We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Eric Bice a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Eric, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s jump right into the heart of things. Outsiders often think businesses or industries have much larger profit margins than they actually do – the reason is that outsiders are often unaware of the biggest challenges to profitability in various industries – what’s the biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?
Rising costs of goods while keeping the brand “Made in the USA”
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
The Beings at Interstellar live by one philosophy: Produce revolutionary, high quality & long lasting guitar effects pedals that open the door to a new level of musical artistry for everyone.
It all began when studio & touring musician Eric Bice noticed and made an observation while out on the road playing at the infamous Red Rocks Amphitheater. Numerous professional & hobby guitar players all loved their guitar fx pedals like they were their children. Eric tapped his long time friend & fellow musician Sam Hindmarsh to help in creating out of this world guitar tone that was attainable for everyone, not just those with diamond hands.
Utilizing their years of cumulative music industry experience and relationships, they spent the better part of 2 years leveraging every resource to build & test numerous pedal component combinations and ultimately arrive at the promised land: an affordable pedal that adds a cosmic boost of interstellar guitar tone. Interstellar Audio Machines was born.
Since then we have been spreading the word and connecting with guitar players and enthusiasts all over the world! Truly we are loving every minute of this and can’t wait to release our next interstellar fx pedals for you all. Stay tuned as the best is yet to come!
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Any business faces a lot of challenges, especially in the first years of operation. Of course applying the years of musical knowledge to this new format if you will, of creating the tools(pedals) to play instead of just playing them as am artist was a challenge. We just kind of went back to school to learn. Funding is always a huge hurdle for any new company. We initially funded this all out of our own pockets and really bootstrapped it to get it to the point we are at today. On top of that, supply chain challenges from a pandemic and a war that came out of nowhere really made us have to plan much farther down the road than most companies normally would. Really trying to guess what the market will be 6 months to a year from now and preparing from a manufacturing standpoint to meet those demands is a tough nut to crack. E-commerce is a marketing channel that most pedal manufacturers don’t really do on their own (left to distributors or shops etc). We have taken on the challenge to market our own shop online and it has been a large hill to climb and the learning curve was costly and time consuming. After a year of trial and error, pivoting etc we are actually starting to reach the top of our education process.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
Funding your business is a large integral part to a successful business. Originally starting IAM with the money from our own pockets, we decided to tackle crowdfunding for our initial first batch of money. Ok so crowdfunding is not what they try to get you to believe it is. Unless you have a large established fan base or lots and lots annnnnnd lots of friends, it’s very hard to make crowdfunding work. It is rarely this purely organic thing. We put several months into marketing the fact that we were going to launch a crowdfunding opportunity. We had this great effect pedal, but getting the word out to people about it was the hardest part and is what ultimately led to our successful crowdfunding campaign. I’m not sure if I would do it again, but if you do want to approach it, its a bit of a catch-22 in that you really need money to ramp up the awareness prior to your launch and most people are doing crowdfunding because they need money. The plus side of it, we took on the risk ourselves and weren’t borrowing money from someone else or giving up equity in a company that at those initial stages had no real sales track record to leverage.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.interstellaraudiomachines.com
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/interstellaraudiomachines
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/interstellaraudiomachines
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzZ10hVzy-CUWbHYDTD3qoQ