a Mike brings expertise in scaling back end and IT for companies like Linkedin, Google, and Airbnb. He was also a Linux guru back in the day. He is an executor through and through. And we are so glad we brought him on the team.

It's funny how you go down the road and try to figure out what you have to build to get to product-market fit, and then out of the blue something happens that you didn't think was something you wanted, and now you're happy as a clam taking another path.

So, onward! Our next step is getting folks to pay for an app they have said they want. How? We're not sure. That's why all of the Indie Hackers posts are so great. We have ideas, but everything is just an educated guess. Our next step after that is getting our first 10, 100, and 1000 customers. And then, when we get cash flow positive, someday we can build that hardware device. Yay for learning and building openly!

I'm here for any other SaaS founders who want to shoot the breeze about business models, marketing tactics, community building, etc!

Cheers! And thanks for being here alongside us!

After going to NAAM in Anaheim, Ca and coming back completely crushed. We were there doing some customer development around a control board for musicians who use DAW's. Trying to find a problem to solve. We came up with an idea for a hardware product that is a portable songwriting collaborator tool.